Media Arts - a superfluity?

cjwainwr currently thinks,

Media Arts is an unnecessary, superfulous, and costly addition to the Australian primary school curriculum.

All the pedagogic outcomes, strategies and processes of the Arts Education curriculum may be effectively achieved in each of the other arts education forms. The generating-realising-responding process which is central to the arts education curriculum is not reliant upon a particular medium, material, pretext or artefact.

From reading the Tasmanian Arts Education Curriculum it is evident that every pedagogic outcome claimed for Media Arts is contained in every other Arts Education form - dance, music, drama, visual arts. Additonally, many of the Arts Education curriculum outcomes are also contained in most, if not all, of the other curriculum learning area.

Media Arts is included, I think, because film, radio, advertisements and other communications media (and associated technologies) are relatively new creations - like cryonics, polymers, genetic modification and a wide range of other materials, processes and products created since the 1950s.

In my book, it is the processes and strategies of the pedagogy that are important - not the media through which learner-teaching relationship are expressed. Marshall Mcluhan was flatly incorrect - when it comes to developing student achievement the medium is not the message.

Morrigan suggests:

That she disagrees with Chris - and she is sending him off to have a look at the amazing Inanimate Alice project.  She's also going to send him to look at Waves of Girls (caution - adult content on this one); Patchwork Girl; and for Primary classes The adventures of Josie True; and Spywatch.

While these could be considered multimodal texts, they offer a really useful media tool to engage classes and link literacy and arts.  To create some of these with students, you might want to visit the Storytools website, which has 65 free tools to build stories and animations and create digital texts, available to teachers.

Media and animation.

Ceri (aka the Morrigan) writes:

Children making films can be used in almost every curriculum area, and certainly links to the cross curricular intent of both the National and Tasmanian Curricula, especially in the areas of ICT, and communication and thinking.  When developing integrated units we should be thinking of including arts in every area we teach.  Make models in SOSE, plays in history, films in science, songs in maths and paintings in English.  To show some responses by children to making animations, here are two short(ish) films.

The first is 8 minutes long and is a stop motion animation made by grade 7 children in the USA.

The second is more disturbing and somewhat political.  It was made as part of a UNICEF project assisting Palestinian children in dealing with trauma.  It is shorter (only about 3 minutes) and considerably more powerful.

In terms of some media resources for helping children make their own animations or short films, some on-line programs include Cartoonster, which shows children how to make short cartoons; Fluxtime Studios which offer tools, assistance and a gallery for animated work.  There is also facility to create interactive animations online.

There is a lovely article, complete with links to resources, over at The School Run, which you may also find helpful.  Animation is a fun way to integrate work across curricula, engage children and create something new with your class!

The microscope ...again

cjwainwr reflects,

Well, the 'Show-off' sure has disappeared and that's a relief!

And what is added are:

# A big 'thank you' for the central organising ideas of 'generating-realising-responding'. These make a HUGE difference to my approach to arts education - give me something on which to hang the lesson/lesson sequence planning, conducting and assessment tasks of arts ed., stirring inside me.

# A vitality and commitment to my own arts education development - via signing - up in Visual Arts/Drawing classes care of Brenda Hoddinott in Canada:  http://www.drawspace.com/

# A certain fluency with and appreciation of the IT associated with this area of school learning in arts education.

# An attempt, during Assign 2, to integrate specific teacher interventions (ala Hattie, (2009):Visible Learning. Oxford: Routledge) with the generating-realising-responding processes, in a Visual Arts lesson sequence. 

...and now for the TOOLKIT of resources

ceri (aka the morrigan) & cjwainwr say,  

We have filled the Toolkit with items we consider may be valuable guides for lesson sequence planning - including some resources for children to use; and for our continuing learning in the several Arts Education fields.

Today, there are hundreds of thousands of offers of 'teacher resources', from educational publishers, web-advertisers, blog-sites, school staff discussion rooms and from enthusiastic teachers disclaiming 'This is fantastic, awesome, try it out' and proclaiming (often) 'it works!' - though with sparse (if any) evidence. To provide quality resources we've filtered what we've placed inside the Toolkit through the following lenses: * Is it a professional/authoritative item?    * Does it link well to the generating, realising and responding processes?  * If a web-link, is it technically reliable? easy to navigate? * Will it guide and inform children ?


The Toolkit contains 'generic' items (those across all the National Arts Education curriculum areas) as well as items in each Arts Education area. A sub-group of resources in an area represent  a special interest one or both of us have.  Don't forget that each of the blogposts have linked resources and information which you can access too.  So each of the subject posts have even more tools and information.
                            
Generic

http://www.learner.org/http://www.teachfind.com/teachers-tv/

http://artjunction.org/blog/?page_id=1024

http://www.teachfind.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_art

And don't forget that all the great art galleries, museums and collections have their own websites, so it is often worth simply Googling for the Louvre, Tate Gallery, Uffizi, MoMA or any other major landmark!  Click on the links here to have a look.  Most of these have resources, information, learning and lesson information and virtual tours which you can integrate into many learning areas.

DRAMA

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/drama/exploring/elementsrev1.shtml

provides ‘revision bites’ useful for quick understanding of central terms used in drama education.

 http://www.d4lc.org/

 http://www.teachfind.com/teachers-tv/ks1-drama-maths-drama-learning

http://www.theater-dictionary.com/ is a combined dictionary and encyclopedia: Definitions provide meanings set in the context of origin and use of the term, within definite theatrical contexts.

http://www.dramatas.com.au/

http://www.dramaaustralia.org.au/

Process drama

1. TWELVE RED HOT PROCESS DRAMA TOOLS  a succinct description of each tool.

http://improvencyclopedia.org/index.html

http://www.coolingconflicts.edu.au/  describes the use of process drama in conflict resolution: developed by Griffith University/Centre for Applied Theatre, for the NSW Ministry of Education. 5 video clips, teacher handbooks , history and context  of the Coolingconflicts  initiative. Compact, succinctly written, available in pdf form, printer-friendly and with e-mail function.

Circus Arts

http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page  is a comprehensive contemporary encyclopedia - “The international on-line circus archive” - of artists and circuses, a project of the well established 'Big Apple Circus', California, USA. 

DRAMA IN LITERACY

http://www.schoolsworld.tv/videos/ks1-ks2-english-drama-in-the-classroom

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/peace-journey-using-process-269.html

DRAMA IN MATHS

http://www.schoolsworld.tv/videos/ks1-drama-in-maths-drama-for-learning

Dance

http://danceisbest.com/lessonplans.htm   Valuable for conceptualising and exemplifying lessons within the basic view of dance as the  energised body in motion in space and time. 

http://dancepedagogue.com/?cat=35  is a Canadian dance educators site providing talks and videos about k-12 dance education by specialist dance educators.

http://artswork.asu.edu/arts/teachers/resources/dance1.htm

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Australian-Aboriginal-Dancing-and-Singing/131836663250  is a 'Facebook' page providing access to videos and to further links of the increasingly widening range of Australian Aboriginal music and dance artists, companies and performances.

Music

Background music

http://www.songsforteaching.com/richallen/strategies.htm 

http://www.dialogueonlearning.tc3.edu/classroomapplications/Strategies/using-music-grp.htm

Visual Arts

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/  is a UK-based reference point for viewing and reading about ‘Art Gallery’ works: Great Painters/Famous Paintings. An attraction may lie in easy catalogue/search  access to images and histories of  paintings and drawings, to  visual arts glossaries, posters, and to links to museums/galleries world-wide - featuring over 8400 artists.

http://artjunction.org/blog/

http://www.monoprints.com/

http://o5.com/7-easy-steps-for-decoupage-projects/

http://www.campaignfordrawing.net/the-big-draw/making-maths-arty

Media Arts


A really useful article on using animation and film in an integrated way can be found at Stop Motion Kids.


Lots of tools for making multimodal texts (all free and very teacher friendly) at Storytools.


Free animation tools are available at Cartoonster.com,


Fluxtime studios offer tools, tutorials and a gallery to make animations.


http://www.findsounds.com/types.html  is a search engine with a focus on sounds. Available sound types are extensive and with an effect SEARCH function for finding useable samples of different types of everyday human and natural sounds. SEARCH technical specifications are generous: all common file formats, mono/stereo channels, 8-16 bits, sample range 8000-44,100 Hz, file size 2MB-16K.

Drama: making-presenting-responding in 'FOX'.

cjwainwr writes his response to the Drama/activity - week 2/'Fox' drama workshop example. 

"Can you identify when students are making, presenting and responding in this sequence of activities?"

---------------------------------

The objectives of this workshop are to develop knowledge, skills and values within a learner population. The workshop applies the generating-realising-responding (GRR) strategy to the teacher-learner relationship in arts educations. In this two hour drama workshop the strategy is expressed via the structure and practices of 'process drama'. 

GRR is a reflexive and reiterative process. Because drama requires embodiment of the subject we would expect to see learners generating, realising and, less formally, responding simultaneously: this would especially be the case in improvised dramatic production, as illustrated throughout this workshop.

We may know if, when and how the GRR process is occurring by looking and listening within the teacher-learner relationship: to teacher interventions and to learner responses.

Since the workshop is structured around 13 sequenced activities we may consider each and all activity for guaging if, when and how a GRR process is being used. A list of verbs providing a convenient guide for categoric description of each of the three aspects of GRR are found in the ACARA: draft shape of the Australian Curriculum - the arts, p9. Using these verbs we may evaluate each of the activities of the workshop in the following way:

Evolution game: learners are generating (art education) when they pretend their hands/fingers represent paper/scissors/stone and when they make-believe (by physicalising, embody) various life forms. When they "share these images" they are realising (art educating) because they are acting/showing to others (an 'audience'). Learners are also responding because they are 'willi-nilly' apprehending one or more of their own (and perhaps others') sensory, kinesthetic, cognitive and affective responses to generating and realising.

Dog, bird & fox game: learners are generating throughout this game. They have been stimulated to engage in make-belief by viewing illustrations of animals they are invited, by the teacher, to embody or act or realise - they show their own imaginative rendition of particular book illustrations.

For each learner, throughout the workshop the audience is - at least - herself/himself. Thus, responding also occurs at the level of individual apprehension/ consciousness of one or more of one's own sensory, kinesthetic, cognitive and affective embodiments.

Law of nature game: is a continuation of generating, realising and responding, with the addition that participants are given opportunity to "practise responses" ie. to realise via rehearsing.

Offering & rejecting help: again a continuation of the GRR process. In generating by pretending or make-believe is added generating via role-playing in a specified context which requires an improvised response. Responses are performed or shown to others (in a whole group circle); thus realising also occurs.

Forum theatre: is the first structured opportunity learners' responding. After a period of generating and realising learners are invited to "Discuss the social implications..." of offering and rejecting help. Responding occurs when learners think and talk about what they have generated and realised, using vocabulary including gestures, to comprehend their prior enactments in settings beyond the workshop: it is an opportunity to relate their prior apprehesion of generating and realising to, particularly, cognitive forms and to relate what they have apprehended to a social context beyond the workshop activities.

It is an opportunity for self-reflection linking with the social realities of the world beyond the learning location.

The workshop continues in this fashion of generating-realising-responding for the remainder of the activities.

References

Australian Curriculum,Assessment & Reporting Authority (ACARA):

http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/Draft+Shape+Of+The+Australian+Curriculum+The+Arts-FINAL.pdf  Viewed 18th Aug.2011.

Sinclair, C., Jeanneret, N., & O'Toole. (2009). Education in the arts: teaching and learning in the contemprary curriculum. London: Oxford University Press.

Onwards & upwards....professional development

Cjwainwr and The Morigan say,

Many of us by now realise the importance of on-going professional development and may already have membership of a teacher/ing association in one or more learning areas.

Additionally, there certainly are many sound, established and well-designed on-going learning opportunities 'on the web', for life-long learning.

Cjwainwr took the plunge last week. He writes, "I've joined a course of drawing classes (!) run by Brenda Hoddinott, a Newfoundland artist/educator/illustrator who formerly worked for the Royal Canadian Mounties - as a "civilian forensic artist".

The lessons are free and I've 200+ modules to keep me occupied...Learning drawing is one way to keep me humble, accept & profit from errors, maintain on-going role-reversals with children in visual arts classrooms as they learn to draw. Plus - the biggest bonus of my life - tuition teaching me to draw straight and curved lines.

Brenda is at  http://www.drawspace.com/ "       

Whole school, parents and more...

cjwainwr says,

Here's a sample of whole school arts - taking arts education outside an individual classroom and into the whole school, while also involving parents and linking with a national 'kitchen gardens' initiative.

I particularly like how this and the other samples illustrate the 'realising' aspect of the recursive generating-realising-responding process - via opportunities for displays and exhibits and the curating of these.

http://eastfremantleps.det.wa.edu.au/articles.php?req=read&article_id=29

And this is a sample of a collaboration with a local library,

http://mclkids.org/tag/school-partnerships/

and with a shopping centre,

http://www.nicholsonsshoppingcentre.co.uk/news-and-events/news-and-events.asp?news=971&title='CLAIRES%20COURT%20SCHOOL%20ART%20AND%20PHOTOGRAPHY%20EXHIBITION'

This is a 'blog' page specialising in different learning area 'displays in classrooms' -

http://usefulwiki.com/displays/category/art/


                   

Grandfather Tang's Story...lesson plan/s

cjwainwr says,

Robin Ward, Associate Director for Curriculum Integration, Rice University School Mathematics Project, specialises in integrating mathematics learning with other learning areas, via literature.  Robin has produced books of sample lessons which illustrate the integration of literature-based activities with mathematics.

Her samples are drawn from literature-based sources - both fiction and non-fiction - many provide connection with arts education curricula.

Here's one of them:

I like the 11 sub-headings she provides on the left of each page - concise and important information for the organised teacher.

Additionally, included in this volume is an Appendix - "Assessment tools and rubics"; instructional resource and research references, and children's literature references. Her samples refer specifically to USA national curricula yet, these days, the activities featured will be applicable to all strands of any modern mathematics curriculum.

I will certainly be recommending her volumes to school and to local libraries. 

What do you think? 

Morrigan Says:
Here are two wonderful websites that will help with developing linkages between Maths andArt.

The Library of Virtual Manipulatives is more Maths based, but offers geometry, Tangrams and much more.

And Totally Tessellated works on tessellations, and has a special category for Max Escher (one of my all-time favourite artists.  In terms of personal inspiration, he's right up there with Dali, Caravaggio, El Greco, Mondrian, Magritte, Andrew Wyeth and Maxfield Parish.  And the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and William Morris.  And some others - but right up there!)

Acknowledgement of 50/50 assessment

Ceri (aka the Morrigan) and Chris W (aka cjwainwr), each acknowledge this Blog is a 50/50 contribution and that we will be getting the same mark for the work. 

dance triggers a...

cjwainwr responds,

This posting triggers a line of thinking I have about links between curriculum learning areas.

I am now beginning to view arts education as providing a pedagogic base for making such links.

Before, in my mind 'art' was always an 'add-on' ! Now, the generating-realising-responding strategy (and the arts curriculum docs that support this) gives me confidence to integrate learning areas.

The "I can't draw for toffee" mind-set I've had for eons is being replaced; I've begun to use a basic 'How to Draw' straight lines and much else book, to improve my skills and understandings for a lesson sequence in a teaching-learning the 2D-3D transition that occurs in maths development.

Ordinary, everyday art..in a suburb near you

cjwainwr reports,

Here are two 'artists in residence' for the day, at No 39.

Pretext: the weather: in local parlance, "a polar weather front".

 

Question: how might you describe the pose ?

                                                                 

                                                                       

comment on 'You should be dancing, yeah!'

cjwainwr has a response,

I like this posting. Definitely. It responds to the colours, movements and liveliness of learning in arts education while linking dance with other learning areas. And yet (Oh No!...here he goes again...another wet blanket...) I just about threw 'fit' when I heard you ask your questions...

"Dance is one of the most basic of human expressions - right up there with singing and laughing.  So how come we do so little of it?  Why do we see it as something only people who are trained can do.  Ask someone.  Bet they say they 'can't dance'."

What on earth is the use of this presumption to me as a trainee-teacher who will be meeting parents and other family members on an almost daily basis.?

During my training in psycho-social education as well as in psychodrama, my supervisors instilled in me "Look for the health, look for the creativity, look for the ease and for the spontaneity in each and every one of your clients....it's there ...just bring it back to life.....Dis-ease is familiar. It is in lots and lots of people and places - including ourselves...So, look for the ease, for the life, for the vibrancy, for the dance and song....it's there somewhere. Keep ferreting around, digging and probing, using your strategies, Presume the original innocence is merely buried, presume the creative life lives even underneath all the illness."

Of course folk say " I can't dance", just like they say "I'm hopeless at maths", and "I'm depressed, anxious..." When you look further into these matters you see they have once before tapped their feet to the music, they have swayed before in their life, there are origins of the depression...Once upon a time they played...were infants, children, adolescents.


I reckon let's go into classrooms and into our encounters with parents presuming health; let's presume creativity, spontaneity....Sure, we know about cultural and social forces which make inroads against these and yet we also know a whole lot more.

John O'Toole states the connection between art and play as a pedagogic principle. All the adults who say "I can't...I won't" in relation to learning (to dance again, to appreciate their maths abilities) talk nonsense...We don't have to believe them !

Take heart from The Life of Brian... and, altogether now..."Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life....that's right luvvy...see, yer haven't lost it....it was always there; and now you're finding it again..."

Reference
O'Toole, J (2009) in Sinclair, C., Jeanneret, N., O'Toole, J. Education in the Arts. Victoria 3205: Oxford University Press.

You should be dancing! Yeah!

Ceri (aka the Morrigan) writes:


When was the last time you danced?  Not because you had to, not self consciously, but for the sheer joy of moving your body, or responding to music, or because you couldn't keep still for one more minute?

Do you boogie in the kitchen, or chacha in the classroom?  Pogo in the parlour or jive in the garage?  Can you listen to music without tapping your feet or moving your head?

Dance is one of the most basic of human expressions - right up there with singing and laughing.  So how come we do so little of it?  Why do we see it as something only people who are trained can do.  Ask someone.  Bet they say they 'can't dance'.

I love watching children dance.  When they are young they have no self-consciousness, when they are older they try to develop routines.  Teachers tailor their approach to the age of their classes because they have to deal with social baggage, and because older children require both more and less direction.  More direction, because they need to be reassured that it is socially OK to dance - and less, because you don't have to explain every move.

For more than 17 years I danced every day.  But I was a ballet dancer, specialising in contemporary and modern dance.  And because of that, I am actually a really bad creative dancer.  Too much regimentation (and currently, too much age!).  But introducing children to the types of dancing which other cultures and places find normal is an exciting way to introduce SOSE and history topics.

So here are some videos you could show to classes to get them thinking about how other cultures dance - and what those dances mean to the people dancing and those watching.  You have already seen the Chooky Dancers from Australia, and what they do with cross cultural and global culture.  These dances are more representative of the cultures from which they come.

First, Masai dancers from Africa - young men attempting to engae the interest of girls!

This one is a clip about Bollywood - another example of how traditional dances meet the 21st century!

And here is a Lakota Shawl dance at a Powow

And last, but definitely not least, an African drumming and dancing workshop for primary students.  Look at the children's faces!

So, get up, and get moving!

Not only is dancing fun, and an expression of our creativity - it's also good exercise!

Reply to Sir Kenneth...

cjwainwr says,

On the one hand there are Sir Kenneth's view. On the other hand is Professor John Hattie's research synthesis of twelve meta-analyses of 685 studies of 'creativity programmes' in schools, colleges and university completed during the last fifteen years. Hattie concludes, "Overall, creativity programs have a large positive effect..." on student achievement. (Hattie, 2009, 155)

Such programs are increasingly 'mainstream' across all learning areas in all Australasian schools.

Additionally, arts education processes of generating-realising-responding are daily conducted within, around and between family households. Children, dads, mums, siblings and other family members, friends and neighbours....not to mention local libraries, shopping malls, A & P shows; and a veritable phalanx of community locales, hobby and crafts associations, buskers, music festivals/competitions, church and community halls and members up and down the country - each  are participants at various points in these arts education processes.

Such processes are essentially 'creative' when they arouse and develop the aesthetic capacities.

These facts suggest Sir K's 'input-output' box has many leaks: whereas the engagement of the community and of school students and teachers in processes of creativity and of arts education appears to be solidly based and multifareous.

Sir K's version of events is too mis-leading, inaccurate, glib and dismissive for my taste.

Reference.
Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Oxford: Routledge.

And that's a PRINT!

Ceri (aka The Morrigan) writes:

Thinking about visual arts in primary school, and about children making art, makes me think of finger painting.

Finger painting is one of those deeply satisfying activities for many children, because it is both visual and kinaesthetic.  You get to feel the paint and/or medium, squoosh it around, play with, and you can just play, or you can make marks, or you can just make a mess.  All eminently satisfying activities.

But we tend to stop the finger painting at about the time we finish kindergarten.  And I'm not sure why.

So here is an idea, from one of my art teachers, which we grownups loved, which makes 'adult' art (after all, if Salvador Dali, Degas and Picasso all did it, it can't be just for the under fives, can it?), and which recaptures all the squooshy fun of finger painting - but can be as sophisticated as next week!

MONOPRINTS!

Monoprints are one-off works of art.  You can use a desk as your plate (if you are willing to clean up afterwards), or you can do as I did and visit a hardware shop and buy pieces of laminex, or drawer bottoms.  Any flat smooth surface will work.  You can try with textured surfaces, but it is not as clean in the printing.

Add paint, move it around. Maybe add different colours of paint.  Use your fingers, tools, pieces of cardboard.  Use stencils, leaves, rollers or anything else which will make marks and textures.  When you are happy, take a clean piece of paper, place it carefullyl over the paint and smooth, using either a clean roller, a cardboard tube, the back of your hand or some other large-ish, flatt-ish object.  Peel the paper away.

Voila!  A mono-print!

Now, mono-prints are singular unique art pieces.  Curriculum Online has some lovely ideas  for materials and methods of printing.  There are lesson plans available at eHow, including step-by-step instructions.  There is some information - including links to a variety of resources at About.com Elementary Educators.

When the monprint is dry you can overprint, or draw into the image you have created (Dali and Degas did this a lot).

And best of all, this art form can be used in any curriculum and for any subject.  Link it to your work in SOSE, or maths.  Take it outside and link it to science and nature.  Make a monoprint of the way you feel about music.  Make more prints about the characters in books you are reading - use it to illustrate the text you are writing.  Have fun, include prints in your classes.

And if you are worried about the mess, make sure the children have art smocks!

Creativity, children and what education does to them both.

Ceri (aka the Morrigan) writes:

It's an odd thing (and probably familiar to you if you ever 'learned' art from old style art teachers), that while we value creativity and imagination in very young children, as they grow older we keep insisting that they must 'live in the real world', as if the real world is somehow better, or more desirable than their imaginations.


Then, all of a sudden, we ask them to be innovative, and use flexible thinking in their problem solving, and when they get into (some) workplaces, they have to learn all over again how to trust their imaginations.  And at this point, organistions spend gazillions of dollars in getting people like Edward de Bono to develop creativitity and innovation and 'thinking ourside the box'  in their employees.  As CS Lewis says in the Narnia books, "it is always the stupidest children who are the most childish, and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown up".  If we want intelligent and creative grown-ups, we need to encourage children to be intelligent and to reward and feed their imaginations.


Something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong with education.


Slowly, teachers and pedagogues are changing this, and trying to retain and develop imagination and creativity.  Except around NAPLAN time, of course.  We are linking arts across the curriculum, and using visual, dramatic, musical and creative arts within and between curricula.  Arts have snuck out of the art lesson, and are suddenly playing in science and maths, taking up class time in English and doing the hard yards in SOSE.  And children are having a greater opportunity to explore and get their hands covered in clay and paint, and are engaging their intelligences in lots of new and rewarding ways.


So here is an incredibly creative animation, of the innovative Sir Ken Robinson, a crusader about education reform, and a champion of creativity in children, adolescents and adults, talking about reforming education and keeping the creativity in the classroom.

Because if we don't encourage creativity in the classroom, and we actively discourage or punish those who display it, how on earth can we expect our population to suddenly become innovative and inventive and inspire others?