My students are putting the gallery together now and will be finishing their portion next week. This is a very odd process, doing everything virtually and hoping for the best when posting tutorials and written directions! Alas, the students are persisting and I am seeing evidence of their collaboration and work. My lesson planning is completed and can be found on my Teknologia Phase 2 page. I also have sample tutorial videos on that page along with the ISTE standards for both the educator and student.
As this project winds down, I have one nagging concern: Time. Students generally sign up for Art to be "making Art" and see everything other than drawing, painting, sculpture, as not-Art. At what point can we change their thinking and get them away from a modernist point of view? A lot of what I am asking my art students to do in order to put these shows on, are a valuable part of the arts industry, however, they are completely different skills than traditional studio-skills. This type of work (embedding computer science into the Art curriculum) took up a lot of time. The end product is exciting, yet, I am still trying to figure out how to teach what they need to know and give them the space to do some inventing of their own. I do feel better prepared to take those risks and think differently about teaching. I am always re-evaluating what I do and trying to move away from "what has always been done." I'm left with one stubborn issue: Collaboration vs. Independent work. These exhibitions can not be contrived in a solo act. I found myself having to teach way more about working together and way less giving the students the opportunity to design their own visions. Collaboration is a needed skill and is very difficult to teach (just think back on all the group projects you were forced to do a student). Sharing the work load, motivating the unmotivated, modeling appropriate team behaviors--this was a major part of the work as well. This tiny ISTE standard strand says so much in so little: Global Collaborator 7c Students contribute constructively to project teams, assuming various roles and responsibilities to work effectively toward a common goal. I feel like this is where most of my time went. I experimented with giving lots of choice and found students saying "We don't know what to do." And then when given pre-selected options, I always felt negatively about doing that, but it seemed to be the only way to move forward when asking 14 year olds to collaborate and make decisions togehter. Overall, this whole process taught me about my students as learners. I was able to select their roles for exhibition jobs with their input but also knowing their strengths and personal interests. I am excited to keep this work going, as making the exhibition archives gives greater access to viewing the work for an extended period of time.
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I had a plan A. Plan A was to complete this project in April. In school. Plan A is gone. Now I am on plan *%$#. In this version, everything goes wrong....BUT, I don't give up and keep solving problems as they arise. Let's start with the good news. Students are submitting their work towards the virtual exhibition on Google Classroom! So it's been great seeing the work start to trickle in. Today students are working on using a Google Form to submit their work to the show. The form is set up to collect their JPG image, title of work, size of work, audio interview file (which I am hearing from students is not accepted by Google Forms), and artist statements. To resolve this issue, I edited the Google Form so it would not be a requirement to submit the audio file and then students could submit everything else and send me the audio file separately.
The other major hiccup with doing the project online and using Google Classroom between two different sections of students who are collaborating on this is the permissions settings. Google Classroom does not promote group work! After much trial and error, I found you should NOT upload your document and set to "students can edit" because ONLY students in ONE section can access that file and the students in the other section end up working on a different file (and they need to see each other's work). The solution is to upload the LINK, not the actual file and then all students will be working on the same doc. On the back end, I created four assignments, one for each team, and then shared those assignments across two class periods of students (period 8 and period 9). Trying to get students to "build networks" and "customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process" (ISTE Student standard 1C) is much harder than it sounds. Even though my directions were to establish communication with your team (and then listed 3 suggestions for starting that communication), most students emailed me instead of their classmates. Most questions were, "How do I check with my teammates?". Obviously, it complicates things when we move to online learning, but I really saw a need to make kids connect with each other in this project because so much of the communication has been student to teacher / teacher to student. I am hopeful they will improve in their independence as we move forward. Lastly, this blog is just that. A blog. A place to free write and journal about the project. To see the curriculum document for this project, please visit my Teknologia Phase 2 page. There appears to be a huge gap in my Tekno work from November to February. Not true! While I didn't keep up with the blog, I definitely was working on many aspects of the work.
The first aspect was working with the Glowforge team. They really helped me understand the machine and get more confident with it. But that was not my dream project. The second (and main aspect) of my work was the student-led exhibitions. My students put on six exhibitions prior to the shut down! These exhibitions taught me how to delegate the majority of the exhibition tasks to the students and put them in roles where they had to work collaboratively and lead the work. Not easy for me or them at first! I tried archiving them on this weebly site, but by the time the exhibitions were installed, we were all exhausted and burned out, no one wanted to dedicate themselves to faithfully archiving the work. I still need to figure out how to make this happen consistently. Here is a list of the exhibitions: (1) September-October - Advanced Art put on the (Im)Permanence exhibit in our brand new exhibition space at Lansing High School. (2) November - Studio Art and Drawing put on Evanescence at the Mezzanine Gallery in the Benjamin Peter store on the commons (3) December- Photography students put on a show titled Through the Lens: Theme Edition in the Bobcat Artist Gallery in the Lansing High School (4) December - Digital Art held an exhibit at the Lansing Library titled Oh the Places We Know! , which featured panoramic images from the Lansing community (5) February - Photography students put on a show titled Defining Me: Self-Portraits in the Bobcat Artist Gallery in the Lansing High School (6) March - Studio Art installed a sculpture exhibit aptly titled Broken World about social activism topics With each of these exhibitions, I experimented with how best to hand over the planning, designing, preparing, and installing to the students. Students were capable of all this (with resources and coaching), and the even documented each show, but we never made time to archive the shows, mostly because I did not have a classroom account for ThinkLink and would have had to have one student at a time working on the archive with my account. While I did not produce digital archives during this time, I learned a tremendous amount about teaching students to collaborate and teaching students how to take on exhibition roles. These skills do come into play in my final project, where students will create an online exhibit of their Empathy Portrait Project. I am in love with Artsteps
I recently discovered Artsteps, an online gallery creator. I had been planning all along to use the 360 camera and ThingLink, but there have been setbacks with getting a classroom account to ThingLink (which would allow students to be able to log in and work on the collaborative project) and also that you need to start with an image in order to add content to it.
With Artsteps, you can actually design the space (build walls, add doors, pick flooring, framing, etc..) and also create a guided tour of your show! The only setback I see right now is sharing one account with the whole class. While ThingLink and the 360 image/video would still work very well with an actual exhibit that we create in real life and then document, Artsteps allows us to make a space where a space never existed in the first place (kind of perfect for the pandemic shut down). I already made a tour of the program and started planning out the exhibition jobs and who would be responsible for what. It's a big gamble with the online learning component, but I am always up for trying new things if I think they will benefit the learning. Digital Storytelling - Empathy PortraitsNothing like a good old global pandemic to get in the way of this Teknologia project! Even though I have not been blogging as much, I have been working on how to best implement this virtual gallery / archive experience without feeling like it's an "extra" thing that I have to do in my lessons. You can click on Empathy Portraits to see my curriculum materials and read more (below) about what I have been researching. I recently discovered Artsteps, which offers the ability to design and create your own virtual reality gallery. While it feels clunky at first, I can see how the end product would totally be worth it, especially when you can create guided tours and even view the gallery through a VR headset. Student workStudents (in my pilot project) practiced creating two exhibits in real life prior to the shut down. The first was a Lansing Panoramic show, in which the students created panoramic images of a part of the Lansing community and then designed and interactive exhibit of the work (including a visitor's scavenger hunt) at the Lansing Community Library. They worked in teams (curators, designers, installers, and publicity) to organize and put the show on.
Pre-pandemic, the plan was to have the students create a live show of their Empathy Portraits (which would include QR code links to their audio recorded interviews) and then make the online archive of the show. Now in the midst of the pandemic and online learning, we are slowing working to putting together the online exhibit from home. Here are some sample student artworks and statements. To read more about the project, open the PDF link above. |
Artist & EducatorI have been teaching art for over 20 years at the elementary and secondary levels. I am currently instructing high school students in courses such as Studio Art, Digital Art, Advanced Drawing and Painting, and AP Studio Art. For four summers, I also instructed a master's level course at Ithaca College on Integrating Art into the Elementary Classroom. I am also finishing my MFA in Visual Art with an anticipated graduation date of July 31st, 2019. In my own work, I am investigating themes related to perseverance and resilience. -Jessica Stratton Archives
May 2020
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