Thanks to all of you for your postings the past month. It’s great to hear your thoughts on the articles and your work with your students. I understand we’ve given you a lot to read this semester, but I think it would be very helpful for all of us to read Part III, “Integrating Studio Structures with the Studio Habits of Mind,” pp. 89 – 111, in our Studio Thinking text. I know the examples represent ‘traditional’ visual arts classrooms (and our classes are anything but!), however, I would like us to re-orient ourselves with the studio structures and the 8 habits of mind, and to really look closely at our own teaching practice this semester. Which habits are we emphasizing and how?
Please use the reflection prompts on page 109 to think about your own work in the context of your partnership:
- What habits of mind do I tend to emphasize?
- What habits are naturally built by particular activities?
- Which habits come up frequently in individual (or group) consults with students?
Some of your work will fall in clusters. Identify the clusters and notice how they push and pull on each other. I also will be interested to know where you will place the relationship building parts of your class. Understand art world? Reflect/Question/Explain? Other? Where do those activities belong? I really want to hear from our partners on this.
Lois Hetland, one of the authors of Studio Thinking, will be our guest blogger in the next two weeks. She will be looking over our blog and your course blogs, and will be very interested in your thoughts.
If you need more resources on culturally responsive pedagogy, I’ve compiled a short list of sites and articles that might be helpful to you (thanks Virginia), check them out at your leisure:
- The Olivia Gude article on Color Lines from the Teaching Tolerance Web site is an excellent read. (Trena, I hope you’ll have your students read this as it might put a different spin on attaching meaning to color.)
- Teaching Tolerance: Amazing resource for culturally responsive pedagogy and tools for teaching in a racially diverse classroom, I LOVE THIS SITE for all of its resources.
- Harvard Project Zero’s Visible Thinking site provides resources for creating a culture of thinking in the classroom. Look at the Thinking Routines for short, guided discussions that your students can do together.
- Minnesota Public Schools Web site offers wonderful tools to help you plan your teaching using Artful Backwards Planner and Teaching for Understanding frameworks, as well as assess student learning using Studio Habits of Mind.
- Art Is Education Web site that highlights the 10-year anniversary of Alameda County’s Art Is Education work. Please note that Amana’s Art Esteem Self as Super Hero is featured as well as Peralta Elementary where Trena is artist in residence.
Great work, you all! Looking forward to hearing from you online, and for our upcoming guest bloggers: Lois Hetland from Project Zero/Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Dave Donahue from Mills College.
Re Color Lines: To articulate that there is a cultural black-white symbolism that can be questioned was so liberating to the students in Chicago described in this article. They had known something was amiss (with this color symbolism that is mostly taken for granted) but didn’t know what, until the art project explored the idea, asked the question. How many kids have had the experience of hearing this question, and responding? I wish we could bring this question to more kids, so they know such assumptions CAN be questioned, that there are other options, and that they can be the questioners and the inventors of new visions. One of our groups explored color very excitingly. In this way, social realities of racism and art collide, and with conscious instruction in the habits of mind, the results transform kids and their artistic expressions.
My students were introduced to SMoM the first week of school to use as a reflection tool about their own learning as artists and to introduce them to thinking in the shoes of their students. I asked them “How do you see yourself as an artist and a student?” We made a large SHoM on the white board in the classroom and let they mapped out their habits using post-its. See more at: http://arteducationteachingpractices.blogspot.com/2010/04/planning-to-teach.html
The reason we got into it right away was that we thought it would be an important tool for planning the curriculum for Emery and because it was a language that the Emery students had already been introduced to and were using to talk about their artistic process. So in a way it was very easy for my students to plug into it. As well they felt that it was a very valuable tool to evaluate their own personal growth as artists and educators. They keep a weekly reflection going on our class website and my students have started to use SHoM as a way to reflect on their observations of the students they are working with as well as their own practice. You can wade through some of their reflections at: http://ccateachingandpractice.wordpress.com/reflection/
Hi, Trena,
I also introduce my students to the SHoM right away, and I find that they take to them readily. However, I also notice that it takes them awhile — just as I’ve seen with teachers — to begin using it to think about their students’ learning. That happened when we worked in the VALUES project with teachers in Oakland, and it’s happened in every term of my teaching at MassArt (ten runs now). The students need to think about their own art practice and teaching practice in relation to these terms, and to begin observing students to see if they can see learning — and, finally, these things come together with them becoming able to see learning in the terms of the studio habits.
Have you had that experience?
Lois
I have begun labeling my posts with the Studio Habits that are best exemplified by the images. Because many of our projects respond to practical needs (seating, shelter, plantable areas, solar power), most of the learning falls within the areas of Develop Craft and Persist. I am encouraging the CCA mentors to talk to the teens casually while they are building together. I am asking them to support the functions of Observe and Reflect. “What kind of wood are we using and why? Where does it come from? Is this a scarce material? Are we using it wisely?”
“What kind of screws are we using? Why do they have a special color and a special head?” By articulating these choices, I hope that the teens will carry that information into the practical aspects of their later lives, as well as understanding that general concept that every choice in the creation process is significant.
Hi, Lauren,
I’m looking forward to seeing those labels. I ask my students (who are pre-service art teachers, teaching for the first time in a Saturday program under my supervision) to take photographs in categories for their course “galleries.” They need to take photos of classroom set-up, signage, them with kids, student work, all sorts of things. But they also have to take photos that exemplify each Studio Habit and themselves in each Studio Structure context. When they post these, they also have to caption them, to explain how the image shows what they selected it to represent. Many have told me that this helps them “see” the habits and structures more clearly — by documenting, they look for and begin to see what would otherwise exist invisibly. Sounds like you had that experience, too?
Lois
My students have easily adapted to using the Studio Habits of Mind. The last two weeks I handed out the SHOM sheet and suggested the college mentors fill it out WITH the youth, so the youth could participate in the meta-cognitive realization:“Aha! So that’s what we’re doing!” In one group, a particularly talented young artist asked for his own copy of the SHOM worksheet. In another group, a youth participant did the writing for the group as they brainstormed together to fill in information about the habits they were using in the lesson of the day.
While the mentors are conducting their lessons (STRETCH & EXPLORE, DEVELOP CRAFT), I am using the OBSERVE Habit of Mind as I circulate, listening, taking pictures and assessing how the groups are achieving the goals they set out for themselves.
The Athena Project mentors are very good at STRETCH & EXPLORE, challenging their youth partners to make new kinds of art or think about art in different ways (UNDERSTAND ART WORLD). However, what comes up frequently in individual consultations as a problem is ENGAGE and PERSIST since some youth lose interest after a short exposure to something new. My job is to assist the mentors in ENVISIONING how to bring the kids’ attention and excitement back into a project.
The Habits of Mind that I emphasize are built into the assignments and activities:
• In the Athena Project, my goal is personal growth in both the youth and the college mentors, so the REFLECT habit is built in to the course. Each mentor must write a journal entry immediately after working with the youth each week. This is extremely important since I asked them to REFLECT on their REFLECTIONS for the final self-evaluation paper at the end of the semester. In reviewing their weekly entries, mentors see how they and the youth in their groups have matured.
• The Athena Project emphasizes COMMUNITY (Understand Art World) and is structured so that CCA artists work with each other and create a sense of community with the youth. First, I make sure there is time for us to feel a sense of community amongst ourselves so we are more likely to carry that with us into our relationships with the youth. We are all in this experience together and we can’t be successful without everyone’s full participation. Collaborating with Peralta Hacienda, a local historical park building strong arts and community activism has involved my students in local societal issues.
• I have learned that as much as youth need and want mentors, they also come to the Athena Project to DEVELOP CRAFT, so I am clear in my instructions to the CCA mentors: you must share and model your craft. Additionally, mentors work to create meaningful lesson plans to assist the youth in EXPRESSING their ideas or feelings through their artwork.
Once students learn the language of the 8 habits of mind, they have a tool to articulate all of the different parts of their artistic process. Like you said Virginia, it becomes a great way to think back on what you’ve accomplished, and articulate what you were thinking when you created the work of art. Also, ‘non art’ students might see themselves as artistically-minded once they can see all aspects of their creative process.
I am glad to hear that ENGAGE AND PERSIST is the one that comes up as the challenge. I’m sure your class is not alone. It’s great that you are encouraging mentors to use their powers of reflection and their own creativity to re-engage the youth artists. I’ll be interested to see what they say in their reflections about this.
Hi, Virgina,
I so enjoyed your post. I love your description of “the meta-cognitive realization: “Aha! So that’s what we’re doing!” Also, I’ve used a similar method to yours of saying what I think and then “coding” the phrases of the text with the habits in parentheses afterwards. My students at MassArt are starting to do that in their weekly reflections, too. I commend it to any of you in the project, and to your students – write/reflect first in your own language, and then, re-read what you wrote to see which habits you’re emphasizing and how. It’s quite revealing!
I’m also fascinated by the question of how to develop persistence, which is so important in a world in which kids are trained systematically to move on – from station to station, event to event, idea to idea, media to media. Engagement is so key to persistance!
Kim Sheridan, one of the authors of Studio Thinking, is working to engage 8-18 year olds, mostly male, mostly black and Hispanic, mostly poor, in creating 3D gaming environments. They’re spending on average 75 hours PER WEEK – TWO FULLTIME JOBS! – on media by choice (not in any formal schooling or organized contexts), and all of that time is as consumers. So, Kim’s harnessing their fascination with media and gaming environments by getting them to design them in voluntary classes on Saturdays and in summers. Her “critiques” are students playing each others’ games and commenting on what works, is wow, and is boring. Her demo-lectures are brief, introducing kids to limited possibility spaces in the technical tools that, with very little instruction, they can explore and figure out on their own.
And what’s happened to engagement and persistence? It’s skyrocketed. From many feeling frustration and boredom in didactic “you do this” teaching, the classes now have full engagement. From 80% off-task behavior (and why not, when the teacher is teaching the whole class, but half are slower than her pace and half are faster) the classes now have ZERO off-task behaviors. From repetitive, unimaginative work that all looks the same, the classes now produce vibrant, high-quality work that varies tremendously from one child to another as they follow their own interests. It’s great to see how effective art and design approaches are in bringing urban youth into the learning process.
Do we have any examples out there of similar approaches to arts-infused service learning that engages kids so deeply that you can’t KEEP them from persisting? I think that’s the most likely way to succeed.
Also, I’m thrilled to hear you say, “you must share and model your craft.” So important. Emphasizing craft alone in decontextualized contexts is ineffective art teaching. But emphasizing art in the context of service learning without emphasizing craft is equally problematic, just in another direction. We need to involve the entire wheel of Studio Habits to develop an effective artistic mind.
Such a pleasure to see your posting!
Lois
Hi again, just wanted to clarify and simplify: you do not need to read anything I just posted, these readings and links are for your reference or if you want to brush up on Studio Thinking Framework. What we really would like to hear are reflections about how you and your students are using the Studio Habits of Mind in your instruction, exchanges and student assessments.
Thanks!