Rationale
I teach visual art at a magnet high school in New Haven. Our student population is extremely diverse - two-thirds of the students come from New Haven, and one-third come from the surrounding suburbs. My students are geographically, socio-economically, and racially diverse. This diversity means that they walk into my art room with a variety of different skills and prior art knowledge. I must find new and exciting ways to teach content and skills that may be review for some students, while making them accessible to students who have not yet learned them. An astonishing percentage of my students arrive at High School in the Community reading and writing below grade level, many of them far below grade level. Both this statistic and the new CAPT mandates are forcing me to find new ways to incorporate reading and writing across the disciplines within my art curriculum. I have decided to do this through art analysis, followed later by art creation. Students will be looking at icons, analyzing them, placing them in context, determining how context changes the analysis, and then creating their own icon within a specific context. This unit will be included in my Introduction to Art course comprised of ninth and tenth graders, because that is where I first teach art analysis. It will be their final project, so they will have mastered a variety of different media and will now be focusing on the concepts behind art pieces. I may also adapt this unit for my Advanced Placement course because we have to have a dialogue at the beginning of the course about copyright laws, and this would be a much more interesting way to facilitate that discussion.
Many of my students lack critical thinking and problem solving skills. They are very egocentric and feel that simply because they think something, it should be so. They support their ideas solely with their own experiences and not with facts. My students look at artwork with blinders on - How does this piece of artwork affect me? They are wonderful at making art-to-self connections; and for many pieces of artwork this type of analysis can be extremely successful. However, oftentimes students will look at a piece of artwork and not know how to start a dialogue; or their interpretation may be incorrect or incomplete because they are unaware of the context in which the artwork was created. I strive to teach my students that understanding context is extremely important when interpreting an image. In order to put artwork in context students need to begin internalizing a process for artistic analysis: first to look at the artwork and simply describe it, second to begin asking questions to lead to a better understanding, third to gain contextual information to answer the questions they have posed, and finally, to successfully interpret the artwork in context. Many different contexts can affect the analysis of an artwork including: current events, time period, personal experience, existing artwork, etc. I would like students to be aware of these different factors when looking at any piece of artwork. I would also like them to begin to internalize this process of looking at artwork in context.
Besides not understanding how to look at artwork in context, my students have difficulty supporting their ideas with evidence. A student may produce a very strong, well-grounded conclusion about a piece of artwork, but will not be able to articulate how s/he reached that conclusion. It has been proven that this critical thinking skill supporting evidence - helps improve student writing and problem solving drastically. It is a strategy we are focusing on in my school in order to improve student writing. Most of my students practice this skill in English class; I would like to translate this skill into art the art room. Just as students must support their conclusions in papers by providing evidence from texts, they must support their ideas about artwork using evidence they view in the artwork.
First I will show students a set of images of the Virgin of Guadalupe focusing on analysis, supporting their interpretation with information from the artwork. The second set of images we view will be of Malinche and we will focus on the importance of understanding context. I will use these two different Mexican icons whom artists have represented in a variety of different ways, to teach students these skills. I have chosen these two icons because I feel as an educator that it is extremely important to expose my students to artists of a variety of different backgrounds. My student population is one-third Latino, one-third African American, and one-third white, and I would like to ensure that my students see examples of artwork by each of these different groups. These two examples are ideal for comparison because the original icons emerged at around the same time - the early 1500s. I encourage my students to reshape their definition of art to include art made by a variety of cultures and by artist of all different levels of education.
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