Context
I teach in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public school system, which is the nineteenth largest district in the nation with a population of almost 140,000 students. I teach studio art and art history in a school located in the Northeast learning community, with a population of roughly 2200 students, grade 9-12. My students come from fairly diverse backgrounds with approximately 55% receiving free or reduced lunch.
I have taught all levels of studio art, ceramics, and sculpture on the high school level for over sixteen years. This experience now affords me time to be more reflective with the ideas and concepts I am presenting to my students. I no longer need much practice in classroom management, pacing, or organizational skills (at least at this point I know those details will work themselves out). As a result, I have begun to question more deeply the what, how, and why of the units, lesson, and art projects that I present.
We have no magnet program or other enticements to enroll strong visual art students to our program other than the reputation we have built. As a result, our department allows for this flexible scheduling (which relies heavily on the students to be strong independent learners) in order to build our program. I teach a variety of courses within my schools Visual Arts department and regularly find myself with a schedule that has a mixed level of students in the same class period. For example, in my AP Studio Art class last year, I had six students who were developing a 3-D portfolio, four developing a Drawing portfolio, and five developing a 2-D portfolio. This is the case (though not as much of a heavy mix) in the other upper level studio course(s) for which this unit is intended. Art III Honors, a course designed for students who have achieved an intermediate level of Visual Arts standards. I will be relying on differentiated instructional strategies to teach this unit to these two groups of students.
I teach these upper level courses with an emphasis on personal voice, technical consistency and innovation, and with a rigorous sense of self-reliance and discipline. At this point in their art careers, students have a good foundation of different techniques and materials and are ready to manipulate them based on their own interpretations and beliefs. It is however, a different story when it comes talking about their own work and the work of their peers. In all studio art classes, the critique is the one area where this work is most directly challenged. I use the term directly because in both the literal sense and in the more abstract or theoretical sense, we confront works made by others (and ourselves) as
they are in the process of being created and when they are complete. In this format we are able to discover much about technical matters of materials, composition, and technique.
It is always such a challenge to get student to talk about art. In my long experience as a studio art teacher, I've never encountered a critique day that did not feel like it went on for weeks. "I like it…they did a nice job" followed by my now standard response "what do you like"? Long pauses follow. It is a difficult process to get student to shape their ideas in a way that is reflective of their content knowledge as well as to formulate in words the personal decisions that helped create the work. For this unit there will be a series of guided questions specifically related to consumer culture and social commentary that will be repeated at each stage of the critique process.
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