Eloquence

Content objectives

In keeping with its title, this unit is about crafting critical discourse. The initial objective follows that, around topics of art criticism, students will articulate their interpretive responses for selected works of contemporary art. Yet, the larger goal is that in learning how to utilize rhetorical techniques employed in public speaking, students will find themselves able to persuade their listeners to adopt alternative appreciations for what might be seen as unconventional works.

In this unit students will learn techniques of rhetoric they will apply to crafting credible oral and written discussions of their theoretical interpretations of works of visual art. Yet, in the process of their learning, it may please students to ascertain that these rhetorical structures are vastly approachable and useful for a broad array of purposes related to their college and career readiness.

Writing critically about art has always been of particular interest within the content of visual arts curriculum in attending to essential standards for critical response. I am delighted to guide my adolescent students in visual art in decoding visual images and in writing interpretations of art objects as visual texts. However, until writing this unit, I had not purposefully explored the classroom practice of public performances of students' views on art in persuasive oration.

Growing students' skills in talking critically about art is foundational to course content in visual art. The process of art criticism follows a four-step method of inquiry: Description, Analysis, Interpretation, and Judgment. This sequence is implicitly a rhetorically persuasive structure because its sequence moves from relatively objective reportage (color, line, shape, etc.) to more subjective operations. As an evaluator of a work of art, Ethos (credibility) is established at the outset in the first two operations of Description and Analysis. One is more likely to be persuasive in the last two, Interpretation and Judgment in validations of a work's Pathos (emotional appeal) and Logos (the argument presented) in support of its being valued. That students' discussions of art criticism can be approached through persuasion holds great potential to support students' understandings of the various perspectives through which art can be appreciated in the application of aesthetic theories. Also compelling in discussions about art will be topics of instrumentalism, appropriation and how art is valued over time and culture.

Class activities embedded in this unit propose stimulating topics for large and small group discussions. Performance based class activities offer practice in speaking and presenting, as well as motivation for the creation of original art. Students will work collaboratively to grow skills in reading visual texts closely looking for organizational principles as well as cogent components. Students will advance their examinations of established artworks within analytical frameworks and apply aesthetic theories as they explore a variety of solutions to interpretation. Working in small groups, students will select a work of art and compose multiple rhetorical arguments for its interpretation. Students will learn techniques used in rhetorical discourse. Students will then prepare and deliver oral presentations of their interpretations with the intention to persuade their listeners to consider works of art from new perspectives. Students will correspondingly create rhetorical self-portraits.

This unit is appropriate for Visual Arts instruction at the Intermediate level of proficiency or its equivalent, Art II, and for year 5 of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program for Visual Arts. The unit's development follows the MYP Design Cycle and speaks to the MYP Areas of Interaction of Human Ingenuity and Approaches to Learning.