Classroom Context and Objectives
The experiences and practices laid out in this unit are designed to engage students in the concepts and themes of visual literacy, art criticism, art history, art lessons on drawing tattoos and daily journal writing. Activities outlined in this unit will provide students with the opportunities to interact with ideas that relate to their everyday lives.
So, before beginning the unit, I feel that it is important to take time to review how to conduct an organized whole group art critique. An outline on how to guide students through a structured class critique can be found in the strategies section of this unit plan.
After this step, I will then introduce a PowerPoint of tattoo images that were directly influenced by the Celtics during the early medieval period. The images below found in figures 1, 2 & 3 are a few examples of how Celtic images inspired tattoo artist Pat Fish to recreate them in tattoos. In a video that Pat created on her website, she refers to this as, “Bringing alive the art of the past.” Her quote was the inspiration for the title of this unit.2 The symbolic meaning of these images will be explained in greater depth later in this unit.
figure 1
Understanding the relationship between words and images
Understanding the relationships between images and words is one concept of visual literacy. Visual literacy is also the ability to “interpret, recognize, appreciate and understand information presented through visible action”3 In this unit we are examining a collection of images and texts in Celtic art and attempting to find similarities and differences with today’s tattoo art through a series of teaching strategies.
Most students do not intuitively develop skills for interpreting visual images on their own. They must be intentionally guided in ways to understand visual information methodically. That is why in this unit I will spend the beginning of each class in this three-week unit, showing images from the Book of Kells to my students, with the expectation that they will “read” the work of art before starting to work on their art project. I intend to begin the unit this way because I believe that intellectually developing the ability to read images will enhance their creative ability to produce more innovative and meaningful works of art.
Having said that, the way I will begin is by using open-ended questions (those with no real right or wrong answer) for modeling a process that students can use themselves as they progress through the course. I have carefully planned the questions with a goal in mind, and that is to create a classroom where it is safe to express your thoughts without fear of failure. Open-ended questions often elicit fresh and sometimes even unexpected insights which will show the class that it is safe to say how you feel and that they can trust me to encourage, support and respond positively to their answers.
A few examples of some of the open-ended questions that I will ask when looking at the artifacts are as follows: “What stands out most when you first look at this work of art? Explain why.”4 “What leads your eye to that place?” “What are the elements that you see most in the work of art?” “What is the main idea of this work, and if you were to give the work a title, what would it be?” “What do you already know about the objects in the work that help you understand what you are looking at?”4
I will progress to questions that prompt multiple and sometimes conflicting answers. My strategy here is to engage discussion and possibly even spark a debate. A few examples of these kinds of questions are; “How do words or text together support or cause conflict with the image (Juxtapose) in this work?” “What would be lost if you removed the words from the image or the image from the words?” “How do the words and images interplay (the way in which two or more things influence each other) in the work?” “In this work of art, do the images support the text or do the text support the pictures?”
The idea here is to get the students thinking about the power of text when combined with pictures and how the interplay with each other to convey a message. Once the learner has displayed proficiency in this area (measured by listening for content during the class discussions) teacher-guided questions can then guide students to make artistic judgements about what they are seeing.
I will use the above questioning strategies when introducing the images below. I am sure that the images will inspire interesting discussion especially when points comparing and contrasting images from the Book of Kells to modern day tattoo art. The images below are the work of tattoo artist Pat Fish from Santa Barbara, California. 5
figure 2
figure 3
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