Activities
Introduction with Music
I am including this introductory activity, which is not explicitly mentioned in the content, because it will help students to understand how they might actually feel something in response to visual art. This activity serves as a scaffold. While the majority of adolescents probably have not had aesthetic experiences as a result of visual arts, I am going to hypothesize that they have had something close to it through music. So, students’ favorite music will be used in our introduction to mood and aesthetic experiences. This activity will occur over one classroom period.
Students should be able to understand that not every work of art/piece of music/work of literature can evoke strong emotion for an individual. Because it of that, the pieces that do seem like inanimate friends that “just get me.” My students will most readily be able to relate this feeling to their taste in music. I might ask, “Have you ever felt so strongly about a song that you feel the need to tell others that this is my song?” I will ask student to bring that song in for us to listen to and share in small groups. If students do not have a phone, I will download it for them on my own. In preparation for this activity, students will complete a questionnaire about their chosen song. It will ask about the first time they heard the song, if it made them think of their own life or someone else’s, if it is a favorite that is shared with a friend, if any particular parts of the lyrics speak to them, if they shared the song on social media, etc....
In class, students will divide into small groups and share their songs from their phones or computers, as well as whatever answers from the questionnaire they are comfortable sharing. Then, I will share a favorite song of my own, sharing my answers. But, I will go further to analyse the song’s “formal” features: the key, the tempo, the register, the rhythm, the pitch of the singer’s voice, and something called “enharmonic change.”32 I am going to invite the music teacher in, or if she is not available, a musician friend, to help me demonstrate all of this on a keyboard. Lastly, students will write in their journals a summary of three takeaways from the lesson, a reconsideration of why they love their favorite song by connecting one of the music theory points to it, and a prediction about how this will all relate to visual art and poetry.
Emotion Lexicons
This activity will take approximately one week. Students will first work with generative tables or lists that will help students to see how words and meaning are constructed. In small groups of 4-5, students will brainstorm emotion words (nouns and adjectives) using roots and affixes such as de-, un-, -y, mis-, path, -ment, -thymia, -ion, -re-, -iveness, -ment, and sent. These word parts will be on laminated slips of paper that each group will have and placed on tables around the room. then after about 10 minutes of brainstorming and jotting down words on another sheet of paper, groups will share out and post their work to the wall. The group with the most pertinently evocative emotion words will win a prize (school supply materials).
Students will then be given a list of 25 new emotion words and their definitions to read to themselves. They list will include tranquil, sanguine, elation, forlorn, bashful, sheepish, disconcerted, ennui, and other words that they are likely unfamiliar with. As they read, I will pass out stapled booklets of blank paper, 25-30 pages, front and back. After about 5 minutes of silent reading, we’ll go over 12 of the new words one by one, discussing their meanings and associations wherever there is a desire to.
I will have students write “Emotion Lexicon” on the cover of their booklet. From the brainstormed words and the 12 words we went over, I will have students select however many words speak to them--from having experienced the emotion to wanting to experience it to liking the way the word sounds--and add them, one per page, to their new lexicons. (I can add new pages later if they run out.) They will be instructed to leave room on the page for adding a type of image later. Dictionaries will be provided for defining the brainstormed words or alternative definitions for the others.
We will continue to look at new emotion words, including the remaining words from the list, through the week, and students can add their favorites to their lexicons. Toward the end of the week, we will come back to the root words and suffixes. We will break apart some of the other words we’ve gathered. Students will be challenged to make a new word for an emotion they have experienced but that does not have a name. For inspiration, we will look at Ellen Frances Sanders’ Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World, and a few entries from writer Eden Sher and comic artist Julia Wertz’s The Emotionary: A Dictionary of Words that Don’t Exist for Feelings that Do.
Later, as I introduce color theory and vocabulary, we will add the next layer to the booklets. Students will be given acrylic paints to mix and experiment with, trying to find the color that, for them, fits each of their moods. They can then paint a swatch of those colors on the word’s page.
Reading Ekphrastic Poetry
To introduce the thirteen poems after teaching Longfellow, Hirsch, and Hayden, I will have students do a “mood matching” exercise, wherein they try to interpret the mood of the poems and paintings, agreeing on one or two good descriptors using their lexicons. They will write the moods on sticky notes and flip over the paintings, putting the notes on the backs. One group will do the paintings and the other the poems. Then, they will match them up according to which moods seem synonymous. It would be fun to see which they were able to correctly match.
Students will work in pairs on a poem/painting. They will be given a close reading worksheet that asks questions about formal elements of the poem. There will be a section for defining unfamiliar words. Prompts will ask students to determine if the poem has a specific meter (or a regular number of syllables per line, as we may not have gone over meter yet), stanza form, and rhyme scheme. It will ask students to look for metaphors and similes. It will ask if the poem is written in first person, third person, or second person. Does the poem describe the painting directly? What are the aspects of the painting or work of art that the poet seems to directly reference? Does the speaker seem to like the artwork (getting at tone)? What else does the poem bring up? What is the setting of the poem? What are the keywords in the poem? What is the mood of the poem? Does the mood ever shift and if so, where? From all of this, what do you think the theme is? What is the poem really about and what is it saying about that subject?
While I will teach close reading skills using poetic and literary terminology, I will also bring in the use of questions and prompts that require the use of those emotion lexicons, and art glossaries, which students can pull out and add to throughout the unit. As we examine the poems and their works of art together, some questions will be: What is the mood of this poem for you? What mood do you think the poet felt when looking at the painting? What do you think is the poet’s attitude toward the subject of the painting? What mood would your poem about this painting be? What would it focus on? What does the poet like or dislike about the painting? Which poems seem to be about something happening either in the poet’s life or in the poet’s world at the time?
Pairs will present their findings to the class. I will model all of this first, including the presentation, in presenting those first three poems, so that students will understand the process.
Museum Trips
The education director and tour manager at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts have helped me to plan our field trips to the museum. We are lucky because this world-class museum is only a 15-minute walk away from our school. However, transportation will be provided for students with disabilities related to mobility. I will bring two classes at a time, twice. The first visit will involve students breaking into four groups of ten and following a docent and chaperone for a tour of the museum. After a break for lunch on the lawn of the museum’s sculpture garden, students will be allowed independent time, about twenty minutes, to revisit favorite pieces and choose three artworks that they might write an ekphrastic poem about (in case an exhibit changes and their first choice is not there on the second visit).
The second visit will be a quiet one, with notebooks and a copy of the rubric for their ekphrastic poetry writing. With permission, we will photograph the art and I will print it for students to refer back to.
Chaperones for the trips will hopefully include art education students from Virginia Commonwealth University, who frequently visit my school, and art educators from the Visual Arts Center, a community art center in Richmond.
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