The Social Struggles of Contemporary Black Art

Teaching Strategies

Project Zero Thinking Routines

Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has published several thinking routines, which are scaffolds for students to understand how to critique or analyze a given piece.⁴⁵ They have created some thinking routines which are specifically for use with art or objects. Two of these routines will be particularly useful for students in this unit: See, Think, Wonder and Values, Identities, and Actions.

See, Think, Wonder

For this thinking routine, students are simply invited to start by observing a work and jotting down as many things they can see as possible. It’s important at this stage to emphasize that they are to make superficial observations, not inferences. I find it helpful in my classroom to give students a graphic organizer with the image under study at the top and a chart with three vertical columns beneath it – each column is labeled for one part of the thinking routine. In silence, students record as many observations as they can, though I usually require a minimum of 10.

Next, in the “think” column, students must consider each of the things they wrote in the “see” column. What inferences can they make about the purpose or meaning of what they noted? For example, if they noticed the focus of the eyes in an image, what might it imply? What might a certain color scheme be telling us? What might a particular symbol mean?

After students have finished the “think” column, it is time for them to make suppositions. In the “wonder” column, they are tasked with asking questions about what they’ve observed. For example, what was the artist thinking when they composed this piece? Why did the artist choose this subject? How did audiences react to this piece? Students usually have several interesting questions to ask that far exceed the capabilities of educators to predict!

After students have had time to independently consider their observations, inferences, and suppositions, it is time to come together as a whole class to share out. When used repeatedly, this routine becomes second nature to students and becomes a permanent tool in their intellectual toolbox to use when observing an object or work of art.

Values, Identities, and Actions

Since this unit is considering art as advocacy, the Values, Identities, and Actions thinking routine is particularly apt. Project Zero recommends that the artwork that one chooses to use with this piece should either have a clear civic message or be able to connect to civics.⁴⁶

For the first category, values, the routine asks us to consider the values the work asks us to think about, i.e. fairness, justice, safety, traditions, a specific group of people, etc. This gives the thinker the ability to ground themself in the moment or social movement in question. Next, the routine asks us to consider identities: Who is this work speaking about? And who is this work speaking to? If we want to probe deeper, we can consider one’s place in the piece. Is anyone left out? Do you fit into the story? Why? Finally, the routine pushes the thinker to consider actions. What actions might this piece encourage? Since we are looking at artwork with strong messages, this should allow students to distill the messages from the pieces.⁴⁷

This thinking routine will be invaluable for interpreting art with a social message. It can also be turned on its head to become a graphic organizer for brainstorming the kind of art they would like to create for their artist’s collectives. Students can think about what values they want to speak to, who their target audience is and whether they want to be more inclusive or exclusive, and finally, what actions they want to inspire their target audience to take.

Partner Reading

PACT Plus is a method developed through a collaboration between the University of Texas, the University of Maryland, and the U.S. Department of Education to improve reading skills through a research-based approach. The acronym PACT stands for Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Texts. The approach is three-fold, but its cornerstone is partner reading. The researchers argue that adolescents learn best from each other, yet in most middle schools, teachers do more talking than students. Therefore, this strategy focuses on increasing student voice and time with their peers. In partner readings, students are thoughtfully paired by reading level and social considerations. Each pair is given a text which is chunked into one to three paragraphs. At the end of each chunk is a “critical question” that usually requires the students to go back into the text and annotate for something specific. The question is followed by a higher-order thinking question that requires students to make inferences. This process repeats throughout the rest of the text. At the end of the text, students tackle a “culminating question,” which forces them to consider the text as a whole. The skillful teacher will ensure that the questions are backward planned so that they serve as scaffolds toward the culminating question. Additionally, teachers can differentiate the questions for higher or lower readers – providing a series of progressively more challenging questions to lower readers and providing more abstract questions to higher readers.

The partner reading then proceeds as follows: one partner is Partner A and the other partner is Partner B. For the first chunk of text, Partner A reads aloud while Partner B listens. After reading, the students discuss the critical questions and complete the annotations together. The focus for the critical questions should be on annotating and speaking and quick jots. Next, Partner B reads the second section aloud while Partner A listens. Students then tackle the critical question(s). This cycle repeats through the culminating question.

The culminating question serves as a good exit ticket or as an opportunity for a written analytical response. While students are working as partners, the teacher should be circulating the room and listening in. The guided annotations serve as useful formative assessments for teachers to keep an eye on. Redirections should take no more than 30 seconds to allow students to own the learning. After the specified time for the reading elapses, the teacher should call the class back together and have student pairs share out their findings. It’s important to spend a little time discussing the culminating question before giving students time to add to their original responses.

Given the number of essays and informational tasks we will be tackling in this unit, we will be using this strategy often. Most notably, we will use the partner reading strategy to interpret Audre Lorde’s essay and the AfriCOBRA manifesto. This technique allows us to admire the author’s craft in addition to making inferences regarding how and why the authors made the choices they did. These annotated texts will serve as a model for students as they write their manifestos for their artist collectives in preparation for making art for the final exhibition.