I really appreciate using circles with students; it is a way to ensure that they know their voice matters. Today I modified my approach because I wanted to speak about our curriculum and expectations. We would be speaking about the structure of our course, so I used a square set-up to represent something more objective and concrete.
We looked over our responses from yesterday’s Google Form, asking students what they knew about the Critical Analysis process (one of the three strands in Visual Arts). We were able to assess what we knew by reading through everyone’s (anonymous) answers, and discuss different approaches to meeting our expectations. We have established a learning target (a term I learned about from my Principal — thank you!), so we know where we would like to be in terms of understanding and communication by June.
I asked students to look through the ten expectations from this strand and select three to examine in more depth. In a Google doc that would be shared with me, they would provide the expectation, explain what it meant, and provide a suggestion for a way to cover this material in class. I’m already very interested to read through my students’ opinions:
B2.1 I think that analyzing the function and social impact of different kinds of artwork in both past and present societies means that you learn from the artworks impact on people and their culture. To represent this in our class, a project we could do is recreate a dynamic historic event that affected everyone in that time period. We can do this through any type of artwork whether it’s painting, drawing, etc.
B2.2 I think that this means that the artwork represents the struggles or challenges that artist had in history. We believe this because artists could have had a minimal supply of products according to the society they lived in. A project that we could do relating to this topic is make a painting with only a number of supplies.
B1. 4; I think this means to analyze your own work and be able to evaluate the strong points in your work and where there is room to improve. I think looking over your work and going through the criteria will allow you to improve and see what you need to work on to better your current assignment or assignments in the future. I think this will help us learn what we are good at, and how we can make our work better. This will help us experiment with techniques, and use of materials.
I think we could create an artwork using 2 or more techniques, and blending them together to make a creative piece of art. I think a project like that will help us experiment will all of the techniques we have learned, while broadening our experience with techniques we aren’t familiar with.
B1.2; I think this means looking deeper into the art we create. I think this skill will help us develop a deeper understanding of the art our peers create as well as our own. I think we will be able to connect on a deeper level and be able to understand each other more, because we will be able to recognize the emotion and feelings put into everything they create.
With this skill I think we could create a piece of art that describes our feelings, or who we are emotionally. This could help everyone understand who we are personally, and show that we all have rough patches or things we don’t talk about. I think this is a great assignment for bullying awareness because bullying affects everyone, and we can show that they aren’t alone and we can relate in some type of way. I think this will help show the true value of our emotions and who we are, this will help us develop a deeper understanding of everyone/everything around us.
B2.1 I think this is teaching us how to evaluate artwork in a different perspective. I think we will be able to use technology to make art, I think we could explore some media art and understand how technology and social media has evolved art, and the creative processes.
I think we could create a piece of art using aspects from social media, but tie it into what we learn on a daily basis. We learn so much from social media, I think it would be cool to show what we’ve learned through the technology we use daily.
Their thoughts are fascinating, and I am grateful for their suggestions. I respect their efforts to consider new possibilities while remembering the foundations of the course.
Northern Art Teacher 
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