AED 813 6: "Contemporary Art as Public Pedagogy Curricula- Planning..."
The following is adapted from Stewart, M. G., & Walker, S. R. (2005). Rethinking curriculum in art. Worcester, MA: Davis Publication.
PART I: UNIT OVERVIEW
Unit Title: Living Linocuts
Enduring Idea: People live diverse lives and have unique perspective. Many artists use their work as a catalyst for activism to bring awareness to the validity of their differing realities to the public. A linocut as a reproducible print can be created and distributed in both traditional and contemporary ways to communicate and teach.
Key Concepts:
Visual Culture and Media
Immigrants in the USA
Black Lives Matter
Feminist Activism
LGBTQI Rights
Societal Power
Economic Disparity and Inequities
Relating to Contemporary Art as Public Pedagogy:
The images we see and make educate us on the diverse and segregated worlds we live in. As students, we learn through seeing but we also teach through creating.
Essential Questions:
What is teaching/pedagogy? What can it look like?
How do artists behave and function as activists that educate through artwork?
Why do artists create work with messages of difference?
How do artists and designers create works of art or design that effectively communicate?
Rationale: Growing as a student should mean exploring issues that affect their lives and matter to them. A lot of times in school, students feel restricted by the curriculum when they have ideas and knowledge that reach beyond what they are learning. Living Linocuts is meant to harness and refine student voice through the study of working artists who address contemporary issues of rights, power, race, sexuality, and gender.
Unit Objectives: Students will study a range of artists to understand how they communicate ideas of their diverse lives, perspectives, and challenges through visual communication and performance. Students will create a series of two-layer linocuts that visually communicate and teach their viewer about an important issue in their lives. Artwork will be curated publicly in the spring art show but also shared on Instagram or other favored platforms.
Standards:
9.1.8.B: Recognize, know, use and demonstrate a variety of appropriate arts elements and principles to produce, review and revise original works in the arts
9.1.8.C: Identify and use comprehensive vocabulary within each of the arts forms.
9.1.8.H: Demonstrate and maintain materials, equipment and tools safely at work and performance spaces.
9.3.8.A: Know and use the critical process of the examination of works in the arts and humanities.
End of Unit Assessment:
EVIDENCE:
FOUR pieces= Linocut Series as art project (100 points), Linocut pedagogy on social platform as technological component (20 points), Artist reflective statement to explain process, inspiration, and meaning (50 points), and class critique to observe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate (30 points)
OVERVIEW OF LESSONS
Students will be invited to recall and explain how the issues we discuss apply to their lived experiences. Students will observe formally how artists use activism as a way to teach and spread pedagogy about issues that affect their lives and use this to apply to their practice. Students will utilize verbal visual journals to write and draw about who we study, discuss their knowledge and take on the visual culture, and act through their project, reflection, critique, and social media sharing. This will open doors for students to gain deeper understandings of, raise questions about, and express to the complexities of gender, sexuality, race, power, and rights. Students will be consistently looking at artists and their use of text/imagery to communicate/teach larger concepts about diverse lived experiences throughout the project unit. The variety of way students will be assessed at the end of the unit will offer ample opportunity for students to engage in multiple formats.
LESSON 1:
Students will learn about issues that contemporary artists have taken on to communicate their message, teach their viewers, and communicate a challenge they experience in their lives. Students will observe how artists use words and images to teach others about their lived experiences. Students will learn that their artwork has the power to teach in this way. Students will discuss and explain their interpretations and projects of the scope of artwork.
LESSON 5:
Students will watch a demonstration and learn to transfer their sketch of a two-layered linocut based in a mirrored format onto their linoleum. Students will have their design with pedagogical concept and color scheme in mind.
LESSON 11:
After carving their first layer of the linocut, students will watch a demonstration and learn how to properly ink, roll, test print, and clean up when printmaking with linoleum.
LESSON 17:
Students will learn and practice labeling their series of prints and consider how and where they would best be displayed traditionally to communicate and teach viewers.
LESSON 20:
Students will use the computer lab to upload, explore, comment, like and discuss work of theirs and their peers.
ARTMAKING PROBLEM / CONCEPTUAL STRATEGY:
What do I have to say? What do I feel passionate about to teach the world? What is my perspective?
PERSONAL CONNECTIONS / ARTMAKING BOUNDARIES
Students must find a way to make linocut words and images effective but school appropriate (no outright depictions of gangs, guns, or drugs)
TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE
Note-taking, Designing, safe carving, printing, labeling, written response in sentence and paragraph form
ARTWORKS, ARTISTS, ARTIFACTS
Many including Shepard Fairey, Judy Chicago, and Dareece Walker
MATERIALS AND RESOURCES
Projector, student VVJ, elmo, paper, pencils, erasers, warm up and exit sheets, transfer paper, example projects, linoleum, carving tools, sink, brayer, block printing ink, print paper, drying rack, lined paper, reflection prompts, rubrics, critique prompt sheet, and directions for social media post, access to computers
INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS:
Artwork tells the history of the human story and connects with English and Social Studies
PART II: PLANNING INDIVIDUAL LESSON WITHIN THE UNIT
UNIT TITLE: Living Linocuts
ENDURING IDEA/THEME: People live diverse lives and have unique perspectives. Many artists use their work as a catalyst for activism to bring awareness to the validity of their differing realities to the public. This is a form of public pedagogy or teaching. A linocut as a reproducible print can be created and distributed in both traditional and contemporary means to communicate and teach.
LESSON NUMBER: 1
LESSON TITLE: Art that Teaches
GRADE OR CLASS: High School General Arts
TIME ALLOTMENT: 45 minutes
LESSON SUMMARY: Students will complete warm up with “I see, think, and wonder” format. Teacher will choose students to share out. Teacher will instruct to introduce new project big idea- Artists teach about their diverse lives and challenges. Students see three artists who use art as a teaching platform and spread awareness about their reality. Students will takes notes inside of their verbal visual journals when they see, hear, and observe important concepts in the explanation, images and videos. Students will gather in a restorative circle to answer prompts to discuss their feelings, thoughts, and relations to what they viewed. Students will complete a written exit to summarize ways they saw artists using their work to communicate and teach.
ARTWORKS, ARTISTS and/or ARTIFACTS:
In the "Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago, she introduces "the richness of women’s heritage into the culture in three ways; a monumental work of art, a book and a film because she had discovered so much unknown information,” because women aren’t acknowledged as important figures in history. SOURCE: http://www.judychicago.com/gallery/the-dinner-party/dp-artwork/
RELATED VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mrFRTEnMPQ
Dáreece Walker’s “Made in the USA” self-portrait, he says, announces that “I am made in the USA but somehow I’m not treated as a full American. I’m treated as a black American, like cardboard, disposable, easily replaced.” SOURCE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/07/13/the-most-powerful-art-from-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-three-years-in/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.16686902df5d
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI7eHX9u4Q0
Shepard Fairey, "We the People Are Greater Than Fear" from 2017 is a series of prints meant to question and stand up against fear in media that discriminates against immigrants and Middle easterners. SOURCE: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2017.284/?gclid=CjwKCAjwhbHlBRAMEiwAoDA349vdV04uJKKLCJnNsJJadRUibjYHYvKPNJ5tJT8d9aM5_77Gi8VmLhoCQB4QAvD_BwE
VIDEO: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/06/26/supreme-court-travel-ban-reaction-jm-orig-vstan.cnn/video/playlists/trump-travel-ban/
KEY CONCEPTS
Visual Culture and Media
Immigrants in the USA
Black Lives Matter
Feminist Activism
Societal Power
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
What is teaching/pedagogy? What can it look like?
How do artists behave and function as activists that educate through artwork?
Why do artists create work with messages of difference?
How do artists and designers create works of art or design that effectively communicate?
STANDARDS
9.3.8.A: Know and use the critical process of the examination of works in the arts and humanities.
INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS
Artwork tells the history of the human story and connects with English and Social Studies
LESSON OBJECTIVES: Students will be able to pick out and discuss important ideas addressed in artist’s work, students will make connections to the works they observe with their lived experience.
Students will possess knowledge of self, current events and observed realities in visual media, and students will have ideas about others and how they might feel given the presented issues.
Students must have cognitive skills to sort, interpret, and evaluate artists work. Students will utilize social skills to express opinions of what they saw in the presentation.
Students will have a disposition to questioning power schematics called out in the artworks and think critically about the implications on their lives and others.
ASSESSMENT:
-How will students and you know that they have learned what is intended in this lesson?
Students will have a clear understanding and be able to explain their observations, thoughts, and opinions in verbal and written formats.
-What objects or performances will count as evidence of student learning as stated in your objectives for this lesson?
Warm up, exit, and participation in circle
-How will you measure student achievement?
Formative assessment will be based on students participation
-How will you sequence instruction to facilitate learning?
We will follow classroom routines that naturally facilitate with the opener, instruction, task and conclusion.
PREPARATION
1. Teacher Research and Preparation: Sources to be presented in slideshow
http://www.judychicago.com/gallery/the-dinner-party/dp-artwork/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mrFRTEnMPQ
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/07/13/the-most-powerful-art-from-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-three-years-in/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.16686902df5d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI7eHX9u4Q0
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2017.284/?gclid=CjwKCAjwhbHlBRAMEiwAoDA349vdV04uJKKLCJnNsJJadRUibjYHYvKPNJ5tJT8d9aM5_77Gi8VmLhoCQB4QAvD_BwE
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/06/26/supreme-court-travel-ban-reaction-jm-orig-vstan.cnn/video/playlists/trump-travel-ban/
2. Teaching Resources: Projector, elmo, talking piece
3. Student Supplies: student VVJ, elmo, paper, pencils, erasers, warm up and exit sheets
