Art Journal 3, 10/12/2020
In the past few weeks, I had my students work on their final project, and it was heartwarming to see what they worked on, but it was challenging to maintain engagement online when many students stopped attending class. So many students are struggling with the online classes, and so they are very excited to be going back to hybrid later this October. We had the students complete a teacher eval and explain what I as a student teacher could improve on, and none of the students rated me poorly or said anything bad about me- the students were telling me that they would miss me, and that I could be more confident in my teaching, and that I could time manage better overall. In the critiques they learned to use positive feedback to help the others improve on their artwork without detracting from the others' confidence. The project, as my example above shows, was for the students to recreate an artwork of their choosing with materials around their house and a challenge object. In my example, I used sugar and chocolate chips, and had a challenge object being a floss container. The students were interested in the project but only half of the classes were showing up to class, and only half of those who showed up were keeping up to date with the work. This led to about 13 projects being turned in, which is unfortunate but the thirteen submissions potentially inspired the other students who had yet to turn in their projects.
Overall, I believe engagement in the final project would improve if we worked on the project during the live session, but unfortunately we would not be able to ensure that the students were on task. One of the students actually thanked me for the lesson after the critique, which indicates that it was a good lesson, but needed something extra to help the students stay engaged, most likely the in-person element. We found that many students did not understand the functions of their portfolios that we taught them in week three, so we were able to refine and pinpoint how they were supposed to use the technology, something that will help them in the future with this technology-driven world. In the future, I would like to incorporate more non-traditional mediums as I did above, because the students stated that I changed their point of view on what makes a good artist / art because of the different mediums we were able to use. If we were in person during this lesson, I would bring in a variety of materials for the students to experiment with if they didn't bring their materials. I would maintain the criteria of at least two materials combined with a challenge object, this way the students can stretch their problem solving and think deeper to involve other ideas. |