Response to Readings

Graphic Novels as Contemporary Art? 
The Perplexing Question of Content in the High School Art Classroom 
by Mark A. Graham

-Art educators are constantly trying to answer the question, "what work of art or artifact of visual culture will provide the richest educational eperiences for students?"
-Graphic novels are a blend of drawings and real world issues that students can relate to. They present history and culture in a way that is accessible to them.
-Many artists use graphic novels as a form of conversation.
-The connection between text and image can create a number of crucial conversations with students.
-Aesthetics and the impact of expressive qualities can be examined like any other work of art.


How the Teaching Artist Can Change the Dynamics of Teaching and Learning
by Mark A. Graham

-Schools are often uninteresting and uninspiring places for students because education is so strongly based on standardization. However, you can't standardize individual students.
-Teaching Artists have the opprotunity of working against the flow and guiding students in questioning and crucial thinking and conversations.
-A creative environment (studio) can be created by both the teacher and students to encourage tiral and error, as well as exploration.
-As a teacher, demonstrate art making so that students see you go through the process of thinking, correcting, making changes, and they catch on to what art making looks like.
-Effective teaching is mediating and mentoring.
-There needs to be constraints when creating art, but also freedom to choose and freedom of expression.
-"An enabling or liberating constraint creates conditions for the emergence of complex learning and complex learning communities by balancing sufficient openness to allow for a diversity of interests and experience among students."
-An art room shoule be a place where students do their own work, not where the students do the teacher's work.


Engaging Minds
Changing Teaching in Complex Times
by Brent Davis, Dennis Sumara, and Rebecca Luce-Kapler

-Nothing moves from one brain to another in moments of explanation, students need to experience!
-It is ok for students to copy artists who embodies a sensibility towards an art form.
-"Getting inside the mind of a master" can help guide a student's art making skills.
-Copying isn't merely meant to have students duplicate something, rather it helps them participate in an awareness of a certain way of thinking.
-Student teachers can be under too much pressure to find time and desire to create a positive learning environment. They get lost in a "trial by fire". They need to have a mentor teacher they can mirror (in a personal way) to get them prepared for their own classroom.