Final thoughts and research!

Going into my fifth year of teaching, one thing has always remained the same: my ultimate goal of integrating the core curriculum into class art projects. In the past I have worked on lessons on environmental science, world history, United States history and English.  One year, I jumped on board with a program through a neighborhood art group that placed local artists in the core classroom to lead art projects aligned with the teachers’ lessons.  I felt that this was such a great idea and attempted to market this program at my campus.  Unfortunately, I have found it difficult to interest the core teachers enough to want to collaborate with the Visual Arts.

On the other hand, gaining interest from the student population is simple.  Design of video games, clothing, shoes and other consumer items prove that the current generation of kids thrives on visual aesthetics.  As a matter of fact, if you walk through stores targeted for teenagers/young adults, you can see how modern design is vital in all the product being sold.  One of the major clothing designers, OBEY, today is not a clothing manufacturer at all.  Obey the Giant was actually founded by American street artist, graphic designer and illustrator Frank Shepard Fairey.

Creating an interesting curriculum may be easier for the visual arts but the same cannot be said for the core classroom.  I have heard it from too many students that they are simply NOT as involved in their core courses as they may be in mine.  Like I mentioned, every year I have done a visual arts project centered around a core topic.  In order to succeed in this, my students are given all the information and supplemental references to teach them about the subject (WWII, U.S./Mexico War, Holocaust, etc.).  At first, I felt that I had to do this because my classes vary in grade levels and not all students have taken certain courses yet.  When I am searching for the information to give to them, I look for something that is either visually appealing or written short and to the point to help make the reading/lesson shorter and more interesting.  During this stage of the project, my students ask me questions like, “You should be a History teacher!” and “Ohhh!!  That makes more sense, why didn’t my teacher teach it like this?”  But why do I always receive these kinds of reactions every year I teach these types of lessons?

One of the main problems in the core curriculum is obviously peaking the interest of the students.  I have always felt that the easiest solution is simply to choose or re-design the adopted textbooks used in these courses.  Since I have a background in graphic design, I decided that I wanted to take a crack at it.  After checking out a few textbooks from the textbook clerk at my school, I chose a chapter in a Freshmen Science book about Photosynthesis.  Using examples of appealing designs I found online and in my favorite magazines, I developed a few ideas on how I wanted to re-design the chapter.  After creating a mock-design, I revealed the chapter to a number of my students by first showing them the chapter in the textbook they currently use.  All students were clearly more interested in the newly designed pages.  All of them asked me why their classes didn’t have textbooks that looked like my designs.

As a teacher, one of the main concerns and goals of a lesson is to promote and keep the attention of the student.  Because my students thrive on the visuals we use in the art classroom and the fact that they can find connections of these visuals in their own lives, I find it easier to gain their genuine interest.  Through my research an, I feel that this generation of students really need something different to motivate them to learn.  The current design of their references in the classroom are clearly outdated and boring.  I strongly believe that the educational system needs to take advantage of the many talented artists/graphic designers and revolutionize their sources…starting with the modernization of the core classroom textbook.

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This class has definitely done so much for me and this reflection is probably going to go off into many directions, but…here it goes!  All the courses and connections I have made as a student in this program is priceless.  It is remarkable how much I have learned through everyone in this class and beyond.  What was beneficial in this class is to be able to really see where everyone’s passion lies.  Because we were given the freedom to do research on anything, our true concerns and obsessions were revealed.

Another aspect of this course that I truly enjoyed was the fact that we were all able to follow each other’s research and artwork from the very first day to the last.  When one of us was in a rut (which I was in a few times), several solutions were suggested by fellow classmates.  Not only did the feedback help me fix the problem, but it allowed me a number of directions to work with and even more ideas to work on!   Just the genuine interest and feedback from everyone helped push me through my project.

Now that we are nearing the last week of our class, I have been looking through everyone’s final research and artwork and have been left with many personal questions.  Rick’s ceramics, Germain’s paintings, David’s doors and everyone else’s amazing work has pushed me to really think about my future as an artist.  My research for this class centered on how to better education using the visual arts does project my interest in educational reform, but I want to push my own artwork in that direction as well.  Since college I have toyed with the idea of communicating strictly education information through my artwork, but my own disgust (yes, disgust) with the educational system has never been a topic of mine.  As a matter of fact, I have only recently discovered my bitterness towards the educational system recently.

The remarkable work of my classmates for this research course has left me with the desire to take my research on a more personal level.  I honestly felt this a couple of weeks ago, but was afraid to go off into a tangent so late in the semester.  I also felt a little embarrassed of this new interest, but I can see now that almost everyone has also felt this way.  I understand now that my sudden change of interest is due to everyone’s research.  Hearing about the various ideas and how they have developed over the last few weeks has inspired me!  

Honestly, this course has done more than I thought it would.  I only have two more semesters in this program and I have been shifting through many topics for my own research and artwork.  Following my classmates’ own investigation of interests has urged me to further examine my own.  Because of this, I am very eager and excited to begin a new phase of artwork that will correlate to the research I have done in this course.