Phase 2: Themes

"Persuade Me" development stage personification of mental illness.

This year I'm trying something new with my high school beginning visual art class. I've broken the instructional time down to three main phases. 

• - Phase 1: Explorations. Students learn how to use and work independently with a variety of media. Work is assessed on demonstrating understanding of how to apply media and techniques. 


• - Phase 2: Themes. Students apply phase one learning in increasingly challenging themes, building capacity to tackle open-ended challenges and work creatively. Work is assessed by the student demonstrating  growth, originality and communication of the theme,  


• _ Phase 3: Portfolio. In this phase students generate all ideas for work by selecting themes to explore or by setting learning goals. They work to create a portfolio the presents evidence of the growth and learning that's happened during the class.  

I consider this structure TAB, or Teaching for Artistic Behavior, because it is very intentionally designed to support the student as an artist, and ends with all students knowing how to have an idea and use the resources of the studio to pursue it. 

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​Two weeks ago we started the first theme of phase two. I was excited to introduce the theme, "The Things we Fear", but noticed two issues - students were skipping steps of the Artistic Thinking Process and everyone was using graphite. 

For our next theme I knew I needed to better support students as they navigated the art-making process I'd taught them in the Exploration phase. I modified a form I'd used before and printed one for every student, passing them out during the introduction of the theme "Persuade Me". 

 For this theme I asked students to pick something that they had and opinion about and visually persuade the viewer to their point of view. It's a big theme and the success of the work hinges on a clear understanding of the issue student chooses to focus on. The form I created was very effective with helping students develop their ideas and decide on what to say. 

I decided to add one limitation to the experience - no graphite drawing for the final work. Over 90% of students selected graphite as the media for their first thematic work and I wanted to force them to branch out. Including this limitation at this moment was right for my kids because it caused them to examine different media instead of picking what felt the most familiar. 

​ See one students' process below. 

Planning form

Development

Finished!

And more work, some still in progress.  

It's been a good week!