What's Quality?

What constitutes quality student work? A few conversations I've been a part of lately have made me ponder this question. It's an important one for art teachers because our value is often determined by the aesthetic appeal of the work of our very best students. 

The first thing I think about when I consider a work's attributes is who made it.  Making, of course, is the physical creation of the work but also the mental effort of planning and problem solving. Most of the art produced in my class room falls under two categories: projects and exercises. 

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing by Eduardo, Art 1.

"Auroracent" from our Character Remix exercise.

"I'm Fine" by Shelby, Art 2.

Exercises are for building skills, either the conceptual sort or skills with materials. For example, take our Character Remix project, where we asked our Art 1  students to take a recognizable character and change something fundamental about them. 

Exercises like this are important for developing skills -the technical skill involved in  re-creating an image and the conceptual skill involved in deciding what to change and what to leave the same in this case.

In exercises my students develop skills but in projects they apply them. 

Take "I'm Fine" by Shelby. For this project I asked a lot of my Art 2 students. First, the had to select an artwork from the North Carolina Museum of Art. Next they had to plan and create a response piece of their own. They made all decisions for this project independently, unlike in exercises where I make most of the decisions. 

About her work Shelby writes "My idea was to take a glass bottle and broken pieces of glass and put it into the bottle, but on the broken pieces are words that tear us up on the inside. On the outside we are smooth and clean but on the inside we have our own war that we are fighting. "


Or Eduardo's "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing", which he planned from start to finish around the open-ended theme of identity. He writes about his work 
"To show my concept I did a painting of a wolf wearing the skin of a sheep, the painting showed how reality could be really different from the expectations that people have. I used a dark color in the background to represent the real identity of the animal. The blood and the skin of the sheep on the wolf represent the change of someone's identity with the purpose of taking advantage of other people." 

The work in both of these projects is visually pleasing. They are well made and visually interesting. The ownership and the intent, for me, is what makes them outstanding. This is work that is expressive and personally meaningful.

When considering a works "quality", or lack of quality, what we should do is look beyond the technical skill, though that should be taken in to account. 

We have to also look at the planning - was the student following steps planned by the teacher or did the student do the hard work of selecting the best materials and processes?

We have to look at concept - does the work say something, does it mean something?

When we think about quality we have to make sure that we aren't comparing teacher planned exercises to authentic, student directed work because there really isn't a comparison to be made.