High School Studio Lesson
THE PENCIL
Beyond
To the general public, the topic of art education conjures up images of pencil drawings and tempera paint. If asked what
a student might learn in an art class,
a typical response might be that they
will be taught how to draw and paint.
This interpretation isn’t totally incorrect, as drawing and painting are activities preformed in most artrooms. This
analysis, however, that art is about
drawing and painting, is simply flawed.
Art is not about drawing or painting. In fact, drawing is not about
drawing. Drawing is about seeing. For
example, an art student doesn’t learn
how to draw her hand. She learns how
to look at her hand and reproduce on
paper what she sees.
This is not to say that teaching
technique is excluded from art education. In the example provided, if the
student is asked to use contour line
to draw her hand, she needs to understand what contour line drawing is,
how contour line differs from other
types of line drawings, and how to
properly move the hand in order to
create a contour line drawing.
Art education should go beyond
teaching the ability to see an object
and reproduce it. I’ve come to believe
that art education should teach students how to see an object and conceptualize ways to repurpose it. It is this
realization that has led me to explore
the concept of repurposing.
Repurposing Mud
My class has been exploring the elements of art through repurposed
materials. In order to go beyond the
pencil, I’ve been adapting less traditional materials in my lesson plans.
One such recently used material has
been mud.
Consider the following as it might
apply to mud:
•;How;can;mud;be;used;to;create;art?
•;How;can;previously;learned;tech-niques be applied using mud as a
medium?
•;What;skills;could;be;gained;or;dem-onstrated by students with a lesson
using mud?
These are questions I considered as I
created a lesson plan that incorporates
