Community-Based Art Education Practices

The article “Three Initiatives for Community-Based Art Education Practices” by Lim, Chang and Song (2013), really highlights some of my own interests in incorporating working with the local community into classroom pedagogy and curriculum. The “Three Initiatives for Community-Based Art Education Practices” discusses the importance of going beyond the classroom walls by providing preservice teachers and students with the opportunity to create art making in an environment that involves the local community in hopes that, “students become connected to the outside world and are offered opportunities to change public’s attitude toward art” (Lim, Chang & Song 2013).

Multiple articles throughout the course have brought up the importance of community-base art education practices. After reading about the advantages of allowing students to become involved with the local community I have become interested in and have really fallen in love with this approach to art education outside of the classroom. Lim, Chang, and Song focus on providing opportunities for their preservice teachers to get involved in the local community, because preservice teachers that are guided in art making experiences that work with the local community are provided with and exposure to learning experience that many preservice teachers might not have prior to beginning their career or student teaching. Knowledge of the local community can present tons of opportunities  for an art educator no matter where they might be employed, whether it be in a school district, museum, art management position or etc. in order to keep art relevant in that community. This is important, because art can save a decaying city, keep students interested in their education, keep the arts funded in public schools, encourage pride in a community, and so much more. When I become a preservice teacher I hope I am exposed to an art making experience with school age students outside of the classroom in their local community.

I happened to stumble upon a blog that exemplifies the power of artists creating community art that aids people who are in need. I recently had an epiphany that developed into a personal desire to create artwork to works to serve the greater good, so for my own future practice as an art educator I would really like to inspire my students to create art that is for greater good of our planet, and when I stumbled upon this project I was drawn to it. The title of the blog post is called “SurVivArt Offers a Creative Look at Global Issues and Happiness” (Beitiks, 2013). The project is part of a series called SurVivArt that works to answer a question asked by the Heinrich Böll Foundation ,“What makes a good life?” The pieces exhibited in the article are by artists Kebreab Demeke and Nino Sarabutra . For the purpose of this blog post I am focusing on Kebreab’s work, because he created a sculpture that incorporates the local community and its school students. Kebreab examines the vessels that are used to carry water in Ethiopia, and created an installation with the jerrycans (containers for water and various objects) that were castoff and beat-up vessels of local families. In exchange for the families’ jerrycans Kebread provided them with clay pots. The artist involved the local school students and their parents to create the piece and ask that they also ensure the life of the sculpture that will be used to grow edible plants for the community. Kebreab Demeke’s involvement with the community in Ethiopia is an example of a local community art project that promotes art advocacy in the community and classroom that I would really like to be exposed to in my preservice teaching experience or create with my own students in the future.

Beitiks, M. (2012, January 30). SurVivArt offers a creative look at global issues and happiness. Retrieved from http://inhabitat.com/survivart-offers-a-creative-look-at-global-issues-and-happiness/

Reference List

Lim, M. Chang, E. Song, B. (2013). Three initiatives for community-based art education Practices”. Art Education. 7-13.

Beitiks, M. (2012, January 30). SurVivArt offers a creative look at global issues and happiness. Retrieved from http://inhabitat.com/survivart-offers-a-creative-look-at-global-issues-and-happiness/

How to Utilize the Power and Limitations of School-Age Youth on YouTube in the classroom.

  

A major theme that has intersected throughout all of my classes this semester is Media’s influence on art making, specifically popular culture as a significant means of learning. As a result popular culture has made an impact on my artwork, and helped to expand my understanding of how humans understand and experience media’s influence on their lives. The insight I have gained from studying popular culture that I am particularly curious about is how the idealized representations shape and limit perceptions of reality. In relation to the k-12 classroom, I am interested in how to teach the deconstruction of popular cultures pedagogy.  However popular culture is not entirely bad, because it is a part of our world. We are almost constantly being exposed to it, and informal learning communities are now a large part of our lives. Unless, you move to a remote location underground and live without any form of connection to other human beings.

The two articles that I have read during this semester that really seem to discuss and explore how to deconstruct and benefit from popular culture are “Youth on YouTube as Smart Swarms “(Duncum, 2014) and “Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary Art Classroom” (Tavin and Anderson 2003). Paul Duncum (2014) summarizes the article as, “Viewing YouTube culture as a creative, collaborative process similar to animal swarms can help art educators understand and embrace youth's digital practices” (p.32). After comparing the similarities between school-age youth and animal swarms, Duncum (2014) points out that, “Smart swarms are not always smart” (p.35), similarly youth on YouTube also act this way, because of their age. However, he states that both the power and the limitations of youth on YouTube can offer opportunities for institutional education to remain relevant. He lays out steps as a guide for teachers to fallow on how to instruct their students on how to utilize basic filming and editing skills so that they can better articulate their intentions. The second step would be for students to upload their work onto YouTube and respond to the criticism of viewers with comments and/or with new productions. Third the teacher and class would need to write up rules of engagement to either discuss or censor the transgressive offensive material that occurs in popular culture. The last step is to make a point to let your students know that YouTube’s primary focus is to use the material that is created by its users as a billboard for advertisers, not as a means of self-expression. This last step discusses the idea that the primary educational task that needs to be addressed when working with popular culture, is to produce and prepare students to acknowledge the power of commercial interests and ambiguities.

The article mentioned earlier “Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary Art Classroom” (Tavin and Anderson 2003), relates to “Youth on YouTube as Smart Swarms “(Duncum, 2014). The steps that Paul Duncum provides for art educators to fallow when utilizing the power and limitation of popular culture are similar to the steps that Tavin and Anderson use in their article. In “Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary Art Classroom” Tavin and Anderson (2003) point out the idealized representations that can be a product of an oligopoly like Disney, and its ability to shape and limit perceptions of reality through those products. After bringing to light the power of Disney and the misrepresentations that occurs within their products, Tavin and Anderson provide an example of a lesson that was taught to fifth grade students on how to deconstruct popular visual culture in an art classroom. The teacher lead students in healthy critical thinking discussions by asking questions like, “How do you define stereotypes”? Then the students watched video clips from Disney movies, and the teacher lead more discussions by asking questions that pertained to the movies. This helped students to make connections between the stereotypes in their lives and what they might be seeing in popular culture. Once the students began to notice the misrepresentations the teacher assigned a project where the students created art that was in response to the stereotypes, and example from the lesson was the students created movie posters that illustrated their re-visioned movie. From my own inference of the two articles I think it would be beneficial to create a curriculum where the steps provided by the authors are incorporated from the articles. Below is a video from YouTube that could be a project that was created from the lesson.

Reference List

Duncum, P. (2014). Youth on YouTube as Smart Swarms. Art Education. 32-36

Tavin, K.M, Anderson, D. (2003). Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary Art Classroom. Art Education. 56, 21-24+33-35

Youth on YouTube: Credit Where Credit is Due

In his article, Youth on YouTube as Smart Swarms, Duncum investigates how children engage with YouTube and access to uploading and viewing video media. He agues that the universal access and group mentality create the same sort of swarm effect that is observable in the animal kingdom, and that the products youth create are because of this swarm mentality.

I think we need to give the youth on YouTube a little more credit. It seems odd to me, to focus (as the article does) on a series of videos on Barbie torture, in response to this single toy that has created it’s own genre. YouTube is primarily a source of entertainment, and while the formation of these niche specific genres is interesting, I don’t think it is fair to overlook the originality of much content that kids produce on YouTube, or to deny the vast education community on YouTube, that many children engage with.

As an example, I have been a faithful follower of the Vlogbrother’s community since 2009.  The two brothers that make up the vlogbrothers channel, John and Hank Green started sending video blogs to each other in 2007. They became popular rather quickly particularly among the 13-17 year old age demographic. As a response to the popularity of the educational topic videos they were posting, John and Hank started to organize separate channels dedicated entirely to education. With the help of a small team they started the CrashCourse channel. This channel has a series of videos on World History, Biology, Chemistry, Literature, US History, Psychology, among other topics and the content is similar to intro college level courses. Of course, the CrashCourse channel is just one example of the education community on YouTube that is particularly popular for youth.
            Another genre that has amassed massive popularity on YouTube is the D.I.Y. category. There are videos for how to do or learn anything- how to dance, how to cook, how to sew, how to apply makeup, etc. While most of more well known channels in these areas are by older creators, a massive contribution to this category is from youth. So often big name YouTube hosts will invite subscribers to post a video response to their content, as a way to engage with fans. Many of these video responses are from a younger demographic, and are a thoughtful or a meaningful assessment of the content in the original video. It is a vast oversimplification to say that children will just respond automatically to whatever is virally popular and share it in a swarm like way. Creators even before they reach double digits will want to respond to a favorite video of one of their idols, or even create a video tutorial themselves as inspired by something else.
             It does youth a disservice to charge them as a ‘swarm’ instead of looking at them as individuals with individual goals and interests. While it is a thought provoking comparison to draw in terms of how we view and interact with them on a large scale, it is unrealistic to belittle youth in this comparison and to say that this is a helpful way to think about it. Youth are excluded and minimized in so many other ways in our society, to be reduced to analysis as part of a swarm is just adding insult to injury. A better way to approach youth culture would be to view it how it really is, a response and interaction with general public or adult pop culture. If anything, the bulk of adult YouTube users are the ones who make up a swarm. It is the nature of a decentralized internet platform, and any of the reasons listed in the article as a comparison to the a swarm could be applied in more depth to adults. It is time to give credit to the youth of YouTube (and any other internet community) and approach them as we would approach a community of our peers, instead of trying to compare them to something that is barely human.





Duncum, Paul. "Youth on YouTube as Smart Swarms." Art Education (): 32-26.

Generemix

                With the onset of a digital generation, one can’t help but question the authenticity of work being created. Our culture has metamorphosed into a portmanteau in itself—everything just a remix of preexisting information. Perhaps they use a song they like without permission from the artist, or make a parody of the same song by giving it different lyrics, or even make an entire remix of the song by changing everything but its catchy hook; all of these actions are stealing in some way. While students are the most abundant contributors to the world of YouTube, the question of how far appropriation can go and still be accepted as an art form is evoked by nearly every video posted into cyberspace.

                While YouTube was originally made for the sake of advertising, it now acts as a hub for creative projects. Kids and Adolescents alike can post whatever information they want with the full intention of allowing the world to view it. Many accounts act as parodies, and I have to admit those are my favorite ones to watch. Although it’s hilarious to see a high volume of people mocking celebrities, some videos have even been made as parodies to emphasize the humor in previously viral YouTube Videos. For example, Joseph Gordon –Levitt recently made a video acting as a grown up Charlie from Charlie Bit My Finger. The ability for someone’s baby video to catch international attention and become the muse for a stranger’s own video is an accomplishment in itself, but appropriation clearly made this possible.

                Although many people will argue that appropriation and plagiarism are synonymous, they absolutely are not the same thing. The ability to remix work is an advanced skill that only some can accomplish so carefully that they narrowly avoid plagiarism in lieu of creating something brand new—allowing a phoenix to rise from existing sources of visual culture. So what are students learning from experimenting with this type of medium? They are learning from the greats: Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Duchamp. They are learning how to compile ideas in an array of video, sound clips, megabytes, and pixels. They are finding an outlet that stimulates more parts of the human brain simultaneously than staring at a two dimensional painting on a canvas. Activating prior knowledge with the incorporation of already well-known imagery automatically allows the viewer to connect with the piece in front of them. This dialogue of old and new information provides a stimulus, and allows their prior knowledge to be molded so that they begin thinking differently.

                The onset of varied thinking props the door wide open for viewers to metamorphose information, ultimately taking what they've already seen and making it into their own work of art. This cycle continues as a source of inspiration and motivation to create. The widespread use of YouTube provides any internet user with access to a library of videos whose length totals to longer than a lifetime, so that any new project is just a click away.

Thoughts on the Judy Chicago Keynote

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to attend part of the Judy Chicago symposium to see the Judy Chicago keynote lecture. I was immediately impressed by how organized the event was- they had name tags printed for everyone, with schedules and places printed on the back, in case of confusion about where the next event was. After finding a seat in the auditorium, I took out my notebook so that I could be prepared to write down important quotes or things I noticed from the lecture.

While I enjoyed Judy Chicago's talk, I thought that in some ways it came off as a brief outline of her book, to encourage us to buy it. She talked about her time she spent teaching college student's in the 70's, and how after a break from teaching to concentrate on her own studio work, she returned in the late 90's/early 2000's and still had to deal with many of the same feminist concerns that she had to deal with earlier; no permanent strides seemed to have stuck. I thought this and the one or two anecdotes (like a female student at Duke who had been drawing eviscerated torso, and because Judy Chicago was well versed in feminist art she was able to identify this as a cry for help from the student who had been sexually assaulted, whereas her male professors at duke had just said that maybe these images should be hung from I-beams to display them) that punctuated this part of her lecture was very interesting, but these were few and far between. Mostly it was overview of the different colleges she has worked at in the time that she returned to teaching.

I was also upset by her comment about current studio cultures and college age artists producing a lot of bad art. This was a comment she made toward the end of the lecture, and it is possible I was oversensitive to it because I am currently an art education student, taking studio classes and making art. Perhaps it is a naive perspective on my part, but I am very curious as to why we are producing bad art- what make it bad? The art world has changed vastly from when Judy Chicago was in school to today, and art styles and what is popular isn't the same at all. I don't think it was a fair comment to generalize most of today's student art as bad.

However, there were many things that I appreciated from the lecture as well. I liked how she emphasized that interdisciplinary communication should be improved between the Studio Art, Art History, and Art Education departments. (I vehemently agree with this sentiment, which is a large part of why I am double majoring in Art History and Art Education.) I was talking with one of the Art history grad students on the Art History department field trip to New York, and she was telling me how she did her undergraduate degree in studio art, and that some graduate programs would not take majors other than art history. This is odd, because I would think that someone who is more familiar with the art making process, rather than just the theory behind it would be more likely to better understand an artwork on a deeper level than just a framework of how it might have been done.

I also liked her thoughts on how art in the K-12 curriculum should be implemented- that they should be shown all the possibilities and directions to go with making art, and the variety of ways to connect with art, rather than just being given a simple craft. This idea, of making art accessible and relevant to students has been the focus of my art education classes this semester, and her comment about "integrating sensitivity to gender and diversity, promoting content based curricula, that is flexible and adaptable and not the product of only one person's thinking," is a pretty apt summary of all the main points we have touched on for this class.

Teaching the Art of Graffiti

Graffiti is an act that we cannot shelter from the youth of America. Many children live in areas with a prevalent display of graffiti. In most cases this graffiti is committed by the older children of the neighborhood, often causing the younger children to look to graffiti with a sense of awe.

If this act of vandalism is never explained to the youth of the community, this act will only continue through the generations. Teachers need to acknowledge this issue, they need to take this sense of wonderment, the children see within the act of graffiti, and turn it into something positive. Teachers need to explain to the children what could happen if they get caught vandalizing, as well as how much time, effort, and money is put into the removal of this graffiti.

If the teachers give students the ability to express this creativity in a safe and legal way, while still allowing them the full satisfaction of fully expressing themselves through an art form, the act of graffiti as a form of vandalism will most likely decrease.

In having the students get involved with an art form that interests them, the students gain a sense of connection with the teacher. With this connection the students grow to trust the teacher, thus they listen to what the teacher has to say. With that, if the teacher discourages against the act of vandalism, even if it may be a form taught within the classroom, the students will most likely adhere to what the teacher has to say, rather than follow the unruly lifestyle of those that vandalize.

(CBS, 2011)

 

If kids are never taught the affects of vandalism and the difference between graffiti as an art form, and as a form of vandalism, then this act will only continue to occur. Someone, preferably teachers, need to show the youth that they can take this art form off the streets and into museums. These artists need to be taught that they can get recognition for their work, possibly even turning this illegal act into a legitimate career.

 

 

References:

 

CBS.(2011). Graffiti: Art or Vandalism? CBS. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Eu2na_diY





define:graffiti

graf·fi·ti

grəˈfētē/

noun

1. 1.

   writing or drawings scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place.

   "the walls were covered with graffiti"

   synonyms:

   street art, spray-painting, inscriptions, drawings;  defacement,vandalism

2. 
   

             A simple Google search brings up this definition of graffiti. In the most concrete and basic definition, graffiti is vandalism; it's illegal. However, does it necessarily have to be illegal? There is the concept of "graffiti art" which means graffiti that is legally approved. Graffiti is something that is hammered into most children at a young age to be considered delinquent gang behavior. It is a practice that people look down upon and not accepted as a legitimate form of art. Many teachers tend to stray away from teaching children about graffiti art, fearing that they will use it to vandalize in their community. However, this tactic is flawed in that it only increases the desire to break the rules and make graffiti behind the teacher's back. 
   
   

             It's almost as if you are giving the child a large red button, and then proceeding to tell them not to press it. However, if you explain to them the reasons why they cannot press the red button, and provide circumstances in which pressing it might be okay, then they will be more likely to obey. Teaching about graffiti has a similar effect. Sentrock, a Hispanic artist and educator, teaches children how to use graffiti art as a method of expression. He explains how to use graffiti art to further benefit oneself or one's community, and to never let it restrain you. He teaches that (illegal) graffiti is not okay, but graffiti with permission is encouraged. Children are often flexible and open to learning, especially if it is something interesting and meaningful to them. It is up to teachers to provide them with knowledge and not simply shut out new possibilities and outlets for creative expression. By teaching graffiti art and increasing awareness of the positive aspects of it, we can make way for newer generations that are fully supportive of it as an art form. 

             Maybe in the future, the definition of graffiti can be transformed into a new definition, one that puts street art in a positive, and more importantly, legal, light. The legality of graffiti has been one of the most debated issues concerning the topic. Graffiti inside an art exhibition is viewed as art, but once pulled outside, it's vandalism. Because of the street culture associated with graffiti, some artists may even think that "legalized" graffiti displayed inside buildings are snooty and ruin the rebellious aspect of it. It's important to teach kids why it's important to obtain permission, as well as the separation between law breaking, and simply expressing yourself. This is a link to a video filled with beautiful graffiti art/street art on legal walls:
   
   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/arts/design/graffiti-art-of-the-city-from-the-bronx-to-brooklyn.html?_r=0
   
   Reference
   Eldridge, L. (2013, September). An unselfish act: Graffiti in art education. Art Education.