notes/NOTES/notes

“We the people. It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the 17th of September in 1787, I was not included in that ‘we the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in 'we the people.’ Today I am an inquisitor." 

A few weeks back, we had a chance to hear a presentation by the creator of the well-known Spiral Workshop from the University of Illinois Chicago.  Her name: Olivia Gude.  Her initials: OMG.  She is not far off from the OMG acronym and is very much the guru of holistic art education practices in USA.  Spiral Workshop, led by student teachers in art education, offers weekend classes every autumn to 100 teen artists from the Chicago area.  Lesson plans from Spiral Workshop can be found here and here - we oh, so love that the aim of this exploratory model of art teaching is open to sharing their ideas in full on the www.  PDFs and supporting worksheets are also available on these websites.  

A bit more about Spiral:

Spiral Workshop is a place in which teen artists and emerging art teachers work together to envision and create new styles of art education–an education that is rooted in the stories and concerns of the students and their communities through connecting the practices of contemporary artmaking with the practices of contemporary pedagogy.

At Spiral Workshop we consider four components when designing a project. Each project should (1) deal with an issue of developmental importance to the students, (2) be based on a contemporary social theme, (3) include examples of past and recent artworks which have explored these themes, and (4) teach a method (conceptual and/or technical) for constructing works of art.

Spiral Workshop creates curriculum that encourages students to investigate questions relating visual and social phenomena. Many interesting art projects like much interesting contemporary art encourages the reconsideration of our notions of “the real,” “the natural,” and “the normal”–seeing how these are socially constructed through complex layerings of meanings and metaphors.

This comic comes to us from classmate Amethyst.

Sincerely,