Distance Art Ed/Studio

Title: MAKING SENSE OF MEDIA: developing questions, exploring media and documenting observations through the visual journal.

Presentation Proposal Preview:  

The purpose of this workshop is to help teachers decode media practice through student exploration and to provide a resource for them to document their experiences, make notes about their learning and strategize future creative work.

Session Description:

Introducing the visual journal as a useful tool to document student work and understanding is where this begins. The presentation will include student examples like media practice, student reflection, and more.  We will explain how this same tool, when aligned with a general scientific methodology, further enhances student understanding of media and the creative process. By leading students through media practice with a sense of purpose outlined in the scientific method, the regular archive of student work accumulated in the visual journal becomes alive. It becomes an active body of knowledge that informs each student’s future creative choices. In this practice, learners become the critical thinkers in their creative endeavors.

The two presenters will show visual examples of the steps in the scientific method. They will align each level with a lesson in media exploration which highlights how this methodology leads to student and teacher practice and organizes their learning.

Challenging student decision-making for a purpose rather than relying on the project builds a broader understanding of media and teaches students that a better understanding of how to use media will qualitatively impact the creative projects they choose in the future. This work generates artifacts for an archive of practice and reflection supported by practice-based evidence and allows students to build a rich understanding of media options. This field guide as a visual journal, in turn, makes them better-informed artists and will enable learners to take greater ownership of their work. Since student media exploration is not random interaction with materials, this approach encourages students to learn about rigorous decision-making built by their experimenting with media.

Providing a structure for media exploration allows ample opportunity for “teachable moments” that organize students experiences into a bank of knowledge and expertise that increasingly informs their creative choices in the future. This allows the teacher a tool for leading students through media use without feeling they have to stick with a  particular project. In essence, it helps students guide themselves to become independent, well-informed and confident artists.

Forming a plan to use a medium to create a planned visual end allows students to develop a more in-depth understanding of that medium. Thus helping students to align their knowledge generation, knowledge of personal growth in their practice, and linear creative thinking skills all help to build confidence in students to take chances and draw on previous experiences when planning new work and generating ideas.

Track:  Secondary Track 

Co-presenters: Samuel Peck & Michael Dodson  

Presentation Format: Instructional Practices

 Planning conference proposals for next year and getting my first three finished. I’m converting papers from last semesters classes with a few changes here and there to get them ready for submission to publications. I have some ideas about how to do this, but it will take some concentrated work this summer.  A National Science Foundation Application may be in my future as well, given some in-depth time and concentration. My love of procrastination and multitasking myself may need to come to an end if I am to accomplish half of these and the exhibition in Rhode Island at the URI Providence campus in July. 

Title: Creating community change through collaborative sketchbook practices

Session Description:

Are you interested in getting to know another artist/educator and starting a dialogical exploration in images and words? Do you need some inspiration and motivation to engage in your own studio practice on a more consistent basis?  Do you just need to get out of your art making rut? Then this is the presentation for you!

As part of the international art making exchange project known as tet[R]ad: Draw & Play Here, this presentation will invite attendees to become part of the growing and evolving network of artistic accomplices who make, collaborate and share their studio practice research. This workshop will give an opportunity to begin an exchange with an artistic accomplice and provide a model to use as an example of where such a practice can lead.

Title: Creating community through collaborative practices.

Listen to the experiences of five artist educators and the collaborative artistic, teaching, and learning practices they use in their professional lives whether as artists, educators, or scholars. Are you interested in getting to know another artist/educator and starting a dialogical exploration in images and words? Do you need some inspiration and motivation to engage in your studio practice on a more consistent basis?  Do you just need to get out of your art making rut? Then this is the presentation for you!

This panel presentation will discuss the growing and evolving network of artists who make, collaborate, and share their studio practice research. This presentation will expose attendees to the opportunities involved through collaboration and correspondence and in doing so provide multiple models to use as examples of where concerted practices can lead.

Attendees will learn about the history of collaborative correspondence art, the theories surrounding acts of exchange, and the power of building your creative community. Through the combined 100 years of experience of five artist-educator panelists we will discuss how art-based research can lead practitioners and students to robust learning, making, and teaching practices.

Panelists will demonstrate that no matter what position you hold in art education, an ongoing commitment to searching for persistent engagement develops collaboration. These possibilities may never be accomplished without a continuing commitment to searching for creators with whom to collaborate.  Finally, the panelists will demonstrate how collaboration in art education through it's underlying community building philosophy has evolved into garnering access for artist residencies at galleries, institutions, and schools. Collaborative practice is a movement that continues to reinvent itself as it integrates more and different creative energy and expands to new people and places.

Track:  Community Caucus 2019

Presentation Description:  This hands-on workshop invites participation and discusses the evolution of the international visual journal exchange project, tet[R]ad: Draw & Play Here and proposes the practice-based becoming of educator-artist-researchers.

Co-presenters:

Mr. David Modler    

Mr. Michael Dodson

Mr. Michael Bell

Mr. Eric Scott

Presentation Format: FLASH Learning. Fast-paced sessions that introduce varying viewpoints and experiences related to a general topic. 2 - 5 speakers present on the same topic using a strict format that includes ten minutes to present each perspective/experience using ten PowerPoint slides.

Time: 50 minutes. 

Although I feel like I lost an opportunity to work with my group by bumbling communication with them while I had my migraine last weekend, I do think that the thinking that this course provided me with around how to do and construct arts education via correspondence or online is invaluable. 

A pedagogical tool, a vehicle for conceptual thought, a space for documentation of learning, an art studio that can travel with you anywhere. Planes-Trains-Automobiles hold no restrictions on this form. For some like myself, it has become its own media like painting, drawing, sculpture, fabric arts, papermaking, collage, installation ceramics, or architecture. This object can act as a space in its unique empty page format to allow for the building of a history between the two artists that work in a collaborative sketchbook for distance education or participatory arts-based research. The unique empty page format allows for the artist or researcher involved in it to build their own architecture within the book rather than have the space constructed by someone else, as a lined sketchbook does either with a grid or the unwritten rules of the blue-lined notebook page. Standards such as don’t write left of the red line, don’t write past the red line that you can see on the backside of the page, don’t write, unless it’s your title, name or page number in the blank space above the page and always write from the left to the (w)ri(te)ght. This researcher doesn’t claim to be the first to have these ideas that buck the traditions of art education and the art world itself, many before me have, and I include a small sampling of those here below. 

Sketchbook Skool is a collection of artists, art-educators, teaching-artists who work within the sketchbook or visual journal and work together to build the scope and stretch of distance education using Youtube as the vehicle for their teaching practice and place of learning.

Sketchbook Skool: What is Sketchbook Skool?

https://youtu.be/-PHoqvyP0Cg

One of the many artists whose work with Sketchbook Skool I am more familiar with is Danny Gregory,

He wrote a book that I have found valuable multiple times for myself many of my students. It includes brief examples of sketchbooks from many artists from around the world, their processes, and thoughts.

https://vimeo.com/5259158

As I dig around for resources to better understand the history of distance education in my context or field. I thought I would share them here to help build the conversation for correspondence education. Here I have shared a few links about the history of mail art, one of the more prominent artists in the movement, Ray Johnson and how the interaction between artists has been something like a conversation that helps spur us along in our practices as artist, educators, and researchers. Documentation of the cross-pollination and the construction of a new space for artistic acts to exist in small scale. 

“The arts can tap into issues that are otherwise out of reach and reach people in meaningful ways. This realization brought me to arts-based research (ABR). Arts-based research is an emergent paradigm whereby researchers across the disciplines adapt the tenets of the creative arts in their social research projects. Arts-based research, a term first coined by Eliot Eisner at Stanford University in the early 90s, is based on the assumption that art can teach us in ways that other forms cannot. Scholars can take interview or survey research, for instance, and represent it through art. I’ve written two novels based on sociological interview research. Sometimes researchers use the arts during data collection, involving research participants in the art-making process, such as drawing their response to a prompt rather than speaking.” - Patricia Leavy (2014)

Realizing with this read that some of the studies I have already done and am working on are about correspondence/Mail art through participatory arts-based narrative research. Exciting to open this researchers eyes to it!

Reading through the texts Arts-Research-Education Edited by Alexandra Lasczik Cutcher and Linda Knight and Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice Edited by Melissa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund (second edition) in order to find some work that could pertain to distance education and crosses over to arts-based distance education. Thus far, the closest thing I have found is participatory research where the participants have as much voice as the researcher. I’m also thinking about other forms of correspondence art or research as possible of the rails methods of arts-based research.

Side note - If you are a researcher or artist and haven’t listened to Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” listen to it, as a research just mentally shift to understand art as research (or substitute if incapable) and it all makes way more sense.

What would you say is the most important conclusion that can be drawn from research about distance learning in general?

Distance education works! Students learn as much and as efficiently as they do in person face-to-face formats. As an art educator, studio art course models in distance education present a variety of challenges. Curiosity strikes this researcher about where to look for models of studio art courses that work in classes such as sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and painting. In the experiences that this researcher knows being present with the work of students is invaluable and questions continue about how to level the perception playing field for example, how settings for monitors and photographic equipment would have to be equivalent to overcome some of these problems. These questions are questions into personal curiosities around how to solve for these models in future methods courses for art educators and studio artists at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Based on the research report or article you chose to read, what does research in distance education suggest about its impacts or implications in your educational context or the one you decided to learn about?

The research report I chose to read, Integrating Data Mining in Program Evaluation of K-12 Online Education (Hung, Hsu, & Rice, 2012), suggests that there is more for educators to learn about our students by mining the data that is provided by students in many educational contexts. As a future online administrator, the objectives for the framework to "enhance the decision processes in higher learning institutions" provide me with the hope and imagination surrounding an online studio art or art education program can be evaluated to best provide for student needs. The research article had this researcher excited and imagining ways methods courses could be offered to students based on need and curiosity as would be an expected objective of a teacher education program.  Finding the most efficient and effective way to demonstrate student understanding while helping to boost student involvement in the online application. A question also persists, notice there are a higher number of female students passing, according to the findings. Upon closer inspection, there is a discrepancy of 1000 more female students in the difference between cluster 5 and 6. I was not sure if this was due to the total number of females who achieved that grade in the possible dataset or the total collected? In we research, we assume the first answer because one tends to believe these researchers to be ethical but we always have nagging doubts, hence the question.

UNESCO contends that open and distance learning is one of the fastest growing fields of education and is significantly contributing to social and economic development worldwide. In what ways?

When rural settings can provide education to students where previously this was not possible or only possible at great cost. The economic impact is due to now those communities have a better-educated workforce which can contribute back into the economy of the nation, state, region, and community in which they live. This will in turn help with trade and relations between peoples and how to uplift each other in other ways that benefit multiple groups of people. If the rural Chinese are farming a product that the Mongolians need and they are able to communicate that need due to language education then trade (economic interests) increase along with social understanding.

If you had to choose one specific technology that you believe holds the most significant potential to enhance distance learning but is not yet being used to its fullest advantage, what would it be and why? Moreover, "the internet" doesn't count for this answer. Get specific. Alternatively, get creative.