The Art of Teaching.

This should be easy to write today, shouldn’t it? But I want it to read right… I want to contaminate you with enthusiasm…

Eight years I’ve been working with tablet technology. Eight years I’ve been waiting to get into a classroom where every child has been issued an iPad/Pod… Thank you to the staff of the school who I visited yesterday, to those of you who gave up your iPad for the day to make this possible for me and the 28 pupils I worked with.

A while back I submitted a proposal to my bosses that outlined and requested the implementation of a minimum of 15 iPads (one between two pupils) to add to the four I already have in my classroom. After careful consideration, my request was turned down; with the suggestion that I get some other departments on board before resubmitting for further consideration in the future. To “play the game”, I have been canvasing other departments, but the truth is that if I got them, I’d be loath to release them… I would use them every lesson…

Funding is an issue, but plenty of companies offer very competitive packages to encourage these proposals… yet evidence is also a key factor in many schools holding back on investing.

Build the evidence…

Opportunities to experience the new are sparse in this profession, yet our job is to offer fresh and supplementary encounters every lesson. When you get a chance for yourself, take it.

I don’t like taking money out of other Art departments. I think the money is there for resources to inspire kids and give that opportunity not exposed to before. For me to facilitate my day’s residency, my school requested that I should pay for the cover in my absence, so it was necessary for me to charge. And yet, I am a resource… a valuable resource… so it was nice that on my arrival I found the head teacher had changed the brief and requested that I worked with those who were underachieving or failing their GCSE, and had become willing to pay for my time out of his own budget. Thank you.

On our arrival, my brother introduced me to a few other people we bumped into along the corridor. “The Art room?” they asked as they tried to hide their expressions. “Good luck!”

28 GCSE pupils.

28 iPads.

6 hours.

I love fishing. Why don’t I do it more – get out there, away from familiar complacency? Different establishments? Different faces? Casting my hook and slowly reeling them in. Watching their body language and expressions change as their interest awakens. What I wonder, would education be like if teacher’s swopped schools more often… used their specialisms to inform and give pupils tasters… Ha! Ha!.. Maybe that’s it??? Artist teacher?

?

As the students filed in, they helped themselves to an iPad. Instantly they started caressing the screen, intuitively knowing how to turn them on and Face Time one another. The more inquisitive started opening apps – behaving as I had expected them to.

None owned an iPad. Three had iPod touches. All had mobile phones. Only one pupil had ever downloaded an Art app across all platforms, confirming the research from my Masters that it tends to be a far older age range that use iPads.

They wanted to play with the familiar rather than work. My question and answer intro went down like a lead balloon. They weren’t engaging with me. One female became spokesperson for the group – I suspect out of sympathy for my plight.

Give up? Run?

Secret weapon. Engage.

“I would like you to open up Photo Booth please and take a picture of yourself”.

Photo Booth if you didn’t know, has a number of different distortion filters that will morph your face like those magic mirrors you find in Fun Houses at the fair. It’s a great starter. Save the image and you’ve got something to work with. Kids love to laugh at one another…

…They bit,… The hook was loaded. The room became animated. I had their attention. They wanted to know more. They became hungry for information and listened attentively as I set out the plan for the day.

Ten or so apps and six hours later, the majority of pupils had produced at least fifteen useable images each to the astonishment of their teachers, in a variety of mediums.

I am out of words!

To be continued…

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I have a rare opportunity tomorrow to try out some of my ideas in an establishment where I’m not known; where the pupils are new to me – as is the idea of working with iPads. My brother is Deputy Head in a school the other side of the country to me, and his Art department is about to implement iPad technology into some of their lessons. I am going in as a visiting artist/teacher for the day, and will be working with 28, GCSE Art and Design pupils and the Art department staff, specifically on iPads… very exciting… this the first time I venture out to try and make use of the learning I did for my Masters… the first time I have done a residency outside of my own department…

I have planned well… I know what I’m going to do with them… stencil cuts… portraiture… artist links… spray paint… video… mirror boxing… projector-ing… apps-ing… and then freedom for development so that hopefully I learn something to…

…I know I will learn…

My intention is to connect conventional practice with contemporary technology in a bid to amalgamate the work so it is difficult to determine which is the hand of the machine or that of the artist. The iPads will be used as development tools, not canvas’, yet work will be initiated and originate from them also.

The last essay I wrote for my Masters discussed the integration of iPad technology into Art education, but I was criticized for not presenting enough of a difference between what I was proposing and work created within Photoshop. I presented no examples to my assessors and ultimately I concede that they were right in their summations. Here I have a possibility of correcting that view. I am so grateful to the department for inviting me; I suspect that I will probably instigate some form of excitement that may cause issues when I have left… some of what I’m going to do has been “tested” on my own pupils… but isn’t that the point? Should I not be going there to create an atmosphere for “more”? And if I can trigger that in the staff also… I’ll be well worth the money!

I will show examples of what is created…

Is this beginning to sound arrogant? I pray not. Its opportunity… excitement… privilege… occasion…

I shall report further…

I’m back to un-coding the code.

Maybe we shouldn’t be called teachers… Maybe we should be called examples – exemplar? Isn’t that just a better way to describe what we should be doing? Our job description?

I made a mistake with my rant last week. I stood in judgment where it was not my place to, but worse still, I talk of change, yet offer little of or any practical alternative. What kind of example is that?

I don’t know if I believe that pupils learn from us anymore. They carry search engines around with them that’ll dial up anything they happen to want to know… information technology – very cleverly named. I wonder who coined that expression. Yet, that’s precisely what it is… An information highway where increasingly users are born with an umbilical cord driving license…

Interesting turn of phrase there…

…users…

addicts..?

junkies..?

Examples should prescribe something different… shouldn’t they?

My most recent exemplar has been Marion Richardson. Introduced to me at university by another inspirational example, I became smitten with her pedagogy and simplistic teaching philosophy… though on initial first appraisal, it’s anything but simple.

Is the future buried in the past?

My work appears to be finding direction at last. Inspired at Christmas by again seeing Mike Osborn’s mathematical paintings that I mentioned previously, I’ve started pixelating and altering imagery. But its not so much that that I’m interested in… yes, I have developed a methodology using apps that create working drawings to be developed further, but it’s the notion that the single pixel is the key to what I seek…the code to image making… the code to construction that must inevitably be the code to teaching…

Marion Richardson, a great advocate of child Art, meticulously deconstructed the Art of the Art room for her pupils. She pixelated paint, colour, light, dark, imagination, drawing, memory, recall, amongst a host of others, fragmenting them down into simple explanations that fired and inspired her students. Everything was brought down to its simplest form…

De-coded…

In 1917 Marion Richardson wrote in a statement to accompany an exhibition at Dudley Girls’ High School by her pupils, “….drawing is a language, which exists to speak about things that cannot be expressed in words – emotional ideas about the beauty of the world, that come to us. It is these ideas and not literal and photographic representation of appearances that the artist seeks to express”…

…Inherent? Primal? Spiritual?

R. R. Tomlinson and Wilhelm Viola both describe Child Art as needing to be spontaneous, fresh and untroubled, not copied and imaginative, but also cautioned on the role of the educator and the influence that they can impose on their pupils, particularly in a historical context where students were taught by trained artists who had themselves been educated in similar fashion without the freedom of expression or creativity.

So why not just give pupils the building blocks? What would there work look like if we did that – gave them starting points to run with? What are the building blocks? What work must I make as exemplar’s for this theory?

I know what I’m doing at last…

…he thinks..!

If this is about convincing a skeptical government about the worthiness of our subject then lets match their ideas with opportunities they cannot ignore. If they remain hell-bent on pushing through reform, then lets make the reform reflect the ambition of our pupils and plug into a future deserving of change.

I suspect in the not to distant future, the majority of institutions will be working with tablet technology. The technological changes already in my lifetime have been phenomenal. When I started school computers didn’t exist… I’m not that old…

I hear commentator after commentator bemoaning the lack of programmers. A further marriage of the Arts with technology could give us a pivotal life jacket with those who would witness the demise of our cultural heritage… as a starting point.

Digits, letters, atoms, numbers, signs… aren’t these all pixels? The educational building blocks? Add them together; you create something new… words, sentences, structures, solutions, equations.

I have my starting point…

I apologize to any of you who read this and aren’t involved in education, but I really need to rant today! I haven’t blogged twice in a week before, but with so much occupying my head, unless I get it out, the stuff I really want to work on will get contaminated and sidetracked…

I received an article yesterday evening that epitomizes what’s wrong with education today.

http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=6428

Now I know its not my place to comment on what happens in other institutions, but with the government proposing performance related pay, I think the situation reported in this article may well give us a spyglass into the future. In schools such as mine, where pupils are free to study whichever GCSE’s they wish, despite ability, heads will have the power to get rid of teachers who don’t subscribe to the exam factory philosophy of this government, merely because their results are affected by pupils who will never have the ability to attain those top grades. Many of my pupils take art further simply because they enjoy the subject or because they enjoy making or because it gives them an escape from the harsh realities of the rest of their education. They can express themselves freely under the mantle of “artistic license”, and comment on things that really interest and inspire them. Ability is secondary alongside the phrase; “one mans masterpiece is another mans rubbish”. But ultimately, unless other practitioners who aren’t involved in education do participate in this debate, the Arts are at serious risk of being forgotten at a stage where introductions to the new are critical.

In a brief interview with John Wilson on “Front Row” (BBC Radio 4) last night, Dame Liz Forgan commented on her final speech as Chair of the Arts Council England at the British Museum on Tuesday evening, and her thoughts on Michael Gove. She stated that as a cultured man she couldn’t understand why he was “robbing a generation of their birthright” by leaving out culture – the Arts, from the EBacc.

http://new.a-n.co.uk/news/single/ace-chair-defends-arms-length-and-attacks-gove

But why then the EBacc? Successive generations have had their education messed with. Seldom in the past thirty years has a cohort finished the curriculum it started at the beginning of their education, with successive governments finding fault with current pedagogy and increasingly blaming teachers. If it is teachers at fault, why keep reforming the syllabus? Why not invest in the profession that is best qualified to deliver the standards they claim are lacking? You can’t have it both ways, surely?

And teachers aren’t blameless either, are they? I might alienate those whose support I seek, yet many of those who know me keep telling me I might be committing professional suicide by writing this blog! Why am I brave? Am I not entitled to my thoughts – as long as I don’t pass them on to my pupils? Can I not advocate change? It surprises me of my colleague’s silence. Does the profession operate under an umbrella of fear or am I foolish to publicly air my views?

We need to add more voices to the debate and support the belief that Dame Liz Forgan advances… “our first encounter of art should be at school”… Art educators, practitioners, curators, performers, etc. All need to unite and roar out their discontent. All need to add their voices and rally around culture… it is our culture to implement and define change…

Aaah..! That feels better. Now for some work…

Sorry!

I have so much to write this week; so many different themes I want to write on that there is a distinct possibility that this could all end up muddled and confused… I’m back at school and the analytical assassin creeps back in to replace or embrace with the creative…

…more confused than usual.

My good friend Elena Thomas sent me a link earlier this week from the NSEAD Facebook page. Written by the head teacher of Chiswick School in response to some of the current educational changes taking place, my ego was pointed in the direction of his fourth paragraph where he uses the term “the art of teaching”… the title of my blog… my term…

http://www.chiswickschool.org/news/?pid=3&nid=2&storyid=299

… really set my head off… people are coining my phrase… they must be reading me… yea! Fame!

Pah! Like!

It strikes me as a no-nonsense, honest article. It’s nice to finally hear others – particularly a head, commenting to parents and advocating change. Good stuff.

Next, I was pointed in the direction of an article that appeared in last Sundays Sun newspaper – oh no! I hear you cry… the Sun..! No, no, no… I can’t ignore a tabloid that reaches so many of the people that I also want to reach… they read it and can be influenced by what is written in it, whether it be based on fiction or truth… Can I afford to be snobbish? I’m sure similar articles would have appeared in far more “respectable” journals over the course of the week, but in my hectic schedule I just haven’t had them pointed out to me…

“PUPIL’S TAUGHT BY QUACK SIRS” screams out the headline. “Unqualified teachers educate 1000s”.

I have a friend who is a supply teacher. Over the past few years he has found it increasingly difficult to get supply work. He suggests that cover supervisors, student teachers, classroom assistants and “outside” specialists are to blame for this; echoing the Sun article. He regularly writes to his MP asking for clarification on the governments stand on this, and as yet has failed to receive a satisfactory explanation. What does that do to my professional qualification? What does this do for the art of teaching?

I need some help with my blog please. I am becoming acutely aware that what I write about here is only about my opinions and for the most, my work. Previously I wrote about wanting to curate an exhibition of exemplars created by Art teachers. In my search for these, and to help develop and improve my own teaching, I am seeking examples that you might like shown and would be happy for me and others to discuss on this blog. As part of my research into art practices, I am interested in collating a collection of work that can paint a true, representative picture of the art of teaching. It is the imagery that I seek, and knowing the little time we teachers have, explanations of the work would be optional. If you would like to help with this, please email images to [email protected] which is linked to my website where I will hopefully host the initial showing of the work. I would be most grateful for your participation.

In my own search for exemplars I have been developing a technique that uses a variety of apps on my iPad’s to manipulate and restructure an original image either drawn, made or painted by myself. I have long believed that the future of education lies in tablet technology alongside more conventional yet altered forms of teaching. An increasing number of schools now are introducing this expertise across their sites to every pupil, and unless Art starts to incorporate it into its own lessons, we will surely just give the government a further excuse to downgrade our importance to the curriculum.

As the technique develops, pixilation manipulation keeps bringing me back to the primal… the inherent that I see in tribal imagery… that leaves me wondering if conceivably our ancestors hold all the answers? Our future lies in our past? Is the art of teaching buried somewhere within there..?

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