Thursday 4 December 2014

9SK Printmaking - being resilient about our mistakes

So, Art students are shocking for this; make a mistake once, HATE the whole page, screw the page up, hide it from the teacher. Deny they have learn't anything, try again, miniscule mistake no one else can see, screw it up AGAIN, 25 minutes later, it's like they have spent half a lesson doing nothing...except they haven't. When you ask casually, they "can't do it, its way too hard..." and your help is apparently not going to remedy this, unless of course you feel like completing the work for them, so that it looks 'perfect'.

Our values are Commitment, Achievement, Resilience and Respect.

Respect is easy to teach, achievement is generally an outcome and you can get there, commitment depends on the context as to how hard it can be to explicitly manage, resilience is the hardest; that pushing past a lack of confidence.

Wednesday - we have run out of time to finish this unit the way I would like to - our final resolution is a mono-print as opposed to a woodcut print. Students have worked through a process to achieve a stylised form, learning from two examples and comparing them - Art Nouveau and Kowhaiwhai. They have lovely drawings. The rule for this lesson, was everything they stuffed up we kept. Everything they got right we kept. The expectation was that they HAD to stuff it up at least twice, and they had to try and rework a 'mistake' to make something interesting from it.

Below are the examples from this class

We will complete this tomorrow, with the students who don't have their ISLA reward. 

2 comments:

  1. This is so right, helping kids understand that failures and errors are ways towards getting things right and as such could be regarded as not being failures and errors at all.

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  2. You notice that lots were still screwed up and rescued from the rubbish? That was even after my explicit instruction to not do that... :-)

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