ArtEd 478 ch 4 ideas

Art History: I would make it fun through creating projects where the students explored the history instead of me lecturing about it. I would need to provide resources, either from my collection or from the school library, but I would provide books for the students and then divide them into groups of two or three. They would choose either an artist or a time period and every group would have to sign up for something different. Then they would have time to create some representation, whether it's a collage, painting, or they dress up as the artist. But they wouldn’t be allowed to do a powerpoint presentation. All the groups would do a short presentation to the class at the end of the assignment. Each group would need to answer the question, “why is this time period/artist important?” in the presentation.If I felt that there were any gaps that needed to be covered I would then go over those on a later date.

I would also try to relate students work to contemporary or past artists. I have had several professors do this and I have found it useful in helping me create new ideas and feel like I’m making something worthwhile. It might be something as simple as their color scheme or materials, but this would be another way I could expose the students to more artists. I would simply show them work by the artist I am comparing their work to and encourage them to explore the artist’s work.

Criticism: I would want to find some kind of video clip to help explain what art criticism is. We would talk about criticism until I felt the students had at least a basic understanding and then I would show art that I felt the students would be interested in. This would most likely vary from year to year, but I would include work by artists like Jason deCaries Taylor, Damien Hurst, or Frank Nitsche. We would then discuss the piece and attempt to describe it as if we were art critics. I wouldn’t spend very long doing this in one setting, but every time I introduced a new artists or artwork I would have the class describe it back to me to practice art criticism.

Aesthetics: I would talk about aesthetics at the same time as criticism. I would explain the difference between the two. I would show art (at a different time than during our criticism discussion) and ask if the students felt it was art, and then why or why not. And then I would ask if it was good art, and why/why not. I would do an interchange between asking students about criticism and aesthetics when we discussed artworks.