Week 9 Visual Arts 2

Visual Arts 2: Child-based & Teacher-based

In this tutorial we learnt that assessment is “an ongoing process of gathering evidence of and making judgements about students’ needs, strengths and achievements. Assessment should not rely solely on quality of finished product, but pay particular attention at processes that combine to create that product” (Gibson, R., Art Tutorial 2). The attitudes and skills are important to the learning process and should be a focus of attention. That means teachers should not judge or measure students’ artwork in terms of right or wrong. This knowledge is very important and as preserved teachers, we should keep this idea in mind when we begin teaching in school and have assessments of children’s work. In my personal experience, when I was in Year 4, my teacher judged my drawing as ‘wrong’ and ‘disappointing’ because it was different from other students’ work. This experience had a large impact on my life and was one major reason made me did not want to continue further Art learning for the rest of my life. However now, this personal experience now become a power reminding me to be cautious in the way to approach assessment and encourage students enjoying the process of learning not focusing too much on the final results.

Psychological theories, much in vogue during the fifties and sixties, gave rise to arguments which made art, as a manifestation of the unconscious mind, a necessary process in achieving a balanced personality or in a more mechanistic sense an adjunct to the development of cognition (Messon, P., 1985; Heyforn, V.M., 1985, p.55). “Treasure boxes” as one way to process assessment, encourages students to decorate their own boxes, keep students’ artworks in their boxes. The idea is engaging students’ imagination of their private treasure boxes and hence, students would treat their artworks as pieces of treasure. I would like to do this activity in my future teaching since “treasure boxes” does not only fit a primary school setting, it also help students cherishing to their own work and Arts. Students could also display their treasure boxes to their parents so that parents could know what their children had gained from schools.

Then in the next session of the tutorial, we focused on wheels we had started working from last week. Ms. Gibson handed us a viewfinder, and let us select a section of our wheels drawing. Then we enlarge that section in a large piece of paper. Students used various techniques to do artworks with limited resources, such as scrunching paper, cutting paper into different shapes and sticking them into different parts of the drawing. This activity encouraged students in using their creativity and imagination and using limited resources to create pieces of artworks.

This is a picture of half-finished product.

Reference:

Heyforn, V.M. (1985). The Artistic Creativity in The Aesthetic in Education, Malcolm Ross (Ed.)Pergamon