This weeks Integrated Arts lecture focused on creativity, allowing me to reflect back on my own creative initiative. I believe that after the short time I have studied different art forms I have allowed myself to use a set of skills that I have not used in a long time and become a lot more creative in not only expressive arts but in other subject areas like literacy and maths. This can be supported through Csikszentmihalyi (1997) as “creativity involves changing a way of doing or looking at things”, and by doing art regularly it has changed my opinion, thinking and the way I feel about it. This has benefited me as a future teacher as I am much more likely to do art lessons now than before I started this module.
This was our last week in Visual Arts which I was disappointed about because I can see myself becoming much more confident within an art class. This highlighted to me that I need to remember this feeling so when I go to teach art in later lessons I can reflect back on feelings of enjoyment that I now associate with art. This week we tied in visible thinking to art by using emotional learning cards. This allowed us to describe what we saw within the image and answer different questions based on things like the mood, process and content of the image. I found this a fascinating task to do, especially because we had a set of questions to work from and allowed us to be creative with our answers. I think that doing a task like this would be effective as it ties in different curricular links as this task allowed us to “make connections between different areas of learning” (Scottish Government, 2008, p21), such as literacy and art. This task would allow pupils to explore their language skills around art, explaining vocabulary and communicating their thoughts and feelings of the artwork (Koster, 2011). However, I would be mindful on what images and questions I used depending on the pupils ability.
Music this week allowed us access to another resource site called ‘Charanga’. Personally I think that this is a really beneficial tool to use when teaching music as it provides lesson plans, sheet music, lyrics and terminology, making it very convenient for teachers. Often teachers can feel anxious when teaching expressive arts, such as music, and are unsure about how to teach it (Harris, 2016). I think that if more teachers were aware of this tool they would feel differently about teaching music as all the resources are provided. After exploring the website and taking part in some activities, such as listening and appraising, and warm up games involving clapping a long to ABBA, I could really see this as being a tool that I would like to invest in when I get my own class. The resources on Charanga range from primary 1 to primary 7 making it accessible for all stages within a primary school, however, there are different levels of difficulty so it allows the pupils to be challenged. In order to be successful, I would like to explore the Charanga website again in my own time in order to fully get to grips with what the website offers.
I understand that the workshops all linked into the topic of creativity as both the visual thinking and use of musical technology allowed us to be creative and imaginative within both expressive arts. In reflection, I now feel much more confident when using my art skills so hope to witness an art lesson when on placement. As for music, I feel that the resource tool Charanga is one that I will take with me into my future career.
References-
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention London: Harper&Row.
Harris, A. (2016) Creativity in Education. London: Palgrave.
Koster, J (2011) Growing Artists: Teaching the Arts to Young Children. 5th ed. California: Wadsworth Publishing
Scottish Government. (2008) Curriculum for excellence building the curriculum 3a framework for learning and teaching. [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/btc3.pdf [Accessed: 2 November 2019].
