Week 2

This week’s integrated arts workshops were practical and had us doing two very different activities. During the lecture today we looked at how we can read extracts and visualise them to see images. We read the article and illustrated the imagery and any other visualisations we had when reading . This exercise was challenging as the text was of a high level of academics but it was clear to see how this could be done within the classroom with an easier piece of text and what the children could learn from this. This task could be done with books or even song lyrics printed. It taught me that art can be taught through literacy and literacy can provide inspiration for art. This is an important realisation as many lessons can stem from this and could even be a topic in art for a number of lessons. I enjoyed this task as it was not something I had ever done before and was a valuable learning experience.

Being inspired wasn’t just the focus in the first lecture, both the art and drama workshops that followed also had this at the center. During art, we used black ink and black pens along with our hands and fingers to make marks on paper.

We then looked at these marks and focused in on what we saw, from there we added details with pen to create the artwork. This was influenced by the third lesson that the arts teach by Elliot Eisner (2002), in which he says that children see and interpret arts in different ways and can have multiple perspectives on one piece of art.  This exercise made me see how this lesson comes into play when completing a piece of art. This task, although messy, could easily be completed in primary schools as long as precautions were taken regarding washing hands afterwards and protecting uniforms with aprons.  Reflecting on this task today, it has changed by view of art always being a set task to end with a classroom full of very similar art pieces. Today, I realised that art is unpredictable even with everyone following the same brief. No two sheets of  paper after the workshop today looked the same as everyone made their own marks and took different inspirations from each, even though the whole section used the same few resources

After the drama workshop today I am already seeing improvements in my confidence when performing. I hope this same development of confidence would be present in my pupils when continuing drama lessons in school.

The workshops and and lectures today taught me the importance of looking at the work in front of me and taking creative inspirations to create new pieces of art which is something I hope to teach my class and allow them to experience this in the expressive arts.

Eisner, E. (2002) The Arts and the Creation of Mind. Conneticut: Yale University Press.

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