Evocative Object -Session 3

In today’s session we continued with our work from the previous weeks on our evocative object. I am starting to feel more comfortable with the expressive arts and would feel more confident in taking a lesson using the methods over the last three weeks. This week I was specifically working on expanding my concrete poetry around the object – the watch, and making it more meaningful and personal to me. Within this session I spent a lot of time thinking of words that expressed how I felt about my evocative object of my gran’s watch: love, happy memories, goodbye, laughing, hugging, strong, heart-broken, best friend, gran, fuzzy feelings. As discussed last week in the concrete poems I had to think about how I was going to portray these special words on paper. I decided to use the colours red and green. Red to put the words that were happy and positive to remind me of the love I felt and green for the words that were negative and emotive of sadness.  As Aube and Perloff (2017) states that concrete poems can be objects made up of a variety of colours, letters and words and the design and therefore meaning of the poem plays a major role within the space. This is portrayed as can be seen below in my concrete poetry picture. I have used a variety of colours, letters, words, shape and design.

Within the classroom, I could see many opportunities where I would be able to use the concrete poetry pictures. It would be a good starting point for creativity in the lesson. Within these types of lessons, teachers will have ideas in their mind as to what is important and worthwhile for their pupils to achieve. However QCA (2004) suggests that the pupils’ ideas may be different from that of the teachers and therefore a sharing of ideas is crucially important and this will let the teacher see what the pupils deem to be of significance thus taking on the direction of the children. The teacher is the individual that the pupils will go to when they have questions, queries, want to solve problems and have ideas that they want to develop but are unsure of. The challenge for the teacher will be to make sure the pupils’ ideas are valued and at the same time to encourage creativity in doing this (ibid,).

Photo Essays

This week we also briefly discussed photo essays. This is where photographs are used, sometimes with a little  text (not always ), to explain the picture and the photographs are all related, ‘each picture has an interrelationship with the others.’ Moran (1974, p.14-15) The photographs are interpreted by their relationship with each other and thus meaning to the photographic essay should be given. A lot of time and thinking needs to go in to how the pictures can be related together to produce a coherent photo essay. On placement I have seen the children taking photographs with the cameras and the iPads and I think a photo essay would provide purpose and meaning for the children. It could easily be related to the interdisciplinary learning that the children are currently working on. Furthermore it could be used as a stand alone lesson on facial expressions, tartans and healthy foods to mention a few. All children would feel included as using the cameras or iPads is an inclusive activity and not like some areas within maths or language that the children lack confidence with and feel they cannot do.

The reading for this week’s seminar was from ‘You’ve Just Got to Learn How to See’: Curriculum Subjects, Young People and Schooled Engagement by Kress. Kress (p.8) states, as educators we should be providing a curriculum with more communication in it. Kress believes within each subject there is a different type of learning happening and we as teachers have to take this on board when we are teaching and preparing lessons that the learning  becomes relevant to the children and useful for them when they leave school to enhance  life long learning. However, Kress feels that the education system has an ‘inability to understand and then to make a link between the school and the society.’ We therefore as educators need to make a difference. One way Kruss suggests is teachers of different subjects  coming together and discussing issues and methods to have a more coherent and communicative education.

References

Aube, C and Perloff, N (2017) What Is Concrete Poetry?[Online] Available Blog posthttp://blogs.getty.edu/iris/what-is-concrete-poetry/ [Accessed 21 January 2018]

Kress , G (2001) ‘You’ve Just Got to Learn How to See’: Curriculum Subjects, Young People and Schooled Engagement with the World. London : University of London

QCA. (2004) Creativity: Find it, Promote it. London: QCA Publications.