Our  written assignment was the focus of today’s lecture, looking at how the assignment could be broken down into sections and looking at certain topics within these sections. By doing this, it should make the writing of the assignment easier and less complicated as we know what is required in each part.

We have to choose 2 of the arts we feel we have learned the most from and from the inputs we have had so far I think music will be one of the art forms I choose.  It is one of the subjects I have the least knowledge about and feel as though I have gained a lot of valuable information about the curricular area, like how music can enhance wider skills to enable children to fulfil the four capacities. Being creative can support a wide range of tasks, including environmentally, culturally and within the community (Education Scotland, 2013).

Our music workshop was centred around rhythm and pulse. Chanting and marching  a song to a steady beat was the first part of the session,

“Pulse is a steady beat ,                                                                                              You can feel it in your feet,                                                                                   Keep it steady, keep in time,                                                                                Let’s sing this song another time!”.

By explaining what pulse is and giving children real life references, for example, our heartbeat is a steady pulse. Then allowing them to sing and march would cement their understanding of the concept.

We also looked and performed presentations about rhythm. We participated in doing some drumming whilst looking at some presentations that were focused on both first and second level outcomes.

Printing was the subject of today’s visual arts session, working in the style of Bob and Roberta Smith.

As above, we created our own slogans and used highly contrasting colours to create a high impact that gives children agency and the freedom to express themselves.

Reference List

Education Scotland (2013) Creativity 3-18 Curriculum Impact Report. [Online] Available : http://moodle.uws.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/532076/mod_resource/content/2/Creativity3to18.pdf [Accessed: 19th October 2019].

Music is an extremely important subject within the curriculum. It can help increase spatial awareness, with experiments such as the Mozart effect, which has found that spacial tasks, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle were completed quicker after listening to classical music (Telegraph Reporter, 2015).

Music is also an inclusive subject that can enhance wider skills, such as improving confidence and social skills by singing in a choir or playing in an orchestra.

Having an awareness of music by discussing music and realising that everyone has different musical tastes and thoughts on music is extremely beneficial to both us as teachers and pupils alike. We all have our own likes and dislikes, for example, my favourite kind of music is pop punk, I am not too keen on heavy metal.

We were able to prove this theory within the music workshop with listening to five pieces of music and we had to write down one word about how it made us feel. There were many different answers around the room and yet we had all listened to the same piece of music. We learned that there is no right or wrong answer.

By having this appreciation of music ourselves, we can instil this within our pupils and encourage them to become successful learners, effective contributors, confident individuals and responsible citizens. The Greenmill String Project is a great example of a program within Ayrshire that allows children to develop the skills needed to attain the attributes above.

When teachers were interviewed, they stated that “Some are looked-after or accommodated children. This project engages all of them. That has a spin- off into the classroom. They’re more engaged there too. They have a confidence that suddenly they’re good at something.” ( TES, 2011).

In our music workshop, we looked at using music to inspire us to think creatively through literacy. There do seem to be benefits for engaging in musical activities in relation to reading beyond
those associated with language development (Hallam, 2010, p42). We firstly listened to a piece of music and we were then asked to create a storyboard based upon what we heard. There were many different interpretations around room, but our group decided to base ours on a man being chased by a bee. This activity can be taught to all ages and modified to suit each level. For example, if the activity was being taught to infants, you could ask them to draw a picture of what they hear using music as the stimulus.

Music can allow us to find pathways to other curricular areas. We would not get away with not teaching maths, so we shouldn’t not teach music!

Reference List

Hallam, S. (2010) The Power of Music pp 40-47 [Online] Available: http://www.dickhallam.co.uk/resources/The%20Power%20of%20Music%202014.pdf [Accessed: 9 October 2019]

Telegraph Reporter (2015) ‘Mozart effect’: can classical music really make your baby smarter? The Telegraph. [Online] 28 March, non-paginated. Available: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/children/11500314/Mozart-effect-can-classical-music-really-make-your-baby-smarter.html [Accessed: 9 October 2019].

TES (2011) Strings Attached [Online] Available: https://www.tes.com/news/strings-attached-0

I have decided to incorporate a video blog for this weeks reflection please find the video below.

Room 13 is an arts initiative that began in Fort William in 1994. The children of Caol Primary School were asked to produce words, letters and number made out of clay and they would later take pictures of them.  Unfortunately, I was not able copy in the photograph from the presentation.

The pupils felt that school, in particular Art, was too easy and adverse to difficulty and so Room 13 was created. By taking the school photographs, this allowed the funds to be kept in house.

They have since transformed into a global uprising of creative an entrepreneurial children who are responsible for growing an international network of student-organised art studios (Gibb, 2012).

As teachers, we can gain encouragement from Room 13’s theories and pedagogies. As currently, the methods utilized for teaching the arts are becoming increasingly formulated and strategic, which is constricting creativity (Gibb, 2012). Compliance to a set of ‘past practices’ and ‘orthodoxies’ (Atkinson, 2005, Hickman, 2005) that privileges technical skills and teacher-led pedagogies at the expense of creativity and more pupil-led pedagogy which privileges free expressive modes of thinking and making (McAuliffe, 2013).

Adopting Room 13’s pedagogy that we learned about in our lecture within our workshop, enabled us to see the outcome that when you allow choice, you get individuality.

We were able to test this theory within our visual arts workshop by having Diarmuid ask us create a paintbrush out of materials such as witties, wool and wire. He then described a picture to us and we had to create our own painting using his description only using the primary colours.

Being able to link theory and practice about arts education has been valuable for enhancing my skills , as before this module when teaching I would have expected children to most likely copy either painting or pictures and the pupils will have ended up with the same result (see picture below). It is not a skill I am comfortable with yet, but hope to continue to develop this throughout the module.

We were also allowed to utilize choice in our drama workshop. We were focusing on using drama as an integrated approach to topic work, mostly focusing on history and controversy. By first discussing topics and looking at images relating to them, such as, the Me Too movement and WW2, allowed us to get into the mind frame of how certain characters may have been feeling.

I found this helpful as the drama conventions, (mime, monologue, voices in the head and slow motion) this week were quite difficult. In groups, we created role plays based on the two topics mentioned above adopting different conventions. Acting out these topics, I felt as though I was being disrespectful. Although, I do understand the need to teach children about these past and present issues and drama can be a good way to implement it.

Reference List

Gibb, C. (2012) Room 13: The Movement and International Network. International Journal of Art & Design Education. [online] Vol 31.3, p237. Available: http://www.nsead.org/publications/ijadearticle.aspx?id=809 [Accessed: 26th September 2019].

McAuliffe, D (2013) Art and Design Education. In T. Bryce and W. Humes (et al eds.) Scottish Education (4th Edition): Referendum, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

What does thinking look like? By taking the written word and drawing out the metaphors within it allows visual thinking to take place. Visual thinking allows pupils to develop the way in which they think and to help them understand. During today’s lecture, we were each given a page of an academic article and used pictures and colour to pull out metaphors within the paper. I felt this technique helped aid my own understanding of the paper more clearly than if I was just reading it.  See my example below.

Using this approach can help raise attainment levels with programmes, such as Making Thinking Visible being rolled out across Scotland. This programme is mainly aimed at the East Ayrshire sector, as despite money being poured into helping raise levels of literacy and numeracy, it still has the lowest levels of these subjects in the United Kingdom. MTV is focused on helping pupils develop their higher order thinking skills and unite these alongside the learning of each subject (Stewart, 2019).

During our workshops, the theme running through each of the parts was the question of what does thinking look like ? We were able to explore this concept in visual arts by making prints of parts of our hands, like our fingertips to create prints. We twisted and turned the pages to see what images we could see inside these prints and used a black biro pen to enhance them and bring the image to life.

Make a mark and see where it takes you (Reynolds, 2003). By using visual thinking, we were able to use our imaginations and draw what we saw rather than writing it.

Drama uses the concept of visual thinking through giving pupils a scenario and asking them to act out what they think would happen in the situation rather than writing it down. Our workshop today consisted of us using this idea, based around the painting ‘ Windows in the West’ by Avril Paton.

We had to visualise that we lived in this tenement building and had to perform different dramas each time using a different drama convention. This week we focused on still image, flash forward, flashback and thought tracking. Although we focused on mostly upbeat scenarios, we have to be careful as we cannot use drama as way to solve the worlds problems.

Reference List

Reynolds, P. H. (2003) The Dot. Candlewick Press

Stewart, R. (2019). Making Thinking Visible

In order to be successful within the arts, there has to be a tolerance for mess and ambiguity. We do not know where we will finish or where creativity will lead us. Creativity is not a series of direct actions, in which we have all the capabilities needed before we start (Sir Ken Robinson, 2015).

Art was introduced into education to prepare people for the work place to increase hand-eye coordination and build creativity skills. He is also able to support this statement by expressing that , ” Creativity is possible in all areas of human life, in science, the arts, mathematics, technology, cuisine, teaching, politics, business, you name it.” (Sir Ken Robinson, 2015, non-paginated).

During our first workshop for visual arts, we explored a range of portfolios from children in early years, all the way up to upper primary. When looking at the upper primary work, I noticed the work seems to be more teacher led and more interference and there was a noticeable difference between the different phases, with topical and social studies within the art being created.

It also became more apparent that the children lacked confidence and therefore felt more comfortable copying other bodies of work. McAuliffe et al (2007) found that as children become aware of the art around them, they begin to feel more self conscious about their own skills and their own work.

Drama was our second workshop and we began by discussing how we felt about drama, both performing and teaching. I am not overly confident performing or teaching it as it lies outside my comfort zone and is not a curricular area I have a lot of experience in.

Looking at different drama conventions, such as teacher in role and freeze frame, gave us the opportunity to explore drama in a bit more detail. Working in groups, we were given the scenario of being villagers with a dragon terrorising our village and using the conventions we each took on a different role and seen how it could be used in lessons at school.

Reference List

McAuliffe, D. (2007) Foundation and Primary Settings In Teaching Art and Design 3-11 London : Continuum.

Sir Ken Robinson : Creativity Is In Everything, Especially Teaching (2015) [online] Available: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/40217/sir-ken-robinson-creativity-is-in-everything-especially-teaching [Accessed: 16 September 2019].