WEEK 8 – Tuesday 29th October
Our lecture began with an emphasis on creativity within learning. We discussed Csikszentmihalyi (1996), who is a figure of creativity in schools. A famous quote from his book is “Constant busyness is not a good prescription for creativity”, this relates to the idea that boredom often leads to creativity. Children always being kept busy with tasks that the teacher has came up with, doesnt allow any time for them to be creative and fill their time in their own way. When children or adults are bored, we find something to do that will entertain us that is suited to the things we enjoy as an individual. Therefore, as teachers, it is important for us to create a tolerance for mess.
Moving on to the art workshop, we had a focus on Taylors model of assessment. We were all given images with a description on the back and were required to answer questions from Taylors model of assessment using our image. The first image we looked at was:
Process – Colourful, plastic lizards, plants and plastic toys.
Form – Set up against a rich black background to make the colours stand out.
Content – Resembled the queens head as it appers on postage stamps, suggests Britain is no longer made up of the people born here.
Mood – Like a mask covering up whats going on in the inside, pretending to be okay.
Another image that we looked at, and chose to create our video on was:
Process – Flags of the world, made by using black, grey and white materials. The artist must have knowledge and awareness of all the flags of the world.
Form – All flags are in a straight line and blowing in the one direction, this shows that there are similarities between all the countries in the world. Not one country is superior to the other.
Content – The artist has left out all the colours of the original flags to show similarities of countries rather than the differences.
Mood – It shows that if we take the time to get to know others, we would discover that we all have feelings and experiences in common.
After lunch we had our music workshop, this consisted of learning how to navigate the Charanga website. We looked at primary five, Mama Mia and how Charanga walks through it. The website offers lesson plans and step by step lessons and questions to work through with pupils. Theres a section for each year group with different songs for each, so theres a wide variety. I really liked the idea of this website, I’m personally not very musical, therefore, I think this recourse will come in handy as a base for teaching music.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity – Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Collins
