I have always said that I have the best possible teaching position available: art teacher. I get to have the students “play artist” with me, in a semi-controlled setting. I come up with a creative activity and present it to the children. If they mimic my project the best that they can, they succeed. I do not expect everybody’s lesson to be perfect, or look alike; I just want them to try hard, have fun and produce something that looks similar to the proposed project.
I have access to 30 Kodak EZ Share, digital cameras. These cameras will only hold 30 still photographs, or 12 seconds of video; that is it. After the memory is full, the information needs to be downloaded into a computer and deleted from the camera before you can take any more images. I developed a middle school lesson where my students had to doodle up a storyboard, presenting a commercial for an existing product. They had to write a script, have rough sketches of the location (on school grounds) and clearly state the product being sold. The kids tore into this lesson because it was a welcomed break from normal draw/color and cut/paste assignments.
The students quickly grouped up into pairs, or trios, and started discussing what product they wanted to sales pitch. They doodled up all sorts of places they could shoot their commercials, even trying to get into places they knew they should not be: behind the stage, in the principal’s chair, or in the boiler room (via Freddy Krueger fame). The students chose their products and wrote their scripts. Some were written to be funny, some serious and some were just informational, but they all were relatively decent. I issued cameras (one per group) and they ran off all over the campus (I had asked for parental volunteers before starting) and did many, many takes of the same commercial. They found out that 12 seconds fly by when you are not paying attention to it. The long scripts were pared down and locations changed, one group even had to swap the lead rolls because student “A” would not quit laughing.
When it was all finished, we uploaded all the commercials into my computer and I burned them into a CD. We watched all the commercials and they had a critique sheet (prepared by me) that they used to grade the other commercials, looking for certain criteria: Did all members appear/speak on camera? Was location chosen well? Was script clear? What product were they selling? Etc. In the end, the students figured out that making a commercial was not as easy as they had thought. They were learning, but did not know it; it was play.
Most of my lessons are developed in the same fashion. I present an idea, something (or some idea) that has been implemented in the past and I show how the artist performed his work. After that, I let the students learn on their own. It is my way of letting natural transformation occur. Like many of the examples given in “Sparks Of Genius,” the lesson itself is only the tip of the project. There is always work to be done. Just like finding the hominid footprints, the discovery was only the beginning. Art (digital photography included) starts in one place and can lead to many, many other directions. One step may inspire one hundred more. The learning involved is just part of the process.
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