Pop Art Busts

I'm still trying to use up my metallic tempera paint and this project may do it. My student teacher started this lesson, in part based on some of Jeff Koon's works. Students made columns first and then the busts. Here we have an artist, Obama, a student, and a football player.

Doodle 4 Google

My fourth graders have been creating designs for the Doodle 4 Google contest.
Doodle 4 Google is  a competition where K-12 students are invited to work their artistic will upon the Google homepage logo. The theme this year is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..."

A group of well-known illustrators, cartoonists and animators from organizations like The Sesame Street Workshop, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and Pixar Animation Studios, will help select the 40 finalist doodles as well as attending the awards ceremony to personally meet the winners.

The winning doodle will be featured on the Google homepage on May 27, 2010.
The artwork here was drawn by Angel Maldonado.

Design Thinking at NAEA

If you are going to NAEA in Baltimore, you are invited to a presentation I am giving on Design Thinking. The presentation will focus on a design-themed issue of SchoolArts, Design Matters, guest edited by Marty Rayala and Paul Sproll. You can read a preview of my comments on Dan Pinks's ideas about design here. 

Advocacy

Design Thinking

Learn about design thinking, a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues based around the building up of ideas about the design of objects, information, environments, and experiences.

Nancy Walkup

Thursday, April 15, 4:00 - 4:50 PM  |  Meeting Room 331/Center

Survey for NBCT Teachers

A friend and colleague of mine, Susan Hall, asked me to share the following questions with art teachers who are NBCT (National Board Certification Teachers). You can respond here or contact Susan directly at sbh252003@yahoo.com. We appreciate your response.

1. When did you successfully obtain national board certification?
2. How long did the NBCT process take you from start to finish?
3. How did the process impact your teaching strategies, content, and lesson design?
4.  Do you have a masters in art education? If so, how did your master's degree program model compare to the NBCT? 
5.  Please compare the impact of your teaching of both educational degrees.
6. If you had a choice between starting a master's degree or NBCT, which would you select and why? What do you see as the benefits and any negative aspects of each?
7. How do the NBCT standards compare to the reality of your day-to-day teaching experience? How do you incorporate your NBCT knowledge into daily teaching?
8. Any additional comments or suggestions for art teachers considering enrolling in the NBCT program?

For the Birds

When my fifth graders made clay birds, I gave them the option of glazing them or painting them with metallic tempera paint. When the clay was painted with metallics, the finished product looked more like it was made from wood instead of clay. (Actually it reminded me of museum reproductions such as those from the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

We had been focusing on birds native to Texas, beginning with ones we could actually see on our school grounds, including scissor-tailed flycatchers, road runners, red-winged blackbirds, and killdeer.

Initially I shared with students a PowerPoint that included photographs of Texas birds and audio files so the students could both see how they looked and hear how they sounded. Of course, this kind of knowledge is not tested on any state test; I just felt students should be able to recognize (and appreciate) the birds they were likely to encounter.

from the left: Cardinal, Blackbird, Blue Jay, Robin
                                                                              

Student-generated Projects

Do you ever have your students suggest art projects they would like to do? Usually when I have students in group shows, I ask them to look around at the other student art to see if there is anything new to them they would like to do.

The mugs shown here came from a student request. Two of my fifth graders who were in Art Club asked if they could make clay cups which had faces. Then they asked if they could teach the lesson to their peers.

Of course I was delighted. The three of us did some research on historical African-American face jugs and the like and developed the lesson from there. Each introduced the lesson to his or her own class (they were not in the same class) and helped students individually as needed. Their fellow students were impressed and the two students were very proud of their efforts, rightfully so.

Daniel Pink's Rules for Writing

Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, recently posted the following rules for writing on his blog. They offer great advice for writers everywhere:

1. Show up (to work).
2. Write every day.
3. Don’t do anything else until you’ve written five hundred words.
4. Move (your body).
5. Once you’ve produced a semi-credible draft of a section or chapter, have someone read it to you aloud.
6. Remember that writing, though solitary, is also social. You’re making a promise to readers. Honor that promise.

Writing is hard work so any suggestions that make it more effective are always welcome. You can find more tips for writers at SchoolArts Writer's Guidelines.

Whitney's Rabbit

The other day another elementary art teacher in my district mentioned that she had no money to buy glazes. Since then, I have been trying to come up with ways to decorate clay whether fired or air-dry.


Today, with my second grade students, we worked out one solution.

The rabbit you see on the left was made from air-dry clay last week. Today, Whitney first rubbed the rabbit with the side of a bright-color construction paper crayon (Did I hear these were not made anymore?).

Next she painted it with metallic tempera paint (here a red-gold color), trying to paint primarily in the places that could not be reached with the crayon. Finally, she burnished the rabbit with a piece of paper towel to rub off excess paint and give it a polish. To me, the final result looks like gold leaf over wood - very sophisticated. We also tried the same process using black tempera instead of metallic tempera paint. This produced a different but equally dramatic result.

If you know of other clay surface techniques to use instead of glazing, please share them. We get so many ideas from each other!

Being Green

An engaging repurposing of Pez dispensers at a candy store in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

What exactly does it mean to be “green” these days? Using only sustainable resources? Leaving a smaller carbon footprint? Conserving resources and energy? Reusing and repurposing materials? Dumpster diving and scrutinizing items left out on the curb? As Kermit the frog sings, “it’s not that easy bein’ green.”

Yet art teachers have been “green” for some time, (often out of necessity), leading the way as incredibly resourceful reusers and recyclers. Besides inventing uses for materials and supplies with which to make art, these days art teachers also have a wealth of “green” artists to share with their students.

Introducing students to art made from recycled, reused, or repurposed materials provides an engaging exploration of contemporary artists, whose work is often simultaneously humorous and thought provoking.

To me there is a wonderful moment when you simultaneously recognize the objects of which an artwork is made and what they have become. I was recently reminded of this at two different exhibitions in Washington, D.C., where I enjoyed watching the reaction of visitors to artworks made from unexpected but ordinary materials.

One was a permanent installation hanging at the Washington, D.C Convention Center, part of the largest public art collection in the capital, valued at over $4 million. Five Easy Pieces, by Donald Lipski, is a collection of giant mobiles made from everyday objects like tennis rackets, kayaks, guitars, bar stools, and bicycles.

The other was Strange Comfort, an exhibition by Brian Jungen at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on the National Mall. Jungen uses mass-produced ordinary objects such as shoes, golf bags, and plastic chairs to make sculptures that are charged with layers of meaning.  

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can share both Five Easy Pieces and Strange Comfort with your students online. And if you happen to be in Washington, D.C.,  Five Easy Pieces is a permanent exhibit and Strange Comfort will be on view at the NMAI until August 8, 2010.

I think Kermit would enjoy these two exhibitions. After all, the prototype Kermit was made from a discarded green ladies' coat and two ping pong balls. And I agree, as I think you will, too, with his final thoughts on being green, “it's what I want to be.”

Up for Interpretation

Our local newspaper asked the elementary art teachers in Denton to nominate students to give their own interpretations of a local art exhibit. Just the fact that this was the newspaper's idea says a lot about art education in the Denton, Texas public schools. One of my 4th grade students, Karissa Cheskey, was chosen. Here is the story:

Students look for the Story behind Works of Art.

by Lucinda Breeding / Features Editor, Thursday, March 18, 2010, Denton Record Chronicle

The Denton Record-Chronicle recently invited four children in the Denton school district to tour “Materials: Hard & Soft” at the Center for the Visual Arts. The exhibition is a yearly show and a contemporary American craft contest. Craft is a form of art in which objects that once had practical use are stylized and decorative.

After the students toured the Meadows Gallery, they were invited to pick their favorite art and tell the story behind the art, in their own words.

Karissa Chesky, 9

Family: Chris, father; Aimi, mother; Lilia, younger sister; Kason, younger brother

Karissa Chesky, 9, believes that artist Adrienne Sloane’s knitted work in “Materials: Hard & Soft” tells the story of a cloud that breaks into rain over the ocean — or a pond or lake — where the water makes ripples on the water’s surface.

School: W.S. Ryan Elementary School, fourth grade

Favorite work of art: Sea Change, knit cotton, by Adrienne Sloane

A word on the art: Sloane knitted a single piece — moving from white to deep blue — to be hung on a wall in a wavy pattern, with ends streaming down the wall into pool-like patterns.

The story of the piece: “It starts kind of like rain,” Karissa said. “It could be the waves crashing, like it was a thunderstorm, but out in the ocean. It makes me kind of relaxed. Blue is kind of my favorite color — it makes me calm. It’s not like this big crazy piece of art. The stuff at the bottom are kind of like ripples in the pond or the lake.”

The artist says: “By moving the context of knitting, long defined by the human form, from clothing geometry to sculpture, knitting becomes a medium with a link to a powerful fiber tradition and history.”

The Difference One Teacher Can Make

Most art teachers are the only art teachers in their school and some may feel alone at times and that they can't make much difference. But one teacher can make a huge difference - I know many art teachers who continually go far and beyond for their students and Samantha Melvin is one of those teachers.

I have gotten to know Samantha through TAEA and the Global Crutch Project (she is one of the founders). She also lives in the town in which my husband grew up (Burnet). She teaches art and music at the intermediate school there (a position she talked the school district into creating for her).

This past week I was in Burnet to deliver my school's decorated crutches and ended up helping out a little with a display she was hanging (literally, with fishing line).

She hung this huge exhibit during her spring break, hanging artwork from almost every 4th and 5th grader at her school. A local bank let her use a vacant building they owned on the square. Her students' work, hung in rainbow-ordered colors, completed filled the two large front windows. She even came up with a clever way to hang the work (one I plan to use, too). She taped fishing line on the two outside edges of the artwork, hanging six at a time, then hung those units from hooks above the windows.  She also made a very nice sign for the exhibit and managed to get an article in the paper about it, too.

So, my hat is off for Samantha and the difference she has made in one small town.

"Get Published" session offered at NAEA in Baltimore

"Get Published" at NAEA

Please join SchoolArts editor Nancy Walkup and authors Pam Stephens and Ken Vieth at this session at NAEA in Baltimore. Here is our program listing for Thursday, April 15:

Get Published
Advocacy

Boost your advocacy efforts and communicate the importance of student learning in the visual arts by turning your most engaging lessons and ideas into published articles for art education. Writing and photography guidelines will be given.

Nancy Walkup, Pam Stephens, Ken Vieth

Thursday 2:00 - 2:50 PM  |  Meeting Room 321/Center

Spiral Cool Curriculum

Middle school and high art teachers should take a look at Spiral Project Art Curriculum for some innovative, thought-provoking projects involving 21st century ideas. I'm trying to figure out I can adapt some of these to use with my elementary students. 

I think I'll start with Headline Poetry, "a good way to get students thinking about using words in artistic and unexpected ways. An interesting aspect of this project is that it asks students to create a personal stream of consciousness poem out of randomly found words of everyday culture."

If you have some similar lessons for students of any age that address contemporary ideas, I would appreciate you sharing them with our readers here. Who knows, you may end up with an article in SchoolArts!

Building on Bloom's

Did you know that Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains was first published in 1956? Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom, made some changes in the mid-nineties, changing the names of the six categories of learning objectives from noun to verb forms and rearranging them: 

Evaluation was changed to Creating

Synthesis was changed to Evaluating

Analysis was changed to Analyzing

Application was changed to Applying

Comprehension was changed to Understanding

Knowledge was changed to Remembering

You will notice that, in the new version, the highest objective is "Creating." How great is that for us? Yet, unfortunately, many administrators and school districts are still using the original Bloom's.

One of the elementary art teachers in our district, Denise Clyne-Ruch, came up with the brilliant idea of making and using visual aids based on the newer version of Bloom's  to hang in our rooms. This way they are handy to point out to students and administrators our use of these learning objectives. The image you see above is one of them. (Denise will have an article about this in the Aug/September issue of SchoolArts.)

It is definitely important to find out if your administrators are aware of the changes in Bloom's. You can print out a comparison of old and new Bloom's and share it with your administrators and fellow teachers. If your art teachers have district-wide inservices, you could take the time at one to discuss these changes and make posters to hang in your room as we did. Either way, it is to your benefit. As art teachers, we already believe "creating" is the highest level of thinking; now we need to be sure everyone else knows it, too.

Progress on the Global Art Initiative

Yesterday I was able to deliver a batch of crutches my students decorated for Haiti. It was gratifying to see a room full of crutches ready to be shipped through a group of doctors ASAP. Yet the need may never stop. Laurie Berg and Samantha Melvin, the founders of this effort, and I talked about ways to make more people aware of this continuing need. The Global Art Initiative started before the earthquake in Haiti to help disabled artists but it is needed now more than ever.

One idea we discussed was having individual artists turn crutches into works of art. These could be collected to create a traveling show or could be auctioned off to raise money for Haiti. All suggestions are welcome. How can we get more people involved?

Join SchoolArts in Trip to Venice in 2011

You are invited to join SchoolArts' editor Nancy Walkup and author Pam Stephens for a weeklong city stay in Venice, Italy, leaving June 18, 2011. For more information, please join Facebook group Venice, 2011.

Bringing Contemporary Art to the Classroom

Reordering the National Standards for the Visual Arts

Ever since I heard art educator Olivia Gude (UIC Spiral Education and much more) speak at the University of North Texas last week, I have been thinking about her suggestion for reordering the National Standards for the Visual Arts - to move "Understanding the Visual Arts in Relation to History and Cultures" to the number one spot. It's brilliant! And I agree with her.

At my school, Tina Arenas, our music teacher, and I try to follow this standard through collaborations that focus on history and culture and result in personal and meaningful experiences for our students. One of my favorite is a celebration of the Mexican Days of the Dead. Every year we mark this holiday with a procession and presentation that honors Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. This year we were joined by a Mariachi band. To mark the occasion, I take a photo of every child in costume and give them a copy to keep. Here's one:

For more detailed information, lesson ideas, and English and Spanish scripts of our program, go to my school website, Honoring Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Georgia Goes Camping

On my birthday, my husband and I went to see Georgia O'Keeffe at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. The most intriguing thing to me was that the museum had set up her camping equipment to show how she worked out in her beloved landscapes. Everything was military surplus green but her sturdy cot and thick sleeping bag looked pretty comfortable. She also brought along a low table and two children's chairs to use as seating - very Japanese looking. The accompanying photographs of the actual camping sites were a fascinating addition.

Denton Students Decorate Crutches for Earthquake-Ravaged Haitians

Denton students decorate crutches for earthquake-ravaged Haitians

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, March 14, 2010

By BRITNEY TABOR / Denton Record-Chronicle
btabor@dentonrc.com

Symbols of hope are being transported from some Denton fourth- and fifth-graders to Haitians devastated by the country's recent earthquake.

Through Friday, the students at Ryan Elementary School had decorated 18 donated metal crutches, using permanent markers to create a variety of shapes such as polka dots, lines and stars in bright colors.

People sent money to assist Haitians after the earthquake, Ryan Elementary art teacher Nancy Walkup said, but involving students in a project that decorates crutches for disabled citizens offers them "a real connection to what's happening in Haiti."

"The fact that they [crutches] were decorated by elementary students will show the people of Haiti that they [students], in fact, care for them, and hopefully, it will bring some joy and color to their lives. It will be such a surprise when they open the box."

Walkup said she plans to transport the decorated crutches to Burnet, headquarters of the Global Art Initiative's Global Crutch Project, during spring break this week. From Burnet, which is northwest of Austin, the crutches will be sent to Haiti.

"I feel really proud of myself because it's just great to help out other people that are in need of help," Ryan Elementary fourth-grader Christina Paz said. "I'm very happy."

Walkup said she learned about the Global Crutch Project more than six months ago and decided it would be a wonderful effort for her students. In recent months, she said, students have prepared crutches not only for Haitian artists but also for others left disabled by the earthquake. As the need for crutches became greater, she said, the students' efforts gained momentum.

"I just feel that it's great to help out," fourth-grader Nick Curtis said.

Walkup said the school will continue collecting donated crutches to decorate as long as there is a need. People may donate crutches by dropping them off at the school, 201 W. Ryan Road. The school will be closed for spring break this week, but crutches can be dropped off once classes resume March 22.

Bringing Attention to Your Art Program

When I first started teaching (long ago), I remember my surprise in learning that my principal was not going to be the one publicizing anything about the art program at our school. I quickly learned that it was solely my responsibility. Since then, I have not been shy about sharing publicly what my students are doing. Promoting your art program helps everyone (students, parents, teachers, administrators, community) learn about the significant projects in which your students are involved. The best part, though, is the pride that your students will feel when they or their work is published in the newspaper or online.

How does one best do this? You call or email the local newspaper about week before an event or project (I usually email photographs as well) with all pertinent information, possibly to the reporter with the education beat. (It doesn't hurt to point out how colorful or photogenic the event will be, either.)

This morning I woke to find the following article in our local newspaper about the our participation in Global Art Initiative for Haiti, all the result of the above process.

So don't be shy; remember, you are doing it for your students!

Students Get Creative with Haiti Support Effort

Art Teachers Shine in District Teachers of the Year

Whoo-hoo!!!! We just discovered that three of the art teachers in my district were chosen as Teacher of the Year for their respective schools, quite an honor and most appropriate for Youth Art Month! Our 20 elementary art teachers are incredible about sharing and working collaboratively with each other to keep art vital and visible in all our schools. Hard work and persistence really pays off!

Advocacy Begins at Home

In the March issue of SchoolArts, "Art Education and the Professional Learning Community (PDF)" details the efforts made in my school district by our 20 elementary art teachers to form a PLC to help each other and to demonstrate to our administrators, fellow teachers, and students the value of art education.

One suggestion that arose from the PLC was that we share our efforts at a monthly meeting of the elementary principals. As far as we know, this had never happened before but we were happy to have the opportunity. Two of us represented the art teachers at the principals' meeting. We brought a dog and pony show: we displayed student artwork and large art reproductions, gave an overview of elementary art education and national and state standards, showed several interdisciplinary Animoto videos of student artwork, reviewed the updated version of Bloom's Taxonomy, and demonstrated several higher level thinking art activities (we weren't about to waste a minute of this opportunity!).

We were very gratified with the principals' response, both during and after the meeting and wished we had thought of this sooner.

As a result of this presentation, we were invited back and today repeated our presentation, this time to an interdisciplinary group of district administrators. Because we included Animoto videos and a Voicethread project, we have now been asked to present again, this time at district technology training.

Now, you may not want to go on the road with your own dog and pony show, but I offer this example to demonstrate that many wonderful things can happen just by asking for them. So start asking.

A 24-Hour Art Teacher

When I first started teaching, I used to refer to myself as a 24-hour art teacher because I was either teaching or thinking about teaching all the time. Somehow I thought that would change over the years but, in reality, that hasn’t happened. More than ever, as an elementary art teacher and editor of SchoolArts, everything I do is connected through teaching art. And I expect that is true for every one of you.

So here I am, writing for my like-minded compatriots, aiming to share your world of art education by providing timely art news; entertaining or thought-provoking artists, ideas, stories, and issues;  professional opportunities for you; and project and lesson ideas and exhibition possibilities for your students. We can be 24-hour art teachers together!