I chanced upon this interesting blog page that is aptly entitled “Unorthodox by Effective: Teaching Strategies for the 21st Century”: http://mrsloomis.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/literature-or-art-class-8/
In particular, I really enjoyed reading about how the blogger was able to combine Literature and Art into her lessons. She mentioned that this unorthodox approach was based on the “Through the Lens” concept. Essentially, this concept allows students to understand a piece of art and literary work in various perspectives. More specifically, the blogger seems intentionally create the avenue for her students to step into the artist and/or poet's shoes and then see the art-piece from that perspective.
Students were tasked to read a book, write a response piece and then create a digital art work that was related to the book. After which, students had to give a presentation on both the essay and the art work. I found her idea quite ingenious actually. Her activity combines two very related disciplines and this multi-disciplinarial approach provides students with the opportunity to practice multiple modes of learning - the creation of art both through words and through digital means. To me, the manner in which students of her class are able to experience this creative venture is simply fascinating. In a sense, a deeper and more enriching learning experience is taking place - one that is multi-layered and multimodal in nature. In terms of incorporating her idea into our set literature texts, I was thinking that a possible activity could be to have students draw out an image of Emily from “Emily of Emerald Hill”, for example, and then write an essay to accompany that illustration, justifying and detailing why they drew Emily in their own particular ways.
Assessment wise, the blogger uses a simple three-question approach adapted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: What is the artist trying to do? How well does he do it? Is it worth doing? http://mrsloomis.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/your-class-is-working/
The word “artist” can be replaced with poet, dramatist, singer etc. I found this approach, then, simple and effective. The first question tests the students about the knowledge of key ideas, themes and concepts of an art-piece. The second question assesses technique. For example, a possible question stemming from this could be whether the shape and colour of the artwork promotes the artist’s message, whether the tone and diction of the poem promotes the poet’s main message. Finally, the third question, according to the blogger, “separates the artists who has a message to communicate from one who just wants to sell something”. The third question may not be as applicable to Literature as compared to the previous two questions. The blogger does not go into further detail how she accomplishes this but a possible inference would be such questions are only made verbally to her students.
Overall though, I found this website quite valuable and enriching and it helped me think about the teaching and assessment of literature in a different way.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, Chris -- combining literature and art sounds like an ideal integration of two twinned disciplines. It’s a promising way of activating students’ linguistic and visual intelligences, I’d say. Perhaps students can use digital tools like Storybird to create their illustrations of characters and scenes. And concerning the three-question approach that you mention (which I’d agree has value in its simplicity and elegance), I think the third question is often still applicable to literary works – i.e. the issue of motive (‘is it worth writing?’). Asking all three questions is an apt way of assessing a work’s value, style and purpose (as well as students’ understanding of these elements).
ReplyDeleteHi Chris, multidisciplinary approaches work well in the classroom, and are a great way to get students to think about different critical lens as applied to different art forms. Nice idea for Emily, and you can think through it when we have our tutorial on transmediation to explore how the task can be made more complex or simple depending on what you are assessing for.
ReplyDelete