Facilitating Engagement with the Art-Making Process

Thoughts and bits that stood out to me while reading the Carroll text.

Investigating Materials and Ideas

• Ideas are generated by working with materials
• Play and experience are key
• Even simple materials can be used complexly
• With continued practice material and artistic preference will develop 
• Always Push/Challenge your students

 
Structure for Creative Thinking

• "Closed" problems actually are not that bad
• Can learn
• New Skills
• Knowledge
• Concepts
• Techniques
• Processes 
• Ideas
• To Easy = Bored
• Flip Side To Hard = frustration or giving up
• Have task meet ability
• Don't have an answer be obvious without new thinking
• Brain storming best in groups
• Always Push/Challenge your students

 
Forming Elegant Problems

• Elegant problems allow any ability level to tackle the problem
• Open-Ended
• Original Thinking
• WORTH DOING/SOLVING
• Big Idea/Themes
• Metaphors

 Designing Problems based on Real World of Work

• Problem based learning + creative thinking = Solution
• Designed based allows rethinking and redesigning

 Facilitating Dialog and Discourse about Students Work

• Dialog requires clear purpose and guidelines 
• Taken serious with high regard
• Possibly model responses you want to develop
• Try smaller groups before bringing the whole class together 
• Try being a facilitator more then a critiquer
• Try and involve everyone
•  Have no one dominate the discussion

After reading all of these I then started think more about how others recommend strategies or ideas when it came to the infamous critique. This led me to The Class Critique: Get Beginning Art Students to Talk about Art by Alexandra Overby. Throughout the article she goes over a few of the different approaches on how she helps introduces begging artist to a critique. The first was to randomly mix up all the work and then place it in a show like setting. She then lists off all of the lesson objectives and then students then vote for each piece for a certain award (most creative, best technical, and best of show). Then since students are standing by work they are voting for they can speak positive about it and say why it might have beaten others out while remaining positive. A second approach was by having students breaking into small groups and critiquing others work, not in their group, based on a work sheet that asks technical questions while also providing positive criticism. A third approach was to use sticky notes with their name on it to choose the three strongest examples on the lesson. Overby says that by the end of the year students are comfortable with critiques and understand how to give positive criticism.The general rules are a negative is always followed by a positive one (complement sandwich like) and criticism is based on art principles and not opinion.
I noticed that in relationship to both reading it recommends to use small groups to introduce critiques. The more I sat down on this idea the more and more it made sense. Public speaking is a major fear among most people so why not try smaller groups before expanding it. I also liked the idea of keeping criticism to art principles and not content. I think that is often so much of what can cause a critique to become a negative experience to so many and by doing so the experience can remain positive.

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