Week 4- Exploring Keith Haring: Creating a class mural

[RE]spond: to say something in return.

This week our students explored the lively and interactive paintings of Keith Haring.  To our surprise, a lot of our students had previous knowledge of his work and had personal connections with this artist.  We like to have artists of inspiration each week that correspond to the specific media or concept that we are addressing.  Keith Haring was a perfect inspiration because his medium of choice is very similar to what the students would be working with.  His socially driven artwork corresponded nicely with our re-word of the week: respond.  We spoke with our students about how his unexpected graffiti murals got the attention of city dwellers and propelled them to think in ways that they were not used to.  This opened up great dialogue about how we as artists can respond to each others' work.  We also introduced the aesthetics of line quality, shape and shading when drawing and painting.  Instead of doing a demonstration, we had already prepared examples shading and line thickness techniques.  Another wonderful surprise was that Milo was very eager to tell the class how to shade using gradation.  He even explained and did his own demonstration to the class about how shadows or darker areas are created (areas away from the sun or light).

The goal of this lesson was to get the class to be open to collaboratively creating a mural in which they respond to others' drawings visually, meaning they will add their own marks to their classmates' drawings and paintings to make their own meaning.  Our students did a great job in responding to each others' work and letting go of their own images so that their classmates can develop the mural.  Because the space available to the students wasn't very wide, it was hard for them to spread out.  It would be interesting to see how this project would turn out if they were given more space to draw and paint on.  

This week we continued the "centers" model.  The students were given the opportunity to finish their found object sculptures and were also introduced the new mural project.  Because students were learning at their own pace, we had a well balanced divide between sculptors and painters.  For those who enjoy two-dimentional media as opposed to three-dimensional design, they really took to the mural.  In contrast, those who were dedicated to sculpting, had a chance to continue with their previous sculptures or create entirely new ones. 

Clean up this week worked extremely well.  We had thought of clean up jobs ahead of time and wrote them on sticky notes.  Then, we placed the sticky notes under their chairs so that their clean up job would be a surprise.  The students knew specifically what their task was that they had to accomplish.  Because the jobs were specific, there was little room for distractions.

There were no serious behavior issues and a lot of that had to do with them having choices.  Students were really invested in their work this week,  and didn't get distracted or cause distractions to others.  One thing that could have improved this week was our time management.  Although the students were extremely engaged in art making and we didn't want to disturb them, we should have had them clean up earlier so that we could have a discussion at the end of the class in relation to how they responded to others when painting/drawing the mural.

ps. A lot of the students asked about the grass sculptures!!  We told them that we would bring them down next week to look at.  A lot of them are still really excited about them, and that makes Dana and I really excited as well!