Curriculum - Day 4

A New Culture of Learning:
Throughout this book I found myself creating an analogy in my head. I think the authors points can be illustrated as a swimming pool. Teachers are like parents  at the pool with their kids and the water is the world of art education. As teachers, we can't just tell them the water is wet and it makes you kid of float and you can move through it. If they have never felt what 'wet' feels like and never experienced swimming they will not benefit from a top-down explanation of it. So the teacher has to let them go and explore it and play in it on their won. The teacher's main role is just to make sure they don't drown. They can show them how to put their face in and blow bubbles and encourage them to try new things out. Of course, swimming is more fun with friends! From friends kids can learn to do handstands and race and dive in the water. They learn the most from one another. The kid might discover that they are very fast or full of grace when they dive. Then it is the teacher's job to stand back and cheer them on as they realize what they are capable of. The authors call this type of knowledge that is learned through experience "tactic knowledge"(77).

On page 93 Thomas and Seely Brown made another point that really resonated with me. "In the new information economy, expertise is less about having a stockpile of information of facts at one's disposal and increasingly about knowing how to find and evaluate information on a given topic." Recently I was reading a Bill Bryson book and he was lamenting about how his personal survey of teenagers revealed that most didn't know who wrote the Canterbury Tales and how shameful that was. While maybe I should be a bit embarrassed, I didn't know who wrote the Canturbury Tales. So I looked it up online. The internet has made fact regurgitation obsolete, but a lot of education still relies on the fact memorization model.

Eisner:
I feel that the opening sentence to this chapter says a lot (and connects to A New Culture of Learning). "Children, of necessity, develop from both the inside out and the outside in" (93). To me this says a lot about how kids learn. It is not a linear, top-down progression. On page 94 Eisner goes on to discuss Dewey's emphasis on supportive learning communities. Eisner goes on to explain the significance of how "situated learning" leads to greater transfer. Students are more able to apply their new knowledge to new situations. Of course, it makes sense to me that being able to use knowledge should be an important focus of education.

Eisner says that students should be given substantial periods of time with one medium with multiple sequential opportunities, without switching back and forth between mediums. I would agree that students need to build up their skills. However, it seems like spending a long time in one medium could be discouraging to some students who might feel that material is just not for them. I think they should still have to try new things, but maybe more choice would be good. Eisner relates it to sports saying that a kid needs multiple experiences to be good at soccer, but at the same time you don't want to be that parent that keeps pushing their kid when they clearly hate it. Maybe its just a fine line.

I don't have enough experience to really be sure but I think that I might be interested in teaching middle school. During his extended explanation of children's drawing development Eisner says something that makes me wonder what our middle school teachers think about it. He says, "For Davis the bottom of the "U" represents the low level of aesthetic interest in middle childhood, while preschoolers and adolescents have a keen interest in aesthetic matters" (120). ???

Freedman:
"New contexts cause new meanings to be constructed" (87). How can education be expected to keep up with that?! A more flexible model.

"To teach visual culture requires interdisciplinary investigations of the underlying assumptions that can be revealed in the conceptual space between images and objects" (89).
The context of the creation and interpretation are important to the uncovered meaning as are the social circumstances which we might not usually consider. Barrett's article which asks teens to look at the Destiny's Child magazine cover is a good example of this. What does the image say about femininity and sex? What does it say about power?

"In one study, high school students did not tend to view visual and textual fictional sources  of stereotypes critically unless they were specifically taught how to do so...In this study, the students saw the visual fiction of advertising as reality and compared their lived reality unfavorably to the world the created out of visual culture" (93). TERRIFYING!!! This is a great reason why kids should be taught to look critically at the images that they are bombarded with on a daily basis.