As stated in the previous post, I expected to question many more aspects within the realm of technology and art education. This is exactly what happened this week.
At the end of the last week, we were left thinking about objects or events in our life that drove our passions and informed our thinking process. During class, we discussed a few passages that other students wrote. From this, I found that a lot of people were inspired by their interests and focused on the exploration aspect of learning. Most people were excited about the feeling of playing with an idea or tool, and finding out something extraordinary that they could do with it. As the discussion went on, a student brought up an interesting point about the best way to inspire that intuitive/exploratory thinking in students when they approach projects. At first, it was definitely a head stumper. But then I thought back to my time in the art education department.
In my program, we often talk about how to engage students in art making. When students begin projects, teachers should engage them in a dialogue. These dialogues should entice the students into find their interests within the prompt. (The project should call upon the students interests, regardless of the dialogue.) During the dialogues, they would ask students open ended questions. For example, if they were working with clay, a teacher might ask them, “How many ways can you change the shape of the clay? What about the texture?” From there, students would explore the material on their own terms and interact with it freely with the direction in mind: how can I change this piece of clay? After exploration, students would be asked to share what they found and teach each other their techniques. This way, students show their understanding of the material with each other and prove to teachers that they are using it effectively. If there is a direct learning goal in mind for a technique, the time to do it would be after they explore/play. This way, a teacher is not negating the personal experience they had with the clay, they would just add to their repertoire of skills. Following material exploration, students would be starting to think in terms of the project. Depending on the subject, the teacher would continue to ask them open-ended questions that make them think about their own lives/experiences that could relate to the prompt. From there, students would be aided by the teacher to make their artworks.
Based on what I know about dialogues in lessons, I was able to deduct a theory about how to keep students engaged in the same way with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) classes. Conducting an effective dialogue that engages the students interests with the problem in front of them should help inspire them to work on it, and enable their problem solving skills.
During class, we also touched on cognitive development and its influence in how people learn. This reminded me of my time in the developmental psychology of adolescents class that I took last semester. The connection between how people think and how people learn seems obvious, but why don’t all teachers do this then? (But, that’s a point to be explored another day.) What I found interesting was how the role of technology could be looked at, in terms of a students cognitive development. While reading Mindstorms (1980), by Seymour Papert, it is detailed about his outlook on Piaget’s theories about concrete and formal operational thinking. Concrete operational thinking is a developmental step that Piaget theorized children go through. This means that they are not able to think deeper and in terms of future possibilities, in other words, they only see what is in front of them. Formal operational thinking happens later in development, where an individual is able to consider notions that have not happened yet. They are able to think more abstractly and make connections that they would not have been able to make before. Understanding how people develop their cognitive abilities is important when creating lessons for students, after all, you would not want to try to teach something that is too easy or too over their heads to comprehend. Papert believes that abstract concepts, that are only understood by formal operational thinkers, can be understood concretely with the help of technology (p. 21).
I feel on the fence about his statement about the benefit of technology. In one lens, it is important to challenge students to stretch their cognitive development, but not until the point where information goes into one ear and out the other. I see how technology can take abstract notions and simplify it, but I do not see the benefit of that in the long run. Deep learning happens when a student is learning on their own terms so that it resonates with them. But, I worry about how a piece of technology giving them the “answer” in simpler terms could help them apply that knowledge to other aspects of a larger concept. In this way, students would be relying on the technology to complete the section of information they do not fully understand. How could that be beneficial for their learning if the abstract concept is not presented in its intended manner? Why push a concept onto them that they would not understand if not for a piece of technology? I would need another perspective to convince me otherwise. Although, I do believe that technology could be used as a tool to accomplish learning objectives, it should not be used to give students answers they are not cognitively developed to understand.
Towards the end of class, we had the opportunity to work with a physics simulation that used code, Python. This was my first time working with a program like this. There was basic instruction about how to use the main features of the program, along with a basic demo. Based on my lack of knowledge about code and physics, I interpreted the demo as, “Click in or around the grid and it will move. If you look at the code, you can toggle with features and the grid will change.” With this premise, I moved forward fearlessly. I eventually understood what each toggle feature was, but not necessarily how the code worked to change the image or why it moved the way it did. But, I was still proud that I figured out how to change it at all. I began thinking about ways that I could take the moving image in another direction. If I knew how to code at all, I would have tried changing it to do something else. Since I don’t, I found a button that could be pressed to take a still photo of the moving grid. With this, I couldn’t help but wonder how I could apply it to an art project. I thought about how I could combine, replicate, and edit the images aside from the code. What if I translated the digital image into a printed photo? What if I painted it? What if I tried to replicate the functions of code in another medium? So many ideas began flowing about how students could learn about composition and design by using that program, then understanding what the design means in terms of physics.
As a challenge for myself, I decided to edit some photos myself. When the images are saved from the program, they are .svg files. When I tried to open the files, it automatically opened in Adobe Illustrator. Discovering this propelled me into another brain storm of ideas of what I could do with these images. I began to explore how the image was being read in Illustrator, and saw that it was made up of pen points. Using the pen tool in Illustrator is something I am well versed in, and began to edit it. I kept thinking, “How could I change it completely? How could I change it slightly to be more visually pleasing? To what end could I change the image to still be within the constraints of the code? What would it look like if I completely ignored the code and worked with the fundamental principles of design?” The list goes on and on about what I could do with these few photos. The grid below shows pictures of the original screen grabs. The following photos are edits that I have made.
