Course Reflection

EDCI407 Course Reflection- May 9, 2010

This semester in EDCI407, I learned a lot that I believe helped me grow as an artist and a (hopeful) art educator. Throughout the semester, I completed four in-studio projects and one at-home installation project, as well as three ceramic pots. Through working on each of these projects, I learned a lot about different artistic processes that I will be able to teach in my classroom. I also learned about how to better collaborate with other art educators through a group project and group critiques.
We started out the semester with a lesson on ceramics from Dr. Hendricks. I have always considered myself as good with clay, and so I was very surprised to find that I found creating the three different pots- a pinch pot, a coil pot, and a slab pot- difficult. I am very creative, but I have never been very good at following directions, and I think I learned in the ceramics portion of our class that sometimes, it is necessary to read the directions thoroughly before completing a process if I want the finished product to turn out well. I was particularly disappointed with how my Japanese tea-bowl, which utilized the slab-process, turned out. As an art educator, I am sure there will be many times when I want my students to read through the directions for a project thoroughly before they start the project, and it will be helpful for me to be able to understand where they are coming from and that some students may not necessarily follow the directions completely and that I should take into consideration that everyone has a different learning style.
After our ceramics project, we worked on my personal favorite in-studio project from the semester, the papier-mache project. I feel that out of all of the processes we used this semester, the papier-mache process is the one that I am most likely to use in my own art classroom in the future. Papier-mache was a little messy, but it involves no potentially-hazardous materials or tools, is simple to set-up, involves only cheap materials (paste and newspaper), and can be adapted for many different age and experience-levels.
Out of all of the projects I completed this semester in-studio, I think that my wood-and-wire tree and swing sculpture turned out to be the most aesthetically pleasing, but I would only use wood and wire in a very advanced middle school class or a high school class because I feel like the tools and materials can be rather dangerous- I know I hurt my hand several times while trying to bend the wire, and many people had to use power-tools for the wood aspect of their sculpture, which could be very dangerous for less experienced art students to use.

I thought that the most interesting problem we were given was the problem for the plaster project, where we had to create a sculpture for a blind student. I was so interested by this problem that I actually wrote my term paper for my Special Education class on art education for blind and visually impaired students, as I had never thought about how difficult it must be for blind students in art classrooms before. Besides the fact that it was difficult to make a sculpture for students who cannot see, the plaster was very difficult to carve and very messy. Also, much like our wood and wire project, I believe that a lot of the tools we had to use for carving could have been potentially dangerous for less experienced students. Someone mentioned that a good way to help this problem was to have a sign-out sheet for different carving tools, which I thought was a good idea.

The recycled runway project taught me the most about how to be a better group member in a collaboration project. As I mentioned in my studio project reflection paragraph, I had a much different idea of what I wanted to design and create than my team members did, but sometimes, when working in a group it is necessary to let go of some of our own personal ideals for the sake of the finished product. We actually ended up winning “Best in Show,” probably because the judges had a good sense of humor about the dress we created for Daniel and our presentation of the dress.

Finally, my favorite project of the semester was my installation project, as I really liked that we were able to create almost anything as long as we had artistic inspiration. I created a dress out of coffee filters and am really pleased with how it turned out. I plan on saving it to show to future classes I may have, and I think that a “Recycled Runway” project idea could be really fun and easily adapted for a classroom.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed EDCI407 this semester and also feel like I learned a great deal throughout the class.