From: Olivia Gude
The students will be able to invoke the elemental creative power of water by melting the ice that far too often freezes creative minds into confined cubes.
The students will be able to release control and plunge into the realm of liquid possibility, engaging the medium while freeing themselves of assumptions, judgments or the need to anticipate end results.
Staining grounds in the Fluidity: Wet Media group Spiral Workshop
My own art teacher education was completed before the emphasis on structuring curriculum using a backwards design* method identifying student learning objectives and related assessments first and then planning curriculum. Of course, it makes sense that schooling should not be focused on what the “teacher performs” or inputs to the students, but rather be focused on the students’ experiences, what the students are able to know and do, what the students carry with them into their lives.
Yet sometimes I’m deeply uncomfortable with contemporary educational doctrine that states that we can sum up the deepest goals of art education in a series of definitive descriptors. Aren’t the artists we most treasure those who invite us to experience and perceive in ways that question and exceed the boundaries of conventional ways of seeing and being? How are we to resolve the dilemma of being responsible educators who have clearly stated objectives with identified desired outcomes with being artist educators who are open to the emergence of other dispositions and forms?
Flawlessly Flawed (detail) by Bridget Reinhard in Spiral Workshop.
How can we create arts education practices that focus on developing students’ capacities for open-ended becoming? My curriculum research in Spiral Workshop has been devoted to exploring this question. Based on this research I’ve come to believe that:
Curriculum must present students with a bigger picture than can be given in a series of literally stated performance standards.
Articulating the goals and objectives of a “learning unit” whether a project, a series of projects or a whole course must afford poetic and metaphorical as well as literal meanings.
Detail of painting by Masooma Kahn exploring bodies of water and bodily fluids.
Here’s the opening of the Mission Statement of the Spiral Workshop group Fluidity: Wet Media. Note that this poetic manifesto identifies important aspects of artistic making. It functions by inviting students to embrace and participate, rather than to merely meet pre-existing conceptions of quality.
Dripping, seeping, sopping, sinking, submerging, swirling, bleeding, bloating, soaking, splashing, squirting, flowing, sparkling, sprinkling, saturating, spewing, drenching, drizzling, dissolving, distorting, diluting, oozing, salivating, slurping, sipping, staining, eroding, freezing, boiling, enveloping, replenishing, trickling, flooding, transforming,
brimming, rippling, rushing, gurgling, gargling, spouting, slobbering, streaming, sweeping, weeping, washing, wasting, baptizing, cleansing, infusing, humidifying, crystallizing, vaporizing, simmering, hydrating, quenching, replenishing, reflecting.
The seemingly infinite stream of associations flowing from the original source – water – is only a rivulet of the torrent that is Fluidity. In this Spiral Workshop exploration of wet media and the natural element that gives it existence, the youth artists channeled the flow of the subconscious mind and the unstoppable, unpredictable, ever-changing, irreplaceable nature of water.
Having drawn from the wells of inspiration, we are all thirsty for more.
Bleeding Flowers paintings at Spiral Workshop
I was the child… painting by Dalia Perez
Students explored the fluidity of their own faces in Myself, Growing Older
Digication e-Portfolio
* Backwards Design is a key idea in Grant Wiggins and Jaye McTighe’s Understanding by Design.
For more information on the Fluidity: Wet Media group, see the NAEA e-Portfolio.