Teaching Art Saves Lives
EDUC 5856 Project by Ryan Hamilton
Proposal
The focus of my project will be to construct two videos that will serve as a curriculum resource for elementary students studying visual arts in Ontario. The goal of the project is to provide students with a digital resource that will assist in making sense of specific elements or principles of art. In the first video I will review the creative process and how the specific element or principle is embedded into the process (e.g., challenging and inspiring, imagining and generating). The second video will give an overview of how to critically analyze art using the grade specific element or principle of art. The primary goal of both videos will be to outline a grade specific principle of art and element of art and its role in the creative process and critical analysis of an art piece for students, as opposed to teachers, in order to give a visual representation with audio support.
The process that I intend to use for this video series is to create and draw a visual representation of the content to be covered through a series of pictures and then animate it through stop animation and then to create a voice over to explain and elaborate on what has been drawn. Thus each video will be using creative process, critical analysis, elements of design, and principles of design to convey the information pertaining to each topic with audio to supplement any information that may require some additional explanation in order to be understood by the viewer.
What I have done ...
Challenges? NONE!! Lies.
The first challenge I faced as I began to put this project together was how I was going to ultimately have it as a resource for students. I initially tried to set it up in my vimeo and youtube account. While it worked, I found it clunky and poor for communicating text-based information. In the end, I decided that a website was probably the best place to localize all the resources. I have created the website and have begun to put the information in place to make it a useable working resource for middle school students (grades 6, 7, and 8) in Ontario. Once the resource is more developed, I plan to plant specific photos (thumbnails) on my pinterest account as hyperlinks to the website as well as to create a vimeo/youtube channel doing the same thing to allow videos to be watched in sequence using the playlist feature.
The second challenge I faced was trying to determine what information needed to be spoken about in the video and what information should be provided on the website in text form. After holding a poll on Edmodo's Visual Arts group, an online education platform where visual arts teachers have networked to improve their visual arts programs, I learned that although most students learn the 6 elements of art in school, very few know what the principles are, let alone how they are used in creating an artwork. (https://www.edmodo.com/community/creative-arts) With this information, I decided to create one page on the website with information pertaining to the elements of art, and when I was making the videos, I focused on how a single principle of art was being used in the art piece.
The final challenge I faced while constructing this project was deciding how I was going to create the stop animation. During the previous class I had constructed a (poor) stop animation film drawing in sharpie markers. I decided that I wanted to create another stop animation film but while painting. The challenge with painting was that once I started working, I had no opportunity to take a break as I could not break my own creative process. This proved to be much more challenging that I had anticipated. The primary challenge was that after every brushstroke, I had to go behind the camera and take the picture. Overall I think the beginning of this project is a success, especially as I have linked it into my previous project with modifications to improve it.