Olivia Gude Response

I really enjoyed reading Olivia Gude's articles about art education and creating an engaging and important curriculum. Here are some points that stood out to me from the different articles that I read:

• Does this curriculum support students in engaging and making personally satisfying and meaningful works of art, craft and design?
• Does this curriculum adequately represent a range of the art, resources, artistic practices and cultural theories in this society at this time?
• Quality Projects:
• value engaging in authentic artistic processes over making facsimiles
• value contemporary practices of medium, over curriculum that merely recapitulates the history of the medium.
• value investigating over symbolizing
• Challenge young teachers to remain certain of their vocation to teach while becoming increasingly uncertain about the cultural position from which they will teach.
• Critical to unlearning racism is accurate information about one's own ethnicity and cultural heritage
• Teachers must be willing to decenter themselves by questioning their deepest beliefs, consciously examining the origin of their ideas and interrogating these ideas within the framework of other ways of experiencing and knowing
• Change is made and person'a/political relationships are formed by small, effective exchanges of understanding
• Good art projects encode complex aesthetic strategies, giving students tools to investigate and make meaning
• the use of discipline-centered inquiry
• the construction of knowledge
• teaching and learning that make connections beyond school
• Quality art generates new knowledge
• Assessment Big Picture: developing students as makers, presenters and interpreters of art
• create, present, respond
• It's not our job to assess student artwork, it's our job to assess student learning
• Creating Creative People
• Ability to play
• openness to experience
• an inner locus of evaluation-trust one's own process
• develop the capacity of students to instinctively respond to situations with playful creative behaviors
• Engaging Social Issues
• acknowledge the dilemma - all forms of representation diminish the subject because they are never as complex as the total reality of the subject
• avoid the sense of speaking about silent absent others, by making use of artist statements, interviews and video clips
• free students from the limiting terminology of dominant, oppressive cultural practices
• clean up classroom language
• silently send a message about who is welcome in this class
• include gay artists in your curriculum

As I was reading her different ideas about creating curriculum I was thinking about the curriculum that I am making. I'm really interested in what she had to say about play and possibilities in artwork because that is the big theme or idea that I want to explore throughout my curriculum. We always talk about wanting to create a creative environment in the classroom, but other criteria often seem to get in the way of free creativity and expression. I hope to teach/discuss different ideas and techniques to students so that they can take those skills and concepts to create something new and from themselves. I also was thinking a lot about being aware of the culture of the students that I will be teaching. I am student teaching in Washington D.C. which has a predominantly black student population. I need to consider this as I create my curriculum. I also need to become more aware of my own culture, like Olivia talked about.