Rationale for my ARP
As mentioned, at the start of this academic year, I unexpectedly lost my teaching hours on CCW Foundation due to the merging of CSM and CCW Foundation and the cutting of all staff outside of the “entitlement” time frames. I have been running short courses with UAL and at City Academy but mostly, I have been teaching drawing and painting at Sunny Art Centre in a one-to-one capacity, helping students to build portfolios for BA applications.
At Sunny Arts, the teaching model is a lot more traditional and instructive. The teaching model I prefer and have been part of at CCW is an active learning model. Encountering this more traditional teaching environment at Sunny Arts has been an interesting and challenging experience and has helped me to further define my teaching practice.
For this project and for my current teaching, I am focusing on the genre of still life painting and drawing. The problem or issue that I am seeking to address is essentially a teaching methodology one. Working in a setting that teaches in a technical and didactic manner, I am trying to feed in my own pedagogic principles which focus on how we as teachers have a responsibility to help the person as well as the artist grow. As such I am focusing on helping students connect with their learning experience through their own connection with themselves and their work.
The questions for my ARP are:
- Can students gain technical accuracy effectively by experimenting and looking in place of technical instruction?
- Does applying NVC principles to pedagogy help students engage on a deeper level with their thinking and making?
Intervention methods: experimental drawing
A methodology I have found useful in forming this connection, is experimental drawing to help students to loosen up and shift their ways of thinking about observational and representational drawing and painting.
Students will make four warm up drawings, each five minutes long:
- Drawing with eyes shut, holding the object (The aim of this is to draw how your object feels, allowing for senses other than your visual perception to take over. I feel this exercise is a useful tool for students (in particular on foundation) to help students to engage with their own making, to not compare their work with others and to hopefully relieve the pressures one’s critical self-places on making something look representationally accurate or “good” whatever that means)
- Drawing whilst looking at and holding the object at eye level and not looking down at the page (this exercise is aimed at relinquishing control and self-criticism. I wanted this task to help students to experience the object through looking and recording the experience of looking through drawing again without having full control on the outcome)
- Drawing the object in the traditional observational way (I ask students to look at their object as if they were a tiny insect moving across the surface)
- Drawing the object without the object (I ask students to turn their back on the object and draw it from memory. I place this one last after students have tried out the previous tasks which have given access/opened other ways of thinking about drawing and making. It feels like it is a middle ground of control and journeying.)
These exercises will be performed at the start of each session with different objects. I hope that students find a growing connection with the exercises and that the repetition of the exercises removes the novelty of them and they become an almost meditative task that breathes connection into their sessions.
These exercises have been successful for defining my teaching practice and for student engagement with experimental drawing and thinking about how we access different lines through different types of thinking and connection. Every student that has done these four warm up experimental drawings is always least interested in the traditional drawing that they produce. These experimental drawing exercises have helped to quickly break down and shift preconceived ideas around the need to control the work that is produced.
We then move onto a still life which students work from with a selection of organic and non-organic objects. Asking students to think back to how they used line, touch and looking in their experimental drawings – to reconnect with sensation and mark making. I am encouraging students to incorporate some of these ways of working in their work. It is important to me that these ways of making are also ways of thinking, and I want these exercises to help open doors for students to think about their work in new ways and find new connections with themselves and the work they make.
The importance of looking
When working on the still life set ups, I ask students to try to really look at what they are working with and to be conscious of not filling in their drawing or painting with what they think they know the object to look like. This is a key part of how I am trying to teach. As such, I am encouraging students to take regular breaks and I am also discussing ways of looking and how an object is not just a surface, it has a weight, a texture and is three dimensional. This links back to the exercises in the experimental drawing and again asks students to connect with line, with mark making and thinking about how they move. Looking is about connection and commitment to what you are engaging with.
Intervention methods: NVC communication
The core fundamentals of teaching and learning through NVC are:
Helping students connect with their intrinsic motivations for learning, rather than extrinsic motivators such as reward or punishment. I will apply NVC communication in my conversations with students. For example, an NVC conversation with a student could go as follows:
Observation: I noticed that you stopped working on this section of your drawing
Feeling: are you feeling frustrated
Need: because you would like to have figured out a solution by now?
Request: would you like some help with that problem?
This way of communicating shows empathy and asks the student if they would like help.
Contextual resources in the sessions with students
I am also showing students a slideshow of different artists who make still life work and asking them to make work in these different styles if they are interested in them:
Classic: Pieter Claesz
Simple but classic: Giorgio Morandi
Collage/deconstruction: Patrick Caulfield
Looser/freer: Ghang Zhao
Graphic style: Hilary Pecis
Incorporating your own identity but borrowing from history: Chen Fei
Research methods
I will use the format of a Likert Scale to record the responses from students in relation to the experimental drawings they undertake and the NVC style communication techniques that I will implement. In addition to this, I will also do an email interview in the format of a handful of questions to get more of an overall impression of how students are finding both forms of the intervention.