Having read the What is contemplative pedagogy? and listened to the A Short Introduction to Contemplative Pedagogy, I felt that the Drawing Lab text by Michelle Salomon was a good fit for considering how develop students thinking in an experiential way. Additionally, as someone who runs Short Courses for UAL, it was interesting to choose a text that was based around workshops. Likewise, as the Life Drawing tutor for Camberwell Foundation, I was interested to see how the text would define drawing.
The aim of these workshops was to test how memory and drawing relate and how the activity of drawing can operate outside of a standard curriculum. The text considers the writings of de Boisbaudran and John Berger’s seminal text On Drawing. It posits drawing as live encounter and a living recording of memory and sets out to:
“demonstrate another function of drawing, as a scientific, forensic tool used for probing and searching for answers”
Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal Salamon 2018 page 132
I was also interested in how the text considered the role emotions and time have on how we remember
“The muscle memory created by the act of drawing becomes physical, the drawing itself becomes an output, yet the making process leaves a mental imprint. The experience of making a drawing becomes part of the experience of remembering and so, combines the act of remembering with the raw memory.”
Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal Salamon 2018 page 134
In particular when it comes to drawing, the line within a drawing hold emotional resonance and has the potential to communicate the feeling of a moment or memory more precisely than words.
The text also considers the effect mobile devices have on the value of memories for millennials. This is of course something that has to be considered for teachers in how we gather and display information. Perhaps the process of making a drawing can be a counter point to this…
The workshop applied a variety of methods to examine this: muscle memory, remote viewing, suggestibility and recall.
“Feedback from students indicates that these activities support them to develop techniques for achieving higher levels of concentration, leading to enhancements in memory, imagination, intelligence, and feeling.”
Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal Salamon 2018 page 139
The workshops and paper conclude that drawing is undervalued and underused in our curriculum and does indeed help to spark imagination and creativity in students and unlike virtual devices, can help students to remember the experiential feeling of a memory. Long sentence.
References
Michelle Salamon, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, Drawing laboratory: Research workshops and outcomes, 2018