JR, street artist in Groningen….and the frustrations of the art teacher

Every art teacher has had this experience I think.  You visit a museum or art gallery and find yourself wishing you could take your pupils to see this particular exhibition. 

Today was one such occasion for me. The artist involved was the French street artist JR and the place was Groningen in the far north of the Netherlands. It’s a two and a half hour trip on the train for me to get there, and if I was traveling from the school where I work it would be more than three hours. With such a time frame, a school visit, no matter how appropriate the exhibition isn’t going to happen.

In the case of the JR exhibition the ‘you just must see the real thing’ sort of recommendation isn’t really relevant. The exhibition doesn’t actually have the ‘real’ artworks. They are out on the streets in cities around the world interacting with the contexts and locations in which they are placed. In JR’s case the work is often on a huge scale and in places with serious political or social tensions. What we see in Groningen is documentation and museum installations that help give a feel for the scale of the work and includes supporting films that document and interview the participants involved. Together, multiple narratives are presented, the life and development of an artist, and the aims an objectives of each individual project.

When seen as a whole, this large scale presentation of the Frenchman’s work, has an effect that I know would have been so interesting to show my pupils. We’ve recently been talking a lot about street art and in doing so have also looked at JR’s large scale photographic work. Whilst in class at school, we have so many possibilities to look at art, a large lcd screen at the front of the class for images and films and pupils have their own computer screens to carry out further web-based investigations. But a walk into a museum, even if it is only to see this sort of documentation does bring other benefits and a chance to reflect and discuss in different ways than in class.

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As I said at the beginning, we won’t be going to Groningen.  Maybe I’ll share someone the photographs I took today with my classes.  But there will be other museum visits at other times that are more feasible. It is crucial to those of us in education to continue making such visits when we can, to give a non-screen based experience of art and culture to our pupils.

 

 

An unfinished CLIL plan, or is it PLIL? With thanks to Bruce Springsteen

I call it PLIL, because this is more like playing and language combined, rather than pure content as we are more familiar with from CLIL (Content and language integrated learning).

I’m always interested in finding new ways to combine a little extra culture and language into my lessons.  This is an idea that arose kind of by accident in an online exchange of messages a few weeks ago with a couple of friends.  The messages ranged through various themes, but as I remember it, Bruce Springsteen was mentioned, Cathy, one of those involved in the discussion is a big fan.  Also, rather randomly, a woman riding a horse was also mentioned……and that was, as it turned out, not an unimportant point.

To amuse myself and, I hoped, the others in the discussion, I decided to write a short fictious exchange between me and an imaginary stranger (the woman on the horse!).  The challenge I set myself was to try and squeeze in as many Bruce Springsteen song titles as possible into my short text.  I am reasonably familiar with Springsteen’s body of work, but after Googling his musical biography I was surprised by the sheer amount, but also the number that were going to be useful for this challenge.

The titles available dictated to a large degree where the narrative headed, but in a way that was the fun of this word puzzle.  It is all about playing with language and in my art and culture CLIL classroom that is very much the sort of area that I like to search out and make use of.  In this case selecting out the words and phrases that are loaded with possibility and then working out ways to link and connect them without altering any grammar or phrasing in the existing titles.

The result of my own puzzling went as follows:

I saw a woman on a horse yesterday,

I asked were you ‘Born in the USA’?

Yes, she said, in the ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’

And ‘Growin Up’ I asked

Mostly near ‘Harry’s Place’ she replied

So this isn’t exactly your’s or my ‘Home Town’ I remarked

No, not ‘This Hard Land’ she said, ‘I’m working on a Dream’

You ‘Walk like a man’ she went on,

I’m ‘Outlaw Pete’ I said as threateningly as I could

Am I being ‘Held up without a gun’?

I was hoping for some ‘Easy money’ I said

Go and jump in ‘The River’ she replied……and rode off.

I haven’t actually tried this activity in class yet, but I plan to soon. I’m not a music teacher, but within my broader culture lessons this can certainly find a place.  I think my third years (aged 15) could have a pretty good go at this.  We will doubtless end up in discussions about which artists and musicians are the best to use.  They’ll have their own favourites.  But it will be interesting to see if they offer such content and grammatically rich pickings.

In my work as an artist, I spend a lot of time playing with images and forms, working out ways to combine and connect them.  It is an approach I love to make use of in the classroom too.  It maybe with paint, collage or other materials, but I really don’t see this form of play with words as being so very different to that.

Studio progress April 2022

Just for those who find it important to know….each one is about a metre across and are oil and acrylic on shaped MDF panels.

A classic poem in a CLIL context in the art room

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

Combing content and language in the learning process

For a while now monsters of one kind or another have been a feature of the lessons that I give to my groups of twelve-year-old pupils.  We’ve done various drawing assignments, made clay gargoyles, and dipped into art history by looking at the work of the likes of Hieronymus Bosch.

With these classes, being bilingual learners (Dutch children, being taught across their timetable in English in order to super-charge their acquisition of the English language), I am always looking for ways of enriching the practical lessons with elements of language beyond simply using it for instruction.  For example, recently I have had the class writing haikus that were inspired by the clay heads that we made together.

This year though I decided to branch out in a slightly different direction and make use of Lewis Carroll’s poem The Jabberwocky.  The monsters connection was obvious, but how to work with it with these children who are only eight months into their experience of bilingual education was the question.  Would they be ready to deal with this curious piece of literature?

I needn’t have worried; they were up to it.  When I asked them to read the poem for themselves and underline all the nonsense words, they were able to complete this first challenge without any problem at all, their vocabulary being sufficiently developed to spot the words in amongst the text.

Next, we spent time thinking of alternative words that could be used to replace the nonsense in the middle section of the poem.  Again, no real problem.  An occasional grammatical error or slip in the spelling perhaps, but they were definitely onto it, and understanding the intention completely.

The fun and laughter really started when I asked them to come up with their own nonsense words for the first and last verse.  At this point I wondered if the imaginary words they created might end up having an English or a Dutch feel to them.  It was of course all nonsense……but to me, the words that they were coming up with did have a distinctly English twang to it and they generally nestled perfectly well into the context of Carroll’s poem.

The link below allows you to download a step by step guide to the language part of the lesson.

jabberwocky-lesson planDownload

With this language component of the lesson series complete, we moved on with enthusiasm to work on a more than five-meter-long group drawing of our own Jabberwocky.  The result of the drawing project can be seen here, but how exactly we arrived at the composition and in what order we did things, are details I’ll save for another post.

Boys choosing fashion design….as sign of changing times?

In 2015 I wrote a piece on this blog (entitled “Gender roles in the classroom”) about a situation in lessons where I give a class of 15-16 year olds a choice of practical assignments.  There is an architectural design assignment and a fashion design assignment.  The two variations are well balanced I feel and require similar amounts of effort and creativity on the part of the pupils.  I provide both possibilities with a good contextual build up and frame the challenges up for the pupils so that they have a very clear idea on what is on offer.

The post from 2015, seven years ago, referred to the fact that whilst a reasonable number on girls would choose the architecture assignment, there seemed to be an unbelievable reluctance amongst the boys to pick up the fashion challenge.  In 2015, I was pleased to have a total of one boy from several teaching groups who did.

However, in the intervening years I seem to be observing a change going on.  Year on year, the fashion designing boys in my groups has been starting to change.  Statistically the numbers involved in my classes aren’t big enough for concrete conclusions to be drawn, but there really does seem to be a bit of a movement in a particular direction.  This year I’ve reached the point where there are 50% of the boyswho have chosen the fashion route ahead of the architecture, something of a seismic shift in this limited creative sample.

It leads be to wonder if there is anything significant going on here.  Is there a switch away from the idea that anything involving clothes is only for girls?  Is there greater acceptance that role models and expectations of behaviours aligned purely to gender and choices have moved on? 

I’d like to think, certainly within the school where I teach, that that second point is the case.  It isn’t that we have an educational institution that is a utopia of acceptance and respect for all issues that in anyway touch on gender, education, behaviour and related areas.  But it is certainly true to say that great steps have been taken in the last ten years or so.  The entrenchment of a boy group and a girl group in each class is not what it once was I feel, maybe this reflects changes in society a broader level too?  But whatever the reasons, I’m certainly happy to see that pupils feel a freedom to choose in this area at least the assignments that interest or suit them the most.