Edward Hopper, stories and content and language integrated learning

The work of some artists just screams out for us to start speculating about what is going on, what is being said or thought, what is the backstory or what has just happened.  The work of the twentieth century American artist Edward Hopper is one such example.  His lonely scenes seem loaded with hidden narratives playing out between the characters pictured.

This fact has resulted in the excellent book In Sunlight or in Shadow: a collection of short stories inspired by Hopper’s paintings and edited by Lawrence Block.   It was also behind the 2013 film, Shirley: Visions of Reality directed by Gustav Deutsch. The film draws heavily on the Hopper style and atmosphere as well as framing up of specific images in the fictional narrative of the actress Shirley.

With these sorts of encouragement in the background there were plenty of reasons to turn my attention to Hopper’s work in my art lessons. I was curious to see if my groups of fifteen-year-olds would find the, not so hidden, narratives as accessible and intriguing as I do.

I needn’t have worried, as soon as I put the first image on the screen the discussions started.  We’d watched a short film about Hopper, his work, and his relationship with his wife beforehand to provide a little context.  But with that as a starting point, the class were only too happy to dive onto the internet and choose an image that they were going to focus on for this art, research, and story writing project.  The only restriction I placed on the work that they could choose was that it had to be a painting with either one or two people in it, I felt this would be most useful when we got to the writing stage.

With an image chosen by each individual pupil several steps followed, most of which were done in a purpose made “Hopper research/drawing book”.

• A short Hopper biography was written
• A portrait of the artist was drawn
• The chosen painting was analysed for its compositional and artistic qualities
• The atmosphere/mood was described, along with any dialogue that may have been being said, or thoughts that seemed to be being considered in the image
• A small-scale pencil drawing of the painting was made
• A large-scale ink drawing was also made
• A photographic “restaging” of the composition was made

By the time all these steps had been completed it is fair to say that the pupils knew their own chosen image pretty well, and in many cases had produced an excellently filled research book.

But it was the last step that for me truly brought art and language together.  The assignment was simple, write a very short story that could accompany be Hopper painting that they had chosen.  The limit for the story was to be a mere 100 words as a maximum.  Very short and to the point! I gave them an example that I had written, based on this image.

Enough was enough.  It was time to leave.  Day after day, week after week, always the same story.

So many good intentions.  She just wanted the best for them.  But that arrangement didn’t seem to work in both directions.  She feels drained and empty.  The bus leaves in a matter of minutes.  Is she doubting her decision?  Yes, absolutely, it wasn’t meant to end this way.

Today pushed her over the edge.  Those angry words, the raised voices, a slammed door.  Her mind is made up, there is no going back, teaching isn’t going to be her future.

A couple from my pupils……

It’s always good to look back and reflect on your lesson material.  This was a first time run through of a new idea.  There are certainly aspects I want to work on a little for next year.  But generally, these are relatively small things that refer to the way I teach/introduce the various elements, the content was essentially good.

The story idea remains the central part for me, with it being so short I think (rather usually for me) I may be tempted to get them to hand in an initial draft version for a bit of feedback and the chance thereafter to refine and improve things before the final version is made.  It would seem only fair to try and iron out a few small language issues, as the pupils are writing in English and not in Dutch, their first language.

The luxury of a project week, but the balance has to be right!

The fragmented nature of the school week, with in my case lessons of 60 minutes, often rather dictates what’s possible and what’s not.  A chance to work on a project for a more extended time doesn’t come along so often.

A project week, without the regular timetable offers so many possibilities.  Things that perhaps simply aren’t possible in a series of shorter sessions, or a chance to press on more rapidly to carry a project or theme much further than you might normally do.  Yet, despite such potential opportunities, often the results of a project week don’t make the best of these chances.

When I first entered education, I was told, ‘get your lesson material right, and the rest will normally follow’, a project week is no exception to this rule.  Sometimes judging the amount of time needed by pupils to complete their tasks can be a challenge and with the quantity of tasks needed to fill a whole day of activities.  But above all what seems to be crucial is variety in work forms, along with a series of cut-off points where a new phase in the project begins.

I have just designed and completed a project that ran for two four-hour sessions.  It had a series of inter-related, but distinctively different parts to it and focused on a number of themes and skills:

In a little more detail these steps ran roughly in this order:

By the end of the first day, all the manipulated photographs were presented in a signal digital artwork.  The second day offered a longer session focusing on two activities, but the pupils involved had to choose only the one they felt most drawn to:

The group I was working with was a class of 32, academically strong 13 and 14 year olds.

Looking back at the project and having discussed the way it ran with the pupils themselves, I see only very minor adjustments to be needed for a future rerunning of the assignments.

Below are the results of the project, the 3D design work, using Tinkercad.com as a design tool still have to be printed, but the documentation of the results shows how well the pupils picked this up.

Should you be interested in the specific lesson material I used for the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch, I’m happy to share it.

Night School – an online (and in school) exhibition of where I work

A few weeks ago, as a sort of trailer for this post, I published a single drawing I had made of the school where I work.  Now the full set……

Night School

I have worked at Maasland College in Oss, the Netherlands for more than twenty years. I teach, I paint in my own studio at home, I draw when I travel, and yet in all that time I have never made a drawing of my workplace. Time for a change! A few months ago I started with a first drawing. Happy with the result, I continued. It then became a series of nine drawings of different corners of the school, based on photographs I took early on winter mornings when it was dark outside and the corridors were empty, almost, you could say, a kind of Night School.

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Night School

The school community will be able to see the exhibition firsthand, everyone else will hopefully enjoy the digital version here.

They are a little different to the images that I normally make, but certainly form a good set.  You can find these drawings and other series of my studio work at my recently renovated website:

https://petersansom.art

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? – The graphic novel, language and creativity combined

I have to mark a lot of reports.  I teach a unique Dutch cultural subject which translates as Cultural and Artistic education. It potentially touches on all sorts of cultural themes, visual art, architecture, film, theatre, fashion, photography, street art and design in all its forms.  A large part of the subject is giving the pupils (aged 15-16] a kind of cultural orientation.  As teachers we provide the class with cultural input, experiences and excursions and the pupils reflect on what they have seen or done.

It’s a subject that I love teaching alongside my more practical orientated art lessons.  However, with quite large classes, and multiple groups to teach, the reflection part does often mean that a significant number of reports are written and in turn, must be read and marked.

Recently I watched movies in class with three different groups, around seventy pupils in total and the plan was for them each to produce a 1000-word report.  I decided to offer an alternative, partly because pupils generally like have a choice, partly because I know I have creative spirits in all my classes who love to draw when they can, and yes, partly for myself to break the boredom of having to read so many reports.  The new approach was to make a more concise report (and in terms of text much shorter) in the form of a two A4 page graphic novel inspired design.

I gave those who chose this more creative route an extended deadline that stretched over the Christmas holiday, hoping that they would respond well to a less rushed time frame.  Did it work as I would have liked?  Yes absolutely, both in terms of content and design.  And oh, so more enjoyable to grade and give feedback on.

Educational aims

The purpose of the assignment is to require the pupils to think carefully about the film we watched and to reflect on how the skills and approaches used by the film makers have been applied.  Ultimately, they are required to explain their own opinions of the film involved, its strengths and its weaknesses.  Having looked through the resulting pieces of work I think I would say that by having to think about which images from the film to recreate the pupils have taken an extra reflective step before beginning on the creative work.

A second, and for me significant extra aim, is for the pupils to combine the use of language with image making and creativity.  My lessons are taught in English, which for these Dutch pupils, is their second language.  The graphic novel form forces a lean and to the point use of language in the text. This is certainly a skill worth learning alongside considering how image and text can be integrated and support one another.

I’ll certainly be using this graphic novel inspired work form again.  I find myself wondering if it could be applied in other areas, a book review perhaps?  Or could it go further?  A diary of a school exchange to another country as a graphic novel, a report on a biology dissection lesson as one?

A Chess set and a social experiment

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post entitled Collaboration, social flow and a search for a school vision.  It was prompted by an afternoon of brainstorming by the teaching staff about the sort of school of the future that we wanted to achieve in the forthcoming years. At the table I sat at, with a group of five of us we found ourselves focussing rather on the social aspects of education.  Exam results are important, but the feeling we had was that a well-functioning social environment is also extremely important.  The sense of well-being, at all levels, of an educational institution also has a significant role to play in a healthy learning environment.

My own personal feeling is that the general levels of social engagement should be given more priority and we should be considering ways of facilitating interaction and in the long-term improving a feeling of wellbeing between pupils and pupils, staff and pupils and indeed also amongst the staff.

I left the discussion afternoon with the feeling that I wanted to do something.  I reflected back on my own secondary school days and remembered with fondness the inter-year football league that was played during the lunch breaks and featured a couple of teams made up of the teaching staff.  It did, back then, undoubtedly bring the school together. 

I’d been sitting on an idea, not unrelated to this, for a while.  A modest step that I could perhaps individually realize.  I decided I was going to make a large-scale chess board and accompanying pieces and then just one day leave them standing in the hall at school, take a step back and see what happened.

Two weeks later after many before and after school drawing, sawing and painting sessions I was finished, plywood pieces on a 120×120 cm board.  I carried it down to the hall after the lunchbreak.  A few groups of pupils were sitting around, taking it easy during a free lesson.  I set it up, took a photo for myself and withdrew to the balcony around the hall to look down on my handy work.  I really wasn’t sure, were the pupils at the school really waiting for a giant chess set?  Would they play?  Would there respect the pieces and leave them where they are meant to be?  Would it just become an ornament that nobody touched?  I had no idea.

I needn’t have worried, literally within two minutes the first game started. The early signs were good!

Since then, we’re a week further on, the board has been in virtually constant use, from early in the morning until the very end of the day. Serious players, beginners and everything in between, often with large groups watching and discussing the action.  It has been such a pleasure to watch.

Often it really hasn’t been the groups of pupils that I’d expected to see.  The problem cases, required to stay behind at the end of the school day have been playing, the youngest in the school, the oldest and yes, the staff too.  I really seems to be working the way I hoped, its fabulous to see, dare I hope that it will continue?  The signs are good, but I’m realistic enough to know that we will have to wait and see!

I find myself pondering what to do next. I have a number of possibilities, but perhaps first up is a sister board for the chess set, but this time the popular Dutch game dammen, comparable to draughts, but played on a larger board and a few small differences in rules. An extra job for after the Christmas holidays!

Collaboration, social flow and a search for a school vision

This week, together with colleagues I spent a couple of hours brainstorming a way towards formulating a new school mission/vision plan.  Prior to the afternoon I’d already given the subject some thought.  I’ve been doing it quite a bit since the Covid interruptions that started back in 2020.  What sort of school environment do I want to work in, and what do I miss at the moment.

Exam results are a subject that often raise their head in such discussions.  They are a very tangible piece of evidence to the successes or failures in any school.  But an overly focussed attention on this the academic success of an institution often leads to a vicious circle of pressure.  Teachers need to perform better to squeeze the best out of their pupils, pupils need to work harder and focus more on the teachers’ message, and the teachers need to be more aware of the needs of their pupils when constructing their lessons, and the pupils need to make the best use of what the teachers offer them.  It all sounds obvious and sensible enough, but this upwards educational spiral can equally become a downward one where pupils point fingers and the shortcomings of their teachers and teachers lament the failures of their pupils.

Within this educational pressure-cooker the pressure builds on all involved, and in the end reaches into most corners of a school.

One of the things that came out of the productive discussion table I found myself sitting at during the mission statement discussions this week reached into this area.  It touched on areas of well-being and state of mind amongst staff and pupils at school, and how by addressing shortcomings in this area we might contribute positively to relationships between:

Staff and staff

Pupils and pupils

and

Pupils and staff

It’s a personal view, but in the classroom, I generally think that we have too much of a ‘them and us’ view when considering the educational process.  Staff and here to teach and pupils are here to learn.  Of course, this is true to a degree, we are in the process together, there should be more space for a sense of ‘we are doing this together’ as opposed to ‘you have to do this’.

We seem to escape this ‘them and us’ relationship on occasions in education, on a school trip, exchange or excursion, a snippet of doing things together, but get back to school and things seem to change back again.

Togetherness, contact and collaboration were, for me, the key words in our brainstorm session.  Steps towards a greater sense of positive wellbeing, where pupils and staff work together on a better flow of contact that stretches beyond the academic level.  Get this right and it will surely bring its own contribution to the academic performance.

Let me repost an earlier piece I wrote on the artist/educator whose work made me first take steps towards entering teaching.  Tim Rollins knew the importance of working together and the benefits it could bring.

Tim Rollins and collaborative educational processes

A treasure hunt, art history and language (CLIL assignment)

When you make an artwork, I’ve always felt that you need to create some sort of hook of fascination in the work that the viewer latches onto quickly and that will hold them long enough to take a proper, more considered view.  Good lesson material is similar, in that you need to catch the learner’s attention, once you have that you then take them to the content that you want them to encounter and understand.  Below is an example of such an approach.

Over the years I have written a large amount of lesson material, my OneDrive and the various websites that I have created are full of it.  One of the problems that arises with this is that you sometimes forget or overlook something that you made at some point that was good material and worked well.  I rediscovered this week exactly such an example.

With the twelve-year-olds that I teach I include a series of lessons that are centred around Renaissance and Northern Renaissance themes.  For our practical lessons we look at one-point perspective and we make a clay monster inspired by Hieronymus Bosch.  The “forgotten” lesson material though was a little art history lesson based around the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from 1563.  I´m not required to teach anything about this particular painting, it certainly isn’t in a fixed curriculum.  This is simply about encouraging pupils to look and to think carefully about pieces of art, trying to show them that art history doesn’t have to be a dry and stuffy place.

The Tower of Babel is great for this.  It has a simple story that is not difficult to understand, it is painted in a very realistic way, but above all, it is packed full of action and detail.  It is this level of detail that is the vehicle for this simple language and art history assignment.

Basically, my aim is threefold:

• Get the pupils to look carefully and in detail at the artwork
• Ask them to create language output inspired by the discoveries they make in the artwork
• Create a fun and playful way of learning that has a gentle form of competition to it using a sort of scavenger-hunt principle

The whole lesson is hung up around the availability of extremely high-resolution photographs of artworks that can be found at various online locations.

Tower of Babel high/resolution image

I ask the pupils to get this image open on their laptop screen and first have a good look round the picture, zooming in and zooming out, taking a good look at everything that is going on.

Then I start my PowerPoint up at the front of the class.  Each slide shows a very zoomed in piece of detail from the painting, along with an arrow pointing above, below or to a side of the detail.  There is also a word, maybe `climbing` for example.  The idea is simply to±

1. Find the detail in Bruegel´s original work
2. Look just beyond the detail in the direction of the arrow
3. Describe or explain what is going on in this `beyond` area, but the sentence that you form MUST include the given word in exactly the form it is given

Returning to this assignment for the first time in a few years it was great to see the pleasure that was had by this particular group of twelve-year-olds, They were searching around a nearly 500 year old painting, laughing at some of the more quirky discoveries they made.  They were enjoying looking at and exploring for themselves a jewel from art history.  Added to this they were also constructing often quite complex English sentences in what is their second language.

I´ll be doing my best not to overlook this half hour activity again next year!

For anyone interested in trying the assignment, my PowerPoint can be found below.

tower-of-babel-clilDownload

“What did you do to the children?”

…said the British customs team as we left the British passport control in Dunkirk. As the last of our group of seventy twelve-year-olds disappeared through the door, all five members of the customs inspectors burst out laughing.  “You could have heard a pin drop as you brought your children through, we have never seen, or heard such a well-behaved school group, it so quiet” she said between her laughs.

Yes, even seventy Dutch twelve-year-olds can be quiet and serious!

Travelling with large groups of school children has its moments.  The chaos, the noise and the feeling that you are heading a flock of sheep.  But occasionally something like this comes along.

As a teacher it does give you a good feeling to get such a compliment!  Was it our very serious (and possibly slightly over the top) instructions? Was it the uniforms of the serious looking customs men and women staring down from their desks? Was it a bit of both? 

Either way, we were happy, the customs people were happy and the kids were quiet…..what is there not to like?

My first post-Covid and post-Brexit international school trip

This really does seem a note-worthy moment to post. So much has happened in the last three years.  In the autumn of 2019 I travelled with 80 or so pupils and a team of colleagues for the last time, the journey being from the Netherlands to visit the U.K. for just under a week.  It was before the pandemic and before the Brexit deal was finalized.

Now three years later we have just repeated the visit for the first time. This time with two groups, one of 71 twelve year olds accompanied by seven teachers and a secon group of 60, mostly fourteen year olds and five teachers. On the program were various outside activities at the location were we stayed as well as a day trip to Oxford, and for the older children also a visit to London.

Reflecting now, from the comfort of having returned, what is there to say, what has remained the same and what has changed?

We’ll leave aside the fact that our travel agency, who organized the main logistics of the trip, let us down to a serious level,. Leaving us with many situations where we were forced to improvise, be creative or simply hang around in the cold waiting for a bus at five in the morning. But what about Brexit or Covid issues?

The main Brexit difference was that now, every single child is required to have a passport, and not just a EU Identity card.  The extra expense of this change was  born by parents and thankfully due to notifying them of it months in advance presented no unexpected problems.  We were also fortunate to have no pupils in our group with complex nationality issues.  Visa requirements have become significantly tighter since Brexit, this is doubtless a bridge that we will have to cross another time.

The Covid part of the story in the end worked out reasonably well, but did leave us a little on edge at times.  There are no real Covid restrictions to travel between the Netherlands and the UK at present.  However the idea of setting off on the trip with people in the bus who were testing positive was a concern.  We didn’t specifically ask pupils to test, I’m pretty sure that we are actually not allowed to do that.   It was the health issues amongst  the staff that was the main concern.  The days before we travelled, one of my colleagues had two family members at home who were testing positive, what if there were more cases amongst the teachers pop up at the last minute?  We needed the full team, and a fully fit team!  It really is an excursion that needs you to be at the top of your game in terms of health to cope with the 16-18 hour working days.

Right until the morning of our departure teachers were testing, thankfully in the end all with negative results.  Did we have pupils with us who might have tested positive?  Quite possibly yes, sitting amongst us in a crowed bus for hours on end.  Did we have an outbreak of pupils feeling under the weather and maybe ill?  Well, that’s a no, despite the tightly packed bedrooms that the pupils slept in. 

Some colleagues were at times definately a little effected by symptoms that could easily have been a relatively light case of Covid.  Did we test whilst in the U.K.? That’s a definite no.  There seemed little to be gained by knowing. We just ploughed on with the excursion.

All in all the trip as a whole felt remarkably similar to the trip of three years ago. There was a bit more hand washing go on before eating, but to be honest, that is about as far as the Covid measures went. But also about as far as the measures really could go in such crouded conditions. Hopefully we’ll be making the same trip again next year, and hopefully the Covid situation will have eased still further, the situation/rules at the border crossing, given the current state of British politics, is anyone’s guess!

A flying start – migrating into the new school year

It might not actually quite be the start of the school year anymore, but it is in its way a flying start. 

The end of school clear out inevitably means empty display spaces come the start of the new school.  This year I decided to make an immediate splash in the biggest space in the school with rapidly made charcoal drawings of birds made by the fourteen-year-olds I teach.

Now as we head into the autumn season of migration in the bird world, it seems appropriate to share the result online.  It’s not an easy display to photograph well, but in real life the transparency of the paper and the darkness of the images combine for ever changing results throughout the day as the light outside changes.