A month or perhaps two without proper school and let the panic begin

Dutch schools have been shut for five weeks.  After the current May holiday there are eight or so weeks until the summer holiday.  In any normal year it is a busy time, with so much to fit in as the end of year approaches.

But imagine that the schools can’t return immediately after the current Spring holiday, and that very well might be the case. What then?  Well, we’ll be continuing with the current distance learning strategies.  The jury is very much out still on how effective the learning and education that is on offer is actually being.  But two things are certain, firstly, education is continuing and secondly, its success or failure certainly won’t be for lack of trying.  The education world at all levels are doing their best in incredibly demanding circumstances.

With this as the background music, in the higher echelons of the Dutch Education system there is already talk of playing catch-up.  The question is being asked, ‘how is the time that the schools are, well, not in school going to be caught up?’  There is talk of next year extending the length of the school day or of shortening the summer holiday to make good the ‘damage’.  But wait a minute, the teaching staff are currently putting in extraordinary efforts to continue the educational process.  This unprecedented situation we find ourselves in is leading pupils and staff to approach learning in some new and innovative ways and judgement is already being made that these cannot possibly be working sufficiently well, and we should be looking at damage limitation and how to make up the ‘lost’ time.

This approach overlooks so much.  During the shutdown young people are still learning.  They are still learning the conventional educational material (maybe temporarily at a slightly less high tempo than normal), but they are engaging with so many other things.  They are being encouraged to work more independently, they are meeting new digital challenges, they are learning more about the world around them, they are learning about the dynamics of a pandemic, they are learning about their relationship with in a broader society and their place within it, they might also be learning about following the news for the first time in their life.  Yes, they might very well return to school with a better understanding of a bigger picture that will stand them in good stead for future their development.

Others may return to school having struggled with the educational challenges thrown at them during the shutdown, that is perfectly true.  But what about those who return having had to deal with unexpected bereavement and loss, or simple anxiety problems that have arisen from the events happening around them that have left them feeling insecure or simply afraid.  Less obvious problems on the surface perhaps, but ones that will have lasting consequences if swept under the educational carpet in the rush to play catch-up.  Education has a wide reach and a duty of care to its pupils in countless areas that go way beyond simple academic achievement, a fact that we should not loose sight of.

Finally, it does have to be asked, what exactly are we trying to catch-up. The integrity of an educational program and the curriculum you might say. Take out two or three months, and we’ll never be able to deliver the pupils to the demarcated finishing line at the age of, say 18. That does rather assume that the content that must be forced in by the age of 18 is absolute and strictly defined. Well, I suppose it is defined by the content of the final exams. So, is the whole idea of the catch-up, and throwing the whole educational sector, pupils and staff under still more pressure, just to be able to pass the exams? Could it just be, that it is the exams that are the problem here, and it is there that we should be looking?

The eyes have it, in the history of art and in teenager art

The human eye has always had a prominent role in the history of art. A statement of the obvious you might say. The tradition of the portrait has been such a prominent feature in art for so long and can indeed be traced back to ancient Egypt. The eyes of a subject are more often than not the focus. The eyes are, as they say, the windows on the soul. The arrival of photography brought new challenges for artists, but even within the modern chapter of art history it has remained relevant and extensively explored.

But here I am less interested in the tradition of portraiture, and more in the eyes, or maybe even ‘an eye’ when it is taken in isolation. The singling out of the eyes, or a single eye, reached something of a peak in the art of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century and the work of the Surrealists in particular.

Un Chien Andalou

Odilon Redon

Man Ray

Man Ray

Rene Magritte

Odilon Redon was more than happy to remove the eye from the human face, to isolate it or combine it with other objects or contexts. Rene Magritte and Man Ray also produced work that see a one-eyed stare coming out of their canvases. And then there is the unforgettable eye sequence in Un Chien Andalou, the film made by Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dalì, a reference that is certainly not for the squeamish.

The eye, as a sensory organ, is of course a crucial to the artist both in terms of perceiving the world around them and realising their own creative work. Without vision, the artistic practice becomes massively restricted. Added to this, we experience our eyes as both tremendously fragile and vulnerable in comparison to much of the rest of our body. These sorts of reasons contribute perhaps to the eyes place in the history of art.

Having made these observations I’m not altogether convinced that these are the motivations why the eye in the drawings of teenagers is at times so extraordinarily prevalent. I have just finished an extensive session of marking of final school exams, where candidates (18-year olds) have documented their working process and drawings that have moved them towards final pieces of work. What has undoubtedly caught my eye is just how many eye paintings, drawings and doodles I have seen.

Maybe it’s not that surprising that YouTube has rather more films about drawing eyes than they have for drawing ears. But what is especially noticeable in the exam candidates’ works is how often the eyes are isolated from the face, so not as a form portraiture, indeed very often they are just a single eye.

Have I got some great theory forming here? Well no, not really. More likely just more questions relating to the subject. Is this more prevalent amongst girls than boys? Is it connected to a fascination in Manga and Anime illustrations with their enlarged eyes? Or is it simply because it is relatively easy to do in comparison to a complete portrait? Do these eye drawings carry some form of symbolic meaning for the young artists involved?

One thing is for sure, they don’t seem to be being made with any great knowledge or insight into the artists’ work that I mentioned earlier, which is a shame, because a little more development of an idea around such a motif, can make it a great deal more interesting, certainly when it is the 137th exam candidate that you are marking!

Parallel Worlds

There was a strange symmetry to today. I was sitting in a hall with about one hundred of our eighteen year old pupils taking their final English exam. Meanwhile, about twenty miles north of where I teach, my daughter was sitting down simultaneously to take the very same exam.

Such a parallel activity inevitably makes you stop and reconsider the pupils in front of you. They sit there ploughing their way through the selection of texts and trying to answer the questions that are designed to split the narrow gaps in possible interpretations. It’s an intensive business, especially on warm afternoon.

Today’s exam was two and a half hours long. Most of the other exams during this two and a bit weeks long test period are three hours long. The sheer length of the sessions all seems rather extreme.

Still Life on corner of exam candidate’s table, May 2018

Many of the pupils present this afternoon are ones that I have taught in the past. And, if I’m honest, have had to work hard at times to keep them focused and motivated during a sixty-minute lesson.  It does kind of beg the question ‘what are we doing sitting them down for such a massive test of concentration?’ Yes, I know it is also a test of knowledge and insight, but make no mistake here, this is a level of concentration that is rarely, if at all, practiced for.

It is certainly not easy for a school to clear sufficient space in timetables to spend too much time giving them three-hour dry runs.  But these are young people who are used to having their days broken up into mostly forty-five or sixty-minute chunks.  Most people simply find sitting still for 180 minutes pretty challenging.

Imagine if you had a driving test that went on for three hours!  Its perhaps not any entirely fair comparison, but it does seem that footballers run into trouble as soon as a match goes beyond the regular ninety minutes that they train for and are used to.

Maybe I’m just seeing the world through my daughters eyes this year a bit too much. Could we not be constructing slightly shorter test? Could we simply cut them into two smaller pieces?  Maybe we should actually be looking at different ways of test altogether….I guess in my heart of hearts that’s really what I think.  But one thing that I feel sure about three-hour exam sessions and sometimes two in a day does seem rather like some form of punishment as a last experience in a child’s secondary school career.

 

 

Educational babies, bathwater and standardized testing

They say that every day in education is different. Generally that’s fairly true, but at the moment it doesn’t really feel like it. Alongside particularly packed timetable at the moment I am ploughing my way through my usual April extra task of being an examiner for the visual arts International Baccalaureate diploma exam. In the course of a month I mark seventy candidates.

The work is all done online and involves a long sit in front of my computer screen at home. Each candidate presents a 10-15 minute interview film where they talk about an exhibition of their work, a 300 word statement, documentation of 20-30 pages of their research/note books and 12-18 images of their main studio work. On the basis of this I have to give an overall grade ranging get from 1 to 20 and write a short report explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the work and justifying how I have applied the marking criteria. All in all, about a forty to forty five minute block for each pupil.

As I said earlier it’s a long sit. But it is actually, as marking of tests and exams go, it’s a really rather interesting test of endurance. The main reason for this is that the IB visual arts exam is perhaps one of the best examples of non-standardized testing. At no point in this exam are candidates tested on predetermined hard information/facts/skills that the exam board passes down as a requirement.

Let’s be clear here, we do examine on technical skill, sensitivity, creativity and imagination in the practical work candidates present, and we also examine on their research and knowledge of their ideas and how they apply them to the practical work. Alongside this we also look that the contextual, art historical and personal references in their work. Not only is the finished product evaluated, but also the working process that leads up to the work being produced.

The fact that this is all examined with a non-standardized test is absolutely right and correct, how else could you examine such a two year process of artistic development? Well there are of course other ways to do this, you could standardize large amounts of the curriculum and also of the test. Tell the teachers and pupils which parts and details of art history they must learn about in order to be able to have a central test for it. You can also have standardized testing for practical work too, I remember doing a, I think, four hour drawing paper at school in the UK and an even longer painting paper spread over a number of days, all based on a series of standardized questions.

The Dutch educational system where I teach uses the variant where the subject teacher in the school examines the practical work and there is a national written paper for the (very specified) art and cultural history syllabus that has to be followed. I have two main issues with this approach, firstly the balance of theory and practical, it’s about 50:50 but I know the pupils end up feeling like the theory work is in the ascendancy. Secondly, and hugely important, the theory and the practical are way too detached.

This is where the IB non-standardized approach shows its strength. Instead of detachment, the art and cultural context MUST be integrated with the practical work. Exactly how, or what, is not specified. If, for example, a particular candidate is particularly interested in environmental issues and has decided to make artworks about such a theme, they are expected to carry out research into this area, the issues involved and other artists who might be making work related to this field. This is all with the aim of stimulating the pupils’ interest by letting them seek out themes that are interesting and relevant to them. Yes, this might mean that they may never stop to study the work of Rembrandt. But does that matter? If a young person and their creativity can be engaged and nurtured into a love and appreciation of art and culture they’ll find out about Rembrandt soon enough.

As I work my way through all my exam candidates (from all over the world) there is great diversity. Diversity in work process, themes and quality. The quality of teaching is important, possibly even more important in this non-standardized approach, as I should perhaps also point out, is the quality of the examining! But the gain is, and it’s a big gain, that candidates have a focus and ownership of their work that is different from a more standardized approach. The creativity, insight and self-motivation that is asked of them is also of huge relevance to them as they continue into higher education, whether that is in an art and culturally related field or not.