Blog 3

After reading Sylvia Kind's ideas about children's art, I found myself considering a "larger picture", and my own past art experiences. Kind explains the drawbacks of a developmental view of teaching art, and yet, from my perspective as I was growing up, that seemed to be exactly what was being taught to me, especially in junior high and high school. I can remember art teachers who told the class "do this, and when you've figured it out, try this next". It seemed so sequential, and at the time I can remember once asking "I want to do things this way", and being told that my way was "weird", thus leading me away from experimentation! A frustrating experience, and one I think Kind would have some problems with. Her model of "representational performance" seems to encompass a larger view of the student as a learner. Each student brings their own "context" with them into the art classroom - their own individual strengths, experiences, and desires for growth, and an art teacher has to be able to adapt to that context as much as the student adapts to the context of the art class. It does not mean the art teacher no longer teaches skills, because they should. It just means that kids have to have the freedom to explore things, and then contextualize the exploration. The biggest issue I see with Kind's model is assessment. What aspects of her model are assessed? Can a child still show growth even if they do not complete an assignment, or it turns out "poorly" in the teacher's or the child's eyes? I found it interesting that Kind speaks to how children will often be primarily concerned with the artwork looking like they expect it to look like, not necessarily any other goal the teacher has in mind, and not necessarily what the teacher thinks it should look like! That seems to lend itself to some measure of self-assessment.