This week I want to talk about a concept that continues to come up in class discussion and in my reflections about teaching experiences, which is choice-based teaching. When I first learned about the concept of choice-based teaching, I thought the idea sounded like an amazing learning concept, but it also seemed abstract and difficult to achieve. The approach Katie and I are taking to lesson planning and art projects is relating a lot to a choice-based classroom. Our approaches are not entirely choice-based, but the way we are allowing students to develop their own plans and choose their own materials for an art project seems correspondent to a totally choice-based classroom.
I think I have been so drawn to creating student choice because of my art experiences in elementary, middle, and high school. Growing up in really small schools in rural South Dakota, the art programs had very little funding and the curriculum was basic. In the projects I remember creating, we were usually limited to using typical materials and processes (drawing, painting, pointillism, etc.) to make very surface-level art projects. I think this lack of choice throughout my early experiences with art has encouraged me to allow my students to have a lot of choice in their art experiences.
Words I associate with choice are: variety, flexibility, creativity, open-ended, connections, interpretation, experimentation, discovery, trial and error, and process. I thought about how I could incorporate these words when deciding the choices I wanted to make for my own artwork.
To represent this new understanding of choice-based curriculum, I decided to experiment further with the technique introduced in Courtney and Layne’s peer teaching lesson. I chose a self-portrait photo that I took in a film photography course during my sophomore year, which I cut into four segments and then sewed together and embroidered into. I wanted to continue to work through my weaving process that I began earlier this semester, for which I #rethreaded strands of paper that will be the weft of a larger weaving. This deconstructed and reconstructed photograph will eventually become one of the strands in that weaving.
