ART IN EDUCATION:
A LECTURE/WORKSHOP ON THE SYNERGISTIC USE OF ART IN CURRICULUM
Given to the Participants of the Association of National-Plus Schools’
Annual Teachers’ Conference for Primary and Secondary Teachers
Saturday, 16 February 2008, 9 am – 4 pm
Sekolah Global Jaya
Jl. Raya Jombang Pondok Aren
Sektor IX, Bintaro Jaya Tangerang 152244
Jakarta, Indonesia
By Ariel E.G. Ponce ©“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
- Stephen R. Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“A creative problem requires a creative solution.”
- A.E.G. Ponce
Lectures in Layout Classes
ART AND EDUCATION“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” what a great opening line! From nothing everything… Could there ever be a greater display of artistry than this. Allow me to elaborate: When people make artworks it is merely an extension of his environment, that is why we have terms like utilitarianism or art which is an extension of its use, metaphorical, which is art that has another deeper meaning from that which we are seeing, or realistic, which pertains to replicating exactly what we see. But for all the technical jargon that art has come up with nowadays, artists are doing nothing more than copying or basing their works from the original. Oh sure, one can interpret art in one’s own way, but the basis is still the same… the Creator’s original artwork. Now allow me to take that point one step further, because when the Great Creator made His handiwork He had no basis for anything at all. Nada, zip, zilch, zero, kosong! All He had was a heart for creation and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the mark of a true artist.
Therefore it is a privilege to know that we, having been made in His likeness, are an extension of that artistry. We in our own way are seeds of creativity and artistry just waiting to be born. Now I know that there are some of you here who, to quote our dear Head of School Mr. Dean Marks,“ couldn’t draw a straight line to save his life,” rest assured that each and everyone of us here present has running within his or her veins the creative spirit that originated from the Great and Almighty Artist Himself. So no excuses now! There are indeed levels of skill involved and there are also those fortunate enough to have been born with “silver brushes in their mouths” but then again whether your artistic capabilities are as huge as icebergs or as miniscule as an atom, it is still there dying to come out.
This workshop’s goal then is to allow each and everyone of us to tap into our “creative” and “artistic” sides in order to create our own “masterpieces” so to speak which I am sure everyone still has no idea of at this time. We will eventually find out through the course of this workshop.
THE FOUR ASPECTS OF DESIGN: CREATIVITY DRILLSSome of you here may be familiar with the four elements of design which are: 1) balance; 2) emphasis; 3) rhythm; and 4) unity. Even the late great Art Theoretician Rudolf Arheim added more to the mix when he added growth, tension, and movement to the mix. I prefer, however, to simplify things. The contribution of industrial design to this is 1) FUNCTION, 2) FORM, 3) TIME and 4) COST. Now I considered this because I felt that in order for one to really come up with a much more practical approach to design and creativity these four must be utilized. And with a largely utilitarian approach that industrial design takes, I believe that these four “elements of industrial design” will fit our academic needs so much more. What is teaching anyway but another tool for effective education!
FUNCTIONStephen R. Covey in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” stated that we should always begin with the end in mind. In design one should always know what one wants to create. Sorry but “getting lucky” is not a preferred option in design. This means that one should always establish the goals or what the end product should be before one builds. If you’re planning to create a chair then what are its functions? Is it to sit on? Does it need to recline? How heavy is its maximum weight capability? Or any other area that needs to be addressed. You need to ask the proper questions.
FORM“FORM ALWAYS FOLLOWS FUNCTION but not necessarily so” is a very famous line used by one of our facilitators in one of the workshops I attended for industrial design. This meant that whatever functions you have in mind for your design will be what it will generally look. A chair has a back to lean on, knee high so that one merely folds the knees in order to sit and made of specific materials catering to specific weights.
TIMEThis answers the basic questions pertaining to duration. How long will it take to build one, how long will it need to last, how long does it take to wait for materials to arrive, how many working days to finish, how much quicker if done with overtime… These are basic questions that will need to be answered if one is to truly make an idea feasible. Time constraints always affect a product’s final outcome.
COST
The reality of funding can never be denied. Whether it will take on a physical rupiah sign or an internal psychological cost, this aspect of design can never be removed from the scenario. How much will it cost to make one? How much physical effort am I willing to put into this project? Who pays for this? In the end the final outcome will always depend on how much we’re all willing to spend or put into it.
THE WORKSHOP PROPERUtilizing the participants’ preferred subject or expertise, the participants will be divided into groups. Once this is done they will then be given a problem that will allow them to design or redesign a product, in this case THE COMMON BUTTERKNIFE, wherein they can make use of the Four Elements of Industrial Design. They will then be presented to the group and shown how it answers the basic elements of function, form, time and cost. The works will be scrutinized and questioned for effectiveness.
LEARNING TO LET GO: WHY IDEAS WORK BETTER WHEN FORGED IN THE FIRES OF CRITICISM(After the presentation and interaction, the participants will then shift the presented output to one of the other teams, and work will resume but this time incorporating the corrections and contributions of other participants.)
Perhaps one of the hardest things an artist can do is to let go of his creation. Personal attachments seem to have a tendency of developing over time; the longer one works on something the stronger the tendency is to think it belongs only to you. This then is a designer’s worst nightmare! Because once a piece comes into public display, it comes under public scrutiny. No idea is etched on stone; to become an effective designer, teacher or instructor, one must be willing to let go of an idea, view it from another point of view, recognize flaws and be quick to correct when needed.
APPRENTICESHIP: THE EARLIER, THE BETTER
The great part about teaching kids, I’ve discovered after having taught in both primary and tertiary levels, is that the earlier you catch a problem the easier it is to fix. A paper I once wrote on this subject reflects strongly the reasons why it is essential to equip at an earlier age. And in skill development, the earlier the child is taught, the better he or she gets. Point of mastery comes only if they get to do something far longer than the other kids.
The following are my reflections on skill transfer and development:
1.
A DEMO IS BETTER THAN A THOUSAND LECTURESA professor of mine once said, “Theory pales before practice.” Nothing can be truer especially in the arts. I have personally witnessed this statement prove true time and time again as I demo taught basic to advanced illustration techniques to my students at the tertiary level. This is perhaps one reason why TV art and crafts shows or cooking shows are a big hit among a lot of people; they make stuff easier to make by showing people how to do it. Never disregard the ability of a demo. It works!
2.
ART IS MORE PATIENCE THAN SKILLWhile some may still consider that Art is a domain best left to the artistic, this is one consideration that I will beg to differ in. I’ve always believed that a patient unskilled man who is willing to learn will always beat the skillful lazy man any day. So it is with our students as well. We need to teach something more than just skill; we need to teach the enthusiasm to learn and the patience to stick to something to the point of mastery. Not only is this feasible in the arts but I believe in all subjects as well.
3.
PRACTICE DOES NOT ALWAYS MAKE PERFECTThe old adage that goes, “practice makes perfect,” is so fraught with misconceptions that it is no longer an accepted one, especially in the arts. It doesn’t matter how long one practices on something, if the foundation is bad, then one is merely executing repeatedly a wrong technique. And no amount of practice will ever make it correct. Like I said before, skill transfer and mastery only come if it is started at an earlier age level, but if the foundation is awry then the effort is wasted.
PARADIGM SHIFT: CREATIVITY IS THE KEYArt in education has always been confused with Arts and Crafts in the classroom. For years, the Arts have been relegated to the position of painting, cut-outs, drawing and coloring projects because for many people art’s sole purpose is nothing more than to improve manual dexterity and fill in slots when there’s nothing else to teach or to “keep idle hands busy”. How totally sad and for an Art Educator like me, totally demeaning! Having been one (an Art Educator that is) for more than 15 years, art for me has taken a deeper meaning other than the study of Canaletto, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Matisse, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Dali, Picasso or even Warhol. For me, art in education has come to mean “art that is firmly entrenched in education,” not pictures of masterpieces on books and walls but of art as a tool for effective education and integration. A synergy, if you will, of creativity and knowledge. A complete use of both hemispheres of the brain, not a drop wasted, every talent and area used!
For hundreds of years, education has remained unchanged. Sure, technology has done wonders in transforming the classroom into a futuristic reality that once can only be seen in sci-fi flicks; but believe me when I tell you that not too many classrooms have escaped the reality of the classroom as this: “one person standing in front of a group of people while lecturing or sometimes writing on a board.” Some will, of course, disagree and say “But I’m using PowerPoint presentations with a digital projector, Mr. Ariel!” or “I teach students in the computer room and each student has one computer each, it’s not the same thing!” And in response allow me to quote Ms. Zsa-Zsa Gabor when she said, “But of cohs they’re the same dahling!” It’s a different type of banana but it’s still a banana nonetheless. No matter how much technology we bring into play, the reality is that they are nothing more than tools. The blackboard has shifted to a white board, a daylight screen, or a computer monitor; the pencil and pen with a mouse and a digital stylus; and libraries with downloaded e-books or images. And no matter how much more gadgets technology will add to the fray, there is truly only one aspect of education that will remain unchanged: THE EDUCATOR.
What then is the role of the educator in the entire process? Allow me to tell you an interesting story…
In 1989, I had the privilege of working in an animation studio. This was before computers handled the bulk of the work. In essence, we dealt with hand-drawn animation. And we did pretty well, if I would say so myself. That is until an Oscar award winning animator showed up at our doorsteps; the man’s name was Bill Kroyer. Some of you may know him as the innovative animator behind the infamous Fritz the Cat and Fern Gully, some of you may be totally clueless of who the guy is. Anyway, he had this weird and unheard of notion of combining hand-drawn and computer-generated images (CGI) for a pilot of an animation series he dubbed, “Computer Warriors.” Our company completed the show, but alas it never went beyond the pilot stage. Some of my colleagues went around saying that it will never happen, that computers will never ever replace the ability of the human artist to interpret emotions or to feel the flow of movement. And that, as they say was that. Unfortunately a few years later, a company by name of Disney started a weird trend by allowing the Beast to dance with Belle in a ballroom that was created by a computer, and suddenly the animation world was never the same again. From a department of more than 150 ink-and-paint employees, the computer allowed the same task to be done by a team of four to six people, from an FX crew of seven to none and from a camera crew of 25 to only 2 (and they never even handle a camera at all). What on earth happened? The animators were right! No machine could ever replace the ability of man to re-interpret movement and emotion, but for all the rest of the labor force, unfortunately it could and eventually did. Today the some of the best computer animators are those that were originally trained as hand-drawn animators and for those who remained faithful to the cause of hand-drawn animation, they are slowly dwindling with the passage of faster hardware and better animation software and their thick-headed refusal to accept the winds of change.
So what is the moral of the story? It is this… That if we as educators persist in the notion that tried and tested methods are enough, then we risk the dangers of stagnancy but worst than that we not only doom our minds to this malady of tunnel-vision education but the minds of our students as well.
The words “paradigm shift” has been bandied and tossed about nonchalantly these past few years, but do we really grasp the whole concept of a shifting or for that matter a paradigm that has already shifted. While the use of the word has gained popularity these past few years, especially in the academe, amazingly it was in 1962 that Thomas Kuhn wrote “The Structure of Scientific Revolution”, and fathered, defined and popularized the concept of "paradigm shift". Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions", and in those revolutions "one conceptual world view is replaced by another". Think of a Paradigm Shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change.
A paradigm shift is in order then. To submit ourselves to the reality that not only is the world changing but our students as well. Remember when video ping-pong games used to just be played with a rectangular bat and a square ball utilizing only three colors? Well they’ve gone a long way now! Now they have images that rival near realistic images and movements and sound FX and music that can only be described as amazing. This is what we are all competing with. Students that have no qualms about saying the word “Boring!” over and over again because they’d rather be in front of their monitors shooting “aliens,” “soldiers” and “warriors” in their mad dash for over-stimulation. Stimuli have taken on a whole new meaning and unfortunately for us teachers it means only one thing – COMPETITION!
I believe that it is now time to fight fire with fire. That in order for us to be able to compete we need to equip ourselves with the very same tool that spawned these high-stimuli gadgets… CREATIVITY! If there is truly such a thing as “Art in Education” it is this: the use of creativity and imagination to create impacting and effective lessons in class.
WHY? WHY NOT!After all these, what have we come to understand about Art and Creativity in Education? If we are to truly believe that Art in Education is much more than paints and cut-outs then it’s high time we considered the words of the late great President John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he said:
“Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say ‘Why not?’”
A time for change is in order, and the time for change is now. Please use your creativity to create new and diverse vistas of imagination that will challenge our children to new heights; to make the classroom a place of discovery and learning. Because we are creating our very own masterpieces in the form of young malleable minds that will eventually be our future. Teachers, in your classrooms are blank canvases that are awaiting your palette and brushes of creativity to fill them with the beauty that has so inspired each and every one of us: the “masterpieces” that will eventually be our gift to the master and to the world, OUR STUDENTS. ©
REFERENCESArnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1969
BALLARD, Lisa and SIEBERT, Lori. Making A Good Layout. North Light Books, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1992.
COVEY, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, A Fireside Book Published by Simon & Schuster, New York copyright 1989.
DESIGN CENTER PHILIPPINES. Lateral Thinking and Creative Block-Busting Techniques, Industrial Design Workshop for Non-Industrial Design Students, 1984.
HOLY BIBLE, The. The New Revised Standard Version, American Bible Society, 1865 Broadway, New York, NY 10023-9980, copyright 1989.
KROYER, Bill. Computer Warriors, Pilot for an Animated Series. Produced by Bill Kroyers Studios, Inc., production work contributed by Island Animation, Incorporated, Philippines, circa 1990.
MCLUHAN, H. Marshall. War and Peace in the Global Village, 192 pages. Gingko Press, Spring 2001.
Morrison, Mike. Becoming a Computer Animator, Sams Publishing, 201 W. 103rd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46290. © 1994.
Ponce, Ariel E.G. Old Dog, Old Tricks: A Paper on the Diminishing Skill Levels of Paete Woodcarvers, submitted to the Art Studies Class, University of the Philippines, 1996.
