Teaching/Art
I was lucky enough to have Frances, a friend of a friend, staying with me this past week. She is a filmmaker who needed a place to stay for a week in New York, and since I have an empty room right now, I invited her to stay in exchange for talking to me about how to structure a unit on digital video for middle school students.
Like all artists, filmmakers make numerous aesthetic choices, large and small, that transform mere moving pictures into films. Frances helped me understand those choices and brainstorm exercises that would be interesting for middle school students and would help them become more conscious about the process of creating art and communicating through video. We talked about lighting, the rhythm of editing, music, scripting versus improvisation, framing, choosing different types of shots, and much more.
As a writer and poet, and friend to artists of many kinds, I am familiar with this language of choice - it is what links all the arts. When I write a poem, I choose one word over another, one metaphor over another, one rhythm or rhyme or slant-rhyme over another. These choices about form deepen the meaning of the writing, by complementing the words or lying in tension with them.
I have always found teaching to be a creative outlet. During my first few years in teaching, I did very little creative writing of any kind. I felt that the creative space in my brain was filled - sometimes to overflowing - by the challenges of designing curriculum, reaching the turned-off or resistant students, and experimenting with yet another way of maintaining order in my classroom.
The other day, as I looked over a first draft of a unit plan given to me by one of the new science teachers, I asked him to think about whether he would introduce concepts first, then do activities to explore them, or reverse the order and allow the students to explore and observe as an introduction to new concepts. I explained that some teachers generally present the ideas first, others let the kids explore first, many use whichever seems most appropriate for the material, and some mix exploration and explanation in still other ways. By reflecting on the possible ways to organize a unit, and making conscious decisions, the teacher takes the material beyond content so that it communicates something to the student about doing science, thinking science, and being a scientist. And that, it seems to me, is one of the aesthetic choices that define the art of teaching science.
Like all artists, filmmakers make numerous aesthetic choices, large and small, that transform mere moving pictures into films. Frances helped me understand those choices and brainstorm exercises that would be interesting for middle school students and would help them become more conscious about the process of creating art and communicating through video. We talked about lighting, the rhythm of editing, music, scripting versus improvisation, framing, choosing different types of shots, and much more.
As a writer and poet, and friend to artists of many kinds, I am familiar with this language of choice - it is what links all the arts. When I write a poem, I choose one word over another, one metaphor over another, one rhythm or rhyme or slant-rhyme over another. These choices about form deepen the meaning of the writing, by complementing the words or lying in tension with them.
I have always found teaching to be a creative outlet. During my first few years in teaching, I did very little creative writing of any kind. I felt that the creative space in my brain was filled - sometimes to overflowing - by the challenges of designing curriculum, reaching the turned-off or resistant students, and experimenting with yet another way of maintaining order in my classroom.
The other day, as I looked over a first draft of a unit plan given to me by one of the new science teachers, I asked him to think about whether he would introduce concepts first, then do activities to explore them, or reverse the order and allow the students to explore and observe as an introduction to new concepts. I explained that some teachers generally present the ideas first, others let the kids explore first, many use whichever seems most appropriate for the material, and some mix exploration and explanation in still other ways. By reflecting on the possible ways to organize a unit, and making conscious decisions, the teacher takes the material beyond content so that it communicates something to the student about doing science, thinking science, and being a scientist. And that, it seems to me, is one of the aesthetic choices that define the art of teaching science.
posted by ms. v. at 5:23 PM
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