14.2 - Looking Back

It goes without saying that I definitely learned a lot in this class, and I appreciated it from a teachers' perspective because I had the flexibility to make work about concepts that I wanted to explore, while also learning new skills and techniques. In a way, this class provided me with a valuable student perspective, which will inform how I proceed as a teacher. 

Learning Objectives:

1. Get more familiar with programs like Procreate, so that I can feel comfortable guiding future students with them.

• I think I met this goal, for now. There is always more to learn, and if I had another eight weeks and another opportunity for a Blank Assignment, I'd revisit circuitry. I enjoyed the prompt of building the switch/LED into the narrative of the drawing, so it's interactive. It invited a playful response; though with more practice with circuitry I'd like to explore its conceptual capacities. 
  
  
• I loved building our robot. (What? Who said that?) I want to build robots with my future students – it was so much fun, so collaborative and everyone was really excited about their pieces. Art Kween is my pride and joy. The energy that robot creation brought to our class was what attracted me to art education in the first place: student investment, problem-solving, and the joy of learning something new. 
  
  
• I love Procreate – especially since I learned how to create animations on it! I'm still not a master, but I know way more now than I did when I wrote these learning objectives. 
  
  
• Tinkercad can buzz right the heck off. I stand by that. 

2. Build a visual and technical vocabulary so I can effectively teach new media in the future. 

• I suppose this goes hand-in-hand with the above objective. I don't think that I will ever have an encyclopedic knowledge of new media. But I think I know enough about what the possibilities are that I can, when planning, incorporate these types of lessons without being intimidated by them. The interactivity of New Media work has the ability to capture student engagement in a different way than more traditional media, because it's almost unexpected. It expands student ideas for what art is, and what art can be. And it supports the idea of the art room as both a studio and a learning lab. 
  
  I will say though that I noticed that I've started to build my own visual and technical vocabulary within the context of new media, which has informed my evolution as an artist. During Advanced Sculpture last semester, I looked with a gimlet eye at the laser cutters. But after a session, it completely demystified it. 
  

3. Make work that meets the moment.

• Well, the damn moment keeps shifting. And I think I've kept up. I think that the conceptual flexibility of the assignments allowed me to more deeply consider how materials can connect to/influence the concept. Plus, it felt like there was a new government-sponsored social ill to respond to every other week. I think that in some pieces I did meet the moment, but in other pieces I wanted to take a break (see, Hot Dog Bomb vs. Wherefore Art Thou). But perhaps that's meeting the moment too, because dark times require light.