Journal Eight
October 21, 2019
#Inspiration
Last week I had the experience of touring fourth graders through the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art. I was very nervous going in but I ended up having an amazing time! I think the exciting part was seeing how well students reacted to open-ended questioning. These theories I learned in the Museum Dialogue reading were easy to use and very effective. By simply observing pieces of art students were able to say a lot about them without knowing their history. Students deduced the mediums, narratives and some of the artists' intentions through me asking well thought out questions that helped guide their thinking. My past perspective on museum tours was that they were strictly informative. For instance, when I went to see the Dior exhibit at DAM, all of the audio recordings that paired with what I was viewing told me about the materials used, the designers life and how or why he made a garment the way he did. This is very different from the experience I provided at Brainy where I provided none of this information. Instead I created an opportunity for students to understand and answer some of these questions for themselves through critical thinking. After touring the museum we created alien soup cans inspired by Andy Warhol. The museum tour itself was an amazing motivation for students as well as an ideation. They were able to draw in heir sketchbooks while we toured to collect ideas and express themselves. For me as an individual this was an eye-opening experience. In my future teaching I want to utilize local museums or art shows to expose my students to art in their communities, motivate my students and inspire my lesson plans! I used the hashtag "inspiration" to reflect how I felt over the museum tours. The piece I created is an image of a real butterfly with colorful paint brush strokes projecting outwards from it. The butterfly is representative of my transformation up to this point, now that I am connecting the dots in my learning in the Art Edu program I am opening up to all of the exciting, colorful and bright opportunities I can bring to students in the future.