9: Contemporary Art as Public Pedagogy Curricula Reflection
For this lesson, I only spent two class periods working on the main ideas. I felt like it was rushed and didn’t have sufficient time finish tasks, like glue people in the environments, or investigate the work of James Mollison as a class. Ideally, one would have at least three, if not four, class periods for the lesson.
Students had insightful, and at times, surprising answers about the images from home decorating catalogs and
magazines. We began by looking at these two interiors, first separately, then comparing and contrasting. The students were quick to point out the child-friendly items in the room on the right. While students were consistently able to determine child and adult spaces, and often teenage places, gender associations were not as clear. “Appropriate” colors are not culturally universal, so many of my male first graders freely expressed interest in rooms of pinks and purples. While most chose children’s bedrooms as their favorite place, either with toys, princess dresses, or flowers, one child preferred the photo of coat hooks, a bench, and shoes (from an entryway); he loved the feeling of family.
In selecting an image (and a person who would live in the room as-is), the first class had unpredictable people, some of which seemed closer in characteristics to the child, not the room. The second class, though their discussion was a struggle, chose more predictable adults. In both classes, the students really enjoyed finding objects to alter their environment. Though the second class is not finished, they seem to do better overall at placing objects in believable 
space (demonstrating depth in the collage) and in switching out similar items (a lamp for another lamp). These two differences could result from the different students in the class along with better instruction from me the second time around. Additionally, it became clear in the interviews that the first class was very confused about who lived in each interior. They merged their identity with the paper person who originally liked the room. One boy was upset when I said he had to draw a new room for his person; in his world, they were married and living together in the altered space.
Click on the presentation below to hear the first class talk about their work, responding to the following:
Tell me about the person who lived here in the beginning.
How did you change the place to be about you?
After her interview, a student held up her pictures and told me “This (collage) is my room and this (drawing) is Sally’s room.” Thirty seconds later, she came back to me and said “No, this (collage) is Sally’s room; this (drawing) is my room.” Another girl seemed to reproduce her collaged room in her drawing, including the flower rug and the picture of the bird on the wall. Many students described their paper person as liking things they had placed in the altered image, instead of liking things as they were.
To help alleviate the identity confusion, I might limit the types of rooms involved. I would have students select a living room from the magazine, then a person. Instead of waiting until the following class period, I would ask students to verbalize on that day why they think that paper person lives in that space. After they altered the space, we would look at Mollison’s photographs of children and the places they sleep. The students would draw a bedroom for their paper person. I think this would help them mentally separate the people in each environment. I would also like to take more time to demonstrate depth in drawings, or have a separate adult to record students so that I could be providing immediate feedback to the students as they draw, rather than monitoring from the other side of the room. Read more...
