Initial Ideas for Artefact:

The artefact will be a guide for use by teachers who wish to further encourage student to experiment with processes and materials within their work. It will be aimed at GCSE level student as my finding through conducting my inquiry have shown that if students are prepared correctly at GCSE for the work load and standards expected of them at A-level then the transition will be a smooth one. I think one of the main reasons why students in our borough struggle with A-level, not only in art but subject wide is because none of our secondary schools teach A-level, so the students cannot see on a daily basis what is expected of you at this level of study. This also allows them to be lulled into the idea that yr11 is the end of school because if they choose to go on to study A-level they will have to move schools. I believe this can give them an arrogant attitude, thinking that they are at the top of the pecking order. In many cases I think it would be beneficial for them to have older students to keep them in check. By the time you get to the end of your A-level career the students are that little bit older and have a more mature approach to their studies, and realise that yes this is the end of this stage but are only at the beginning of their lives and the next stages are determined by how successfully this stage is completed.

 I have found through investigating two other schools which do teach A-level, that the yr11 students have a much more mature approach to their learning and that their work tend to be more adventurous because they have the older years to inspire them and push them to create more interesting work. Unfortunately I do not anticipate being able to change local government’s opinion on this subject thus I am creating this artefact to try and better prepare GCSE students who might not be able to benefit from A-level students influences, for the standard of work that is expected of them at A-level. Experimentation in your work is considered a key a key factor at both stages; it is one of the assessment objectives and to gain a top grade. Candidates must demonstrate that they have experimented with ‘a wide range of appropriate resources, media, materials, techniques and processes, by recognising and exploiting emerging possibilities. Develop skills proficiently, by recognising, reviewing and refining potential ideas as work in progresses.’ AQA GCE Art and Design Specification 2009/2010 Version 2.3. Thus the aim of this artefact will be to demonstrate to teachers how active experimentation with processes and materials improves a student’s work. To do this I propose a project aimed at GCSE students while they are creating their personal portfolio, the focus of the project will be on the exploration of the many different routes to a personal response to the brief rather than the emphasis being on the aesthetic quality of the final outcome. The project will also be presented to the students in a slightly different way to how I have seen other art teachers introduce a new project topic in that it will initiate with a brief with a problem that has to be solved or issues that they have to address and whilst doing so they have to meet certain criteria which the brief has laid out. To be most effective for their studies I believe that the project should be completed early in yr10 so that they learn as early on in the course as possible the magnitude of work that is expected of you and have the ability to work independently. Whilst conducting my inquiry through gathering information from my three chosen art departments I observed that teachers want to encourage their students to branch out and explore their own creative direction but given too much freedom and the students can quickly become overwhelmed being unsure which direction to choose causing their work to become stagnant and often resorting in them following another student rather then exploring an area which they are interested in. Every students studying a different thing does make the teachers role more challenging as they have to keep on top of lots of different areas of study and require a very broad subject knowledge in order to be able to advise all of the students, but this I believe is key to being a good art teacher an area which teacher B has shown great strength in. By presenting the students with a project such as this it encourages them to work independently and explore their own interests whilst also giving them parameters to work within so that the students know that their work is heading in the right direction, also giving the gifted and talented (G&T) students the opportunity to push theses boundaries and really experiment with processes and materials. I believe that by completing a project like this at the start of the GCSE course the students will not only learn the structure that future projects should take but give them the confidence to work independently.

The form of the artefact will be a book, the introduction outlining in brief what I have mentioned here, why I am creating this book and what I hope to achieve by doing this. Chapter 1 will be the project brief, the brief that I write will be quite specific outlining how I as a teacher would present the project to my students and what would be my starting point but I will also outline how it could be altered to accommodate different school’s needs. As the inquiry has shown art departments nation wide have different budgetary restrictions and this does have an effect on the type of work that their students make as a result schools may wish to adapt the brief to try and encourage students to experiment with processes which other schools might not be able to consider. Teachers might also wish to adapt the brief to better suit their preferred discipline, as I am a sculptor a lot of my suggested areas for experimentation will be three dimensional ones. A drawer and painter might have some different ideas. This project will also try to encourage teachers to have more lessons where individual skills are taught and this should be worked into the brief’s timetable so that we are not only asking the students to work independently but equipping them with the tool to do so and build on these skills.

The second chapter will focus on work that I have seen within the three schools involved in the inquiry where I have felt the student has experimented with a variety of processes or used materials in an unconventional way. It shall also look at practitioners who have incorporated theses elements into their work successfully and what impact this has had on their work. All of these will act as inspiration and starting points for the teachers to give to the students.

The final chapter will summarise what I would expect from my students in the allocated time frame.

Time to change my tactics:

I completed my questionnaires about three weeks ago and sent the links off to the relevant teachers asking them to distribute them to their students. I was always a little apprehensive about this method of data collection as I know it is difficult enough to get the students to complete tasks which are mandatory for their course let alone things which are optional. I blogged about a week ago voicing these concerns and it was suggested that I should consider giving the students some sort of incentive for completing it, a prize for one of the students which seems in theory to be a good idea but upon discussions with other members of staff I learnt that this might not be so feasible. As a member of staff I am not allowed to give students anything, any prises must be awarded to them through the correct school channels i.e. an assembly or prize giving and as the schools involvement in the inquiry is limited to the art department this would prove to be quite difficult. Now that we are a few weeks into the collection time the general response has been good from all participant except the student I work with. I have one response and that one was useless as the student filled in the first question, what is your name and the skipped the rest. I have done everything I can think of to try and get them to complete it but still they refuse. I have asked them nicely; I have shouted at them, I have gotten the head f the department to shout at them I have pestered them about it every time I have seen them about I have even set time aside in the lessons for them to in turn go onto a computer to complete it, an idea which I had to abandon because they were all surfing the web and playing games. So now I admit defeat! This data collection method will not work with these students so I have to come up with another strategy.  It has been agreed with the head of the department that next week one of their lessons will be used to conduct a focus group where I will ask the students the questionnaire questions and record their responses. I have asked the department head to sit in on the focus group to try and stop it from erupting into a shouting match like it did when I conducted my pilot focus group. I am slightly concerned about them talking over each other and then struggling to hear what any of them were saying when playing back the recording. To try and avoid this I am going to try to keep a very calm atmosphere, direct questions to individuals and then calling on people in tern to comment on their response rather than asking the questions to the group. I also plan to be very strict with them and remove from the group any person who attempts to intentionally disrupt it. The only possible problem with this tactic is I might end up with more students out of the focus group than in but I believe that this will be the most effective way of getting the information from the students.

To an extent I am lucky that I am having these issues with the students in my school and not one of my comparative schools. Had it have been on of the other schools I would have possibly had to make an extra trip to that school which would be almost impossible as I work full time in a school and to do this I would have to miss an extra day of work or I would have to consider not using this school in my inquiry. At least as it is I can come up with alternative approaches without majorly affecting my schedule.

    

Literary review:

After reading the summary of a report entitled ‘Arts in the Secondary Schools: Effects and Effectiveness’ (Harland, Kinder, Lord et all) I felt compelled to write this review. Their research question was ‘Does the involvement in the arts in secondary school boost general academic performance?’ The study was conducted over several years performing case studies on ‘five secondary schools in the United Kingdom with strong arts reputations’ and examining the GCSE results of over twenty seven thousand students from 152.  The qualitive information collected from the case studies was primarily based on students own opinions and the quantative data based on the exam results.

When starting to read this report I saw a lot of similarities to my own inquiry which sparked my attention, upon further reading element of their research continued to crop up which didn’t sit right with me. Firstly they state that they reviewed results for 27,607 students from 152 schools and distributed questionnaires to 2,269 students in 22 schools. Now the report does not make this clear but from these numbers I can assume that their conclusions have been based on all yr 11 students and not just those who have opted to take one of the creative arts subjects for GCSE.  Thus some of the questionnaire answers have come from students who might not have studied an arts subject for nearly two years; surely this data will skew the results. Student opinion was strongly considered when drawing their conclusions and even though students’ opinions are very useful I do not think I would have based my findings primarily on these opinions as at this age they are not always able to see how subjects can benefit each other, plus there is a strong chance that their opinions have been based more on an emotional response than fact for example a students experience with a particular teacher might sway their responses.

During the first module I made an entry in my in my journal commenting on how frustrating I was finding it trying to get the yr10 students to take the knowledge that they had learned in History about the second world war and the years that immediately followed and using it to draw conclusions about the social and economical state of American as a reason for the emergence of the pop art movement. When it was explained to they could understand this link but unless it was pointed out for them they would not make use of the knowledge they had learned in other subjects. Now this clearly is not because one subject does not help with the understanding of the other subject as I do not believe that anybody could dispute that an understanding of certain historical events will help you to understand the reasoning behind certain art movement rather I believe it is because teachers do not make these cross curriculum connections more obvious to the students. I am aware that this is something teachers should be doing as I have noticed them adding it into their lesson plans when they are undergoing lesson observation but then forget about it the rest of the time. I believe that highlighting these links is vital to improve the students overall understanding. At the moment I believe that there is too much of a barrier between subjects too often have I heard students make comments like I love Drama but hate English and it is not explained to them that the two are intricately linked, one could not be without the other.

The study concluded that ‘no relationship existed between studying the arts in secondary school and performance on national exams.’ These findings were unlike the conclusions drawn from similar investigations conducted in schools in the United Sates, their reasoning for this was ‘perhaps in the United States academically strong students are advised to study the arts, while in the United Kingdom, academically strong students are not encouraged to study the arts.’ From my experience of working in a secondary school I believe that this is the case and to further stigmatise the subjects, it is reviewed by other subject teachers as an ‘easy option’ and this belief filters down to the student. In the opinion of someone who has not only studied the subject for over a decade and taught it, I can confirm that this is not the case. The standard of analytical writing on not only their own work but also the works of others is expected to be of as high a calibre as would be expected in an English exam. This subject also asks you to view and think about things in a different way, pieces of work are not merely made for the sake of making them; they have more meaning or depth behind them. This is not always obvious and different people might have conflicting views on the meaning of a piece, but we ask the student to form an intelligent, independent opinion. How is this dissimilar to what they are asked to do in English with literature and poetry, and how could having more practice at thinking and writing in this way not improve your English level?

To study art at any level takes a huge amount of self discipline and self motivation, something which teenagers are not always renowned for, this is also the case with the other arts but I speak mainly about the study of fine art as this is where my expertise lays. If students do not have a certain level of self motivation and discipline they will not be successful on this course as there are not enough taught hours scheduled on the timetable to get the work done, this is unique to this subject and is understood by most of the students early on in the course and I struggle to see how developing the skill of independent learning could not be beneficial in the study of all other subjects especially when it comes to prioritising revision.

This study has also stated that most of their qualitive data had been collected from schools with strong arts reputation; I believe that this choice of screening was a mistake, how can you comment on the effectiveness of a subject if you only look at the top end and do not take a cross section of schools? Theses findings do not show an accurate depiction of the whole country. In spite of the fact that state secondary schools cannot restrict entry due to academic performance exemplar schools tend to attract exemplar pupils meaning the influence of the arts might not have such an obvious effect on the performance academically as it would if you were to look at an underachieving school. The school I currently work in would be considered an oversubscribed, under achieving inter city school and it is clear how much the study of art helps their literacy level and general use of vocabulary, this might not be the case of all such schools but I believe that other school demographics should have been taken into consideration when collecting their data. This is why I plan to investigate three contrasting schools; my schools will differ in location, pupil demographic and budgetary constraints so that I know that if any trends do emerge I could assume that these trends might reflect most schools nation wide.

In conclusion I believe that this investigation carried out to highlight the effectiveness of the teaching of the arts in secondary schools was flawed to the point that I do not believe that the conclusions that they have drawn effectively reflect the overall teaching of the arts in secondary schools in the UK. Further more I believe that the research question ‘does the involvement in the arts in secondary school boost general academic performance’ is rather a redundant one as we have already established that there are different learning styles, some people learn better with visual aids and working problems out through trail and error, while others learn best in a more tradition learning environment  of reading and memorising, thus the focus should be how can we as teachers be more creative with our teaching styles and incorporate some of the methods used in teaching the arts and other practical subjects to accommodate the different learning styles we will encounter.

References:

• Harland. J, Kinder. K, Lord. P, Scott. A, Schagen. I, Haynes. J, Cusworth. L, White. R and Paola. R, (October 2000) ‘Arts Education in Secondary School: Effects and Effectiveness’ The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), Berkshire, UK.

Revised introduction

I started to write the first draft of my inquiry a couple of weeks ago then following reading Mark’s blog i thought I would write a summery of the inquiry to give to the participants so that they fully understood what they were agreeing to be involved in but as I wrote it I found myself writing another draft of the introduction. I think this draft is more concise and more importantly is within the word count, I think it also outlines the inquiry enough to also use as information for the participants.

Working title: ‘Does active experimentation with processes and materials give a developing artist a firmer understanding of their professional practice? How can this concept be developed to enhance the teaching of the subject?’

This inquiry will take the form of an in depth investigation into the study and teaching of art at key stage 4 and 5, comparing three contrasting art departments and identifying their different practices and constraints which are put upon them. The participant’s roll as either as a current student or an art teacher will be to answer a questionnaire, be involved in interviews conducted by me and be a part of observed lessons. As the period of time during which I will be collecting the information will be relatively short (collection time will run from the beginning of the michilmas term to two weeks into the second half of that term) the participants’ involvement will not be extensive which means that their studies or jobs should not too disrupted. The inquiry will mainly be qualitive based on my observations from the information collected the opinions of the students involved and what I have learnt from the previous modules and previous two years at my current school.

My main aim is to investigate how students experiment with processes and materials and how this impacts the work that they make. To complete the inquiry an in depth investigation will be conducted upon three contrasting art departments. The three schools differ in location, pupil demographics and departmental budgets one of the schools is the secondary school which I currently work in thus this department will act as the base from which my comparisons are drawn. By looking into the children’s experiences and comparing and contrasting the different teaching styles both within the department and between the schools I believe I will have a strong overview of how the subject should be successfully taught.

Through this investigation my inquiry plans to address the following question: What further measures can be implemented in the classroom to further encourage students to experiment with a variety of processes and materials? How do art students manage the transition from the study of GCSE to A-level? What constraints are put on art departments by both the school and outside influences and how might these constraints influence the work made by their students? How do art teachers and their support staff help to foster creativity? Finally with talks of the government changing the curriculum to the English baccalaureate (E-bac) what is the future for this subject?

Upon completion of this inquiry a document will be made outlining my findings and explaining how the information gathered can be translated into a teaching and learning environment. This document will act as an aid for student teachers and newly qualified teacher (NQT) who wish to expand their knowledge of teaching the subject and as a guide for how creativity and methods of experimentation can be encouraged in the classroom.  

This line of inquiry has been chosen as not only is it relevant to the work that I am doing now in a secondary school art department but I am also hoping that it will help me to gain a place on a graduate teacher training course.