Surrealist Lesson

     Today Jenn and I taught our lesson to the studio class at the high school we are observing at. Our mentor teacher was really great in the regards of allowing us total control and freedom of the class and lesson, as well as documenting us interacting with the students and giving our lesson. He of course gave us guidelines as to what he wanted so that we could help keep his process of teaching the students about elements and principles of art going. His guidelines included the aspects of Texture, collage and surrealism. So we were stumped at first, but sat down and really brainstormed and did some research on surrealist artists and how they inspired themselves. So we figured we would include a game of some sort, such as exquisite corpse, or "free-writing". That was the snowball formation of our lesson plan, and from there we came up with the idea of creating a textured Dream-scape with collage, allowing students to explore the play of dreams, manipulations of materials, and diving into dissecting and becoming acquainted with surrealism.
    We included the movie Destino 2003 to start the lesson off with. We felt this was a good choice so we could capture the students using a familiar style of animation and pop culture (Disney) as well as unusual, "weird" images that represented Dali's work, and a few aspects of Surrealism. The few surrealist aspects we made sure to discus was metamorphism, metaphor, and common iconography used in Dali's as well as other Surrealist artists work.The students really seemed to enjoy this video, even though a lot of them were confused by it, and technology was not feeling like being on our side. We kept explaining to them that being confused about surrealism was okay, that it was a lot of nonsense to begin with, as well as there being deeper meanings to some of the images.
   We got to teach the lesson twice. Once at the first period of the day and then the other was the second to last period of the day. Whoa what a difference. The first class was docile, cooperative but lacking enthusiasm during the group discussion, but did seem to really understand the lesson. There was some really great juxtaposition happening through the images once we started to create, an example would be that the one student who seems to have ADHD created a face using the head of a chicken carcass, it was humorous and interesting looking. The last class, I was blown away by the group discussion we had, they had some really great observations as well as deep thinking into the meanings of the icons and images they saw. As a group, they were all really thinking about dreams and as I walked around the classroom heard them all sharing stories about their dreams while working.They also seemed to really enjoy the free writing word game we played, compared to the first class that just stared at us.
    I'll be honest I was quite scared that we were trying to shove a lot of information into our lesson and with that being said it would confuse or overwhelm the students. I then remembered that they are high school students, not pre-schoolers and have a larger attention span as well capabilities. This was proven to be true. I'm not sure if my mentor teacher allows a lot of room for group discussion, but he should because the students seemed to really be effected and enjoy the freedom to learn together as a whole. I find that the idea of group discussions as a good outlet to speaking your mind and stating questions to the class to either get an answer that a few students are looking for or to just voice their opinions.
    I also feel like the idea of not having a set result of their art can really be an eye opener for the students, this way they can see other peoples outcomes, strategies and processes and then possibly learn from their peers and execute it later on in their art. This I think especially for high school students allow them to work on creating their identities and individualism, as well as take notice of their peers individualism. This seems to be a reoccurring issue in high school attitudes and dilemmas.  
    With that being said, I find it hard to see myself as a high-school teacher, the idea of them not being comfortable with themselves or using their ego centric attitudes in a negative manner by making other people feel bad just frustrates me. As well as the fear of being compassionate and vulnerable or even cooperative aggravates me. I feel I need to understand their mentality and how to guide them more into them being comfortable being open would help me feel more comfortable and capable of directing these students. But then there are students that really make you happy to be there and hopeful, for example theres this one student in the second to last period studio class, he is cooperative, open, comfortable and creates some really great stuff. I feel as though sometimes there are students that can help you direct the whole class just by setting a good example for all the students to follow. They do this without the vocal support from the teacher, it's almost like they embody the answer to all the other students insecurities. They just seem so comfortable with themselves that they aren't afraid to be wrong. I just now can reflect on the idea of how hard it was for me to be comfortable with the idea of failure, and how to learn and teach through it.
   Maybe I could be a high school art teacher if I had my own classroom and could really set an environment of comfort through mistakes. Its definitively different when you have your own classroom as well as your own freedom to set the mood and environment of the teaching techniques. I think in my classroom I'm going to encourage a lot of discussion, process compared to end product, peer learning and metaphors for the students to explore their individuality as well as social problems and traumas they are dealing with everyday through.