Reflection

Darwin Aldridge Community Academy

Looking back on this unit I think I have learnt so much, the experience I feel I have gained has been massive. Previous to going to DACA I had lots of ideas that I wanted to execute to push my ability and to try and understand how I can pass on my passion for art other people. I also wanted to try to understand how I would cope in the school environment because I had no idea how I would react in a high-pressure situation such as a school. The ability to adapt to a situation so quickly is something I think I have learnt to do well over time, and walking into a school with no previous experience to try to deliver a workshop that would both challenges the students intellectually and creatively was a daunting task. I think being put into a group helped the transition into teaching much more and people on the whole worked well but there are other challenges I faced too with working in a group as I don’t have much experience of this with previous work. I found that you have to alter your approach to your thinking however a little less spontaneous than working on your own you have to be much more diplomatic.

    Coming from Fine art painting the way that we come up and develop ideas is trough experimentation but also the way you have to put every thought onto paper so you document and record your every strand of imagination. Also everything is developed and pushed by you and you alone with no external pressure to succeed other than your own, this is in some way turned on its head in group work and I find you commonly come up with ideas through long drawn out discussion. Sometimes more painful than productive but the collaborative defiantly altars the way thoughts are thought through and ideas are developed. As I group I think one of the hardest things was to think about things logically and to develop ideas constructively instead of firing ideas in every direction. I found it much more conducive to productivity when we were diplomatic and worked round each others In terms of not trying push your own ideas too much but at the same time letting people voice there own opinions.

   I have tried to incorporate and bring to the group my own knowledge from my own studio practice as this is what I think I can be most informed about and I can push the ideas of which to create something much more interesting. I think working with people from all different areas of the art school has created quite an interesting project and one the students i think found incredibly engaging as well as a day they will remember for a long time. I my own practice as a painter I work in solitude mostly so it has been a fantastic opportunity to develop my method of work and this will continue to feed back to me as well. In my work I experiment with the notions of the transformative and how an object can be used in one state and become something else that has other completely different functions. I use metals that are specifically picked through rigours scrutiny and trial and error to be inductive to rust. Rusting is often a consequence that is commonly not desired, but in this case I crave rust and want it in its most natural form, and learning to develop this method of manipulating my materials is key to the work. I then use this substance that is a product of time and using it to develop paints that have completely individual characteristics which I exploit on the canvas. This process of using materials and pushing there every use and function in a playful way which is the philosophy I wanted to bring to the group.
  Initially I found the whole experience quite daunting but really wanted to challenge my self to do something out of my comfort zone. Altho this was my first reaction think I took to it much quicker than I expected, working with individual children the instant I got there helping them with there coursework submissions. I found it really encouraging to work with them as I very quickly seemed to gain there trust as they were frequently asking me over to help. Also the instant we got to DACA we were sent into a number of different classes to gain a feel of what other departments in the school are like, this enabled me to understand how teaching is adapted to different subjects and how this changes in comparison to art. It also I think enabled me to gain a further understand of what makes a good teacher and helped me by spotting good and bad traits so I could use these to further inform the way I worked with the students. I think it is a lot about the  relationship you have with them at first gaining the trust of the student then delivering your point confidently and conclusively which in turn means receive much more input from them. I also think being able to set boundaries so they don't get away with to much is also important for dispassion to also be established.      

  Thinking how we could express to the fifteen year 7 ideas of experimentation and abstraction was a difficult task and we decided to make the workshop last the whole day to fully emerce them into the experience of playing with your materials to produce something interesting and challenging. From my work I came up with the idea of producing paint that would push there understanding and get them to thing about the process of painting much more.

          

 The children where told to bring in materials that they thought where interesting in terms of there qualities of colour, texture and ability to be crushed or cut, this threw up a variety of different results as on both weeks we got completely different materials that all had different qualities that had to be explored. This instantly became something the kids where itching to be involved in which helped the early stages of presentation which can be quite difficult to execute when you haven't done it before, but all seamed to go well. 

  Planning I think is something you can never do enough of, and I have learnt that throughout this task that there are always going to be variables you cant control, unforeseen events but as long as you stay on track and deliver successfully that’s all that matters. I think this is the most challenging part of producing your own workshop to is trying to take into account and accept that there are that many variables to do with what could go wrong for example that you cant allocate for all of them but you can try. So developing a mentality where you can expect the unexpected is key and being able to adjust the constantly changing parameters is the most challenging part I found. The only thing you can do to try to prevent and help from not succeeding because of a unforeseen event is to plan and I have learnt that good teachers that are passionate are the ones who plan and organise which is what we tried to do to our upmost ability.

  Once we collated and organised the objects they brought in we presented to the children are ideas and plans for the day the video above shows me and Elizabeth presenting the proposal for the first friday. I think on the whole this went well and we fully engaged the children with our ideas and concept being conveyed which was challenging to make sure you completely held there attention. It was also important to make sure they fully understood the context and why they were doing what they were doing this will enable them to contextualise there own work. The presentation was aimed at being simple enough to be fully understood by the kids and also push them to thing about materials and how they can be exploited as well as thinking about ideas of recycling and mark-making. The only thing i would have done differently would be to think more about my positioning because i stood in front of the projector for most of it and I think little tweaks are important to improve.

   This was a really successful power point and I proved to my self and others that I could deliver a presentation to a group of children and convey what I want to convey so the workshop from then on I think was set to go well. After we delivered the powerpoint we set the group on creating paint, they weren't given much direction in terms of how to do this, other than to use only one or two colour combinations to keep the colours clean.  

   

   So with there objects the group where split so they could do both blending and crushing and cutting materials in routerd ares, this allowed the students experiment with materials and develop there ability to play with materials. They worked really well together to experiment with loads of different materials and proses, the image before is of a student who used a piece of cloth to squeeze out the colour fro the beetroot. His previous attempt consisted of pushing through a sieve but this didn't work to well so he learned through experimentation and adapted to a more successful method, this was a clear example of them learning and developing which was nice to see.

   Most of the paint that was produced then needed to be refined and further experimented with so they could personalise them and become more advanced. so we then had to incorporate the blenders which enabled you to further play with mediums to bind the crushed materials, they could use a variety of oils and turpentines to change drying times as well as the shininess of the finnish. They were told previously  the different properties of oil and turpentine, with oil prolonging the drying time but turps shortening it as well as producing a matt finnish in comparison to the oil, this allowed them to adapt there own particular paint to there own preferences. 

         The blenders where a useful tool and although they couldn’t be used by the student, for safety reasons, but I felt they really helped to improve the workshop. I would have preferred to in future if I ever reproduced this to have some way of letting the students work with the equipment so they can feel even more in touch with the proses of making. Enabling them to adapt and think creatively was one of our main tasks and the free rain they had gave them the confidence to produce all manner of different paints. Some thick, thin, dry and even congealed or gloopy this added so much in terms of variety that the children dually relished in creating.

    When the task was completed we went for a break to clean up, after we split the children up again to form one group that would create the hanging devise and one to fill the balloons, swapping half way so both groups would benefit from both tasks. During the task we would ask the students questions so it was them who were designing the hanging devise with minimum input from us to enable them much more freedom to think intuitively.

  Simply asking them questions and prompting them to come up with ideas was quite a breakthrough for me, I think this part of the task really taught me how to sit back and not to try to control every aspect of the design as I would normally try and do. Using this method gets much more interesting results and helps them to develop and feel a part of the work.

 The subsequent task was to bring the two elements together now working in one singular team to hang the balloons, which was another quite tough task because of the complexities of organizing so everyone could be part of the proses. I think in future I would put more time if I had it, into this part of the workshop as it was I thought, quite rushed, trying to hang some 40 balloons from a flimsy frame above your head.

Next on the agenda was the actual painting / mark making what we had been building up to so the anticipation was quite high and no one quite new what was going to happen which is a god thing. After the whole setup was constructed we set about making the devices to puncture the balloons which the children were also set to design. One quite fantastic moment for me was on the first workshop we did two of the students proposed an idea to us about flying paper aeroplanes through the hanging balloons and I think the results where I think quite mesmerising.

    Although in these pictures I don't think it shows how special this was to me being there it was fascinating to see them the only boys in the class do something quite extravert. Themselves organising a little pre curser to the main event with them in the lime light. To see the small planes they had created slowly glide through the stationery hanging balloons was defiantly a highlight for me.
 A few images of the balloons bursting.

  By the second workshop i think we all developed in terms of our ability to control and run the workshop but didn't even realise it. I recognised this when I asked louise "are the kids better than the first ones" and she replied that we have just become much more confident in our delivery and the children responded positively to this. 

    After the workshop was completed I thought it was important for our benefit to gain some feedback from the kids on how they thought the day went. So we used a completely anonymous note and post box system so they could put messages in to review after.

   

    These were invaluable to me because I found them to be such a good insight into the experience from there point of view, and will be perfect for adapting how you run and improve your workshop for the future.   

I think the result of this workshop are far beyond what I expected and enjoyed every part of it almost as much as the students.