Key Blog Post Three

We finally did it. After all the ups and downs this unit have threw our way the sense of achievement feedback from the year 7’s is overwhelming. After such a shaky start I am extremely proud of myself and our group.

I feel my engagement within this unit has been of a good standard and I have appropriately contributed well. I missed a workshop due to a hospital appointment, it was one I was looking forward to. Other than that I feel I have engaged well. Over the past week I had noticed that one of the girls hadn’t felt quite right so had a quick look at her blog just to check. It was clear from her blog that she felt left out this was quite upsetting for me. I felt like I had to talk to her. We had a conversation and she expressed to me she felt out of the loop, this is something I wouldn’t want anyone to feel. We had a conversation and talked it out, after this our group dynamic improved immensely. This was something that felt like an achievement to me as in the past I would have taken things personally in a negative way. But working in this group I have learnt to think before I speak and look at things from every side because noone is always right. I feel in group work I have had my say whilst letting everyone else have theirs. However at times I could see that other people’s ideas weren’t being heard. In future I will try and help people get their ideas and opinions through into the group.

 As a whole I feel the place that most needs improving for future is time management and communication. This was clearly in need of Work an example of this was the run through day, it went miserably. Tim management, communication, planning were off, due to people not doing their set jobs. We got it together at the end but it would have been nice to not worry. In the future I would not presume that everyone had done their jobs, and I would have my own backup plan. I would ask throughout if they were getting on alright and if they wanted any help. After all this is a collaborative unit and it’s not fair to place the blame on other people for not doing the work because me personally and as a group should have communicated better to make sure everyone was okay. This was a key factor that arose from this unit and is something that I will most defiantly improve and use in future.

When doing our workshop we had to think on our feet. We were put into an unfamiliar and ambiguous scenario that we had to find a way out of. We had planned to have the paint Olympics outside and got the okay off the school. However we didn’t get permission on the day due to the mixed lunch times. We had a disaster plan ready and covered the room in dust sheets. We didn’t fully take into account the paper used to cover the floor so there was a bit of tidy up time but we did protect the rest of the classroom and the walls.

The choices we made in terms of artistic media we based on the key motivations we had from DACA. The children didn’t have room to show their own artistic flare and that they only seemed to use acrylic paint and work on small pages. We chose A3 for the children to work on and chose a variety of media including; chalk, oil pastel, food colouring etc so that the children could expand their create mind with new things. This clearly worked as one child said “we only work on big paper in groups” and how many of them had never used food colouring, oil pastels or chalk within the school.

I feel like the theme worked well with the year sevens “colour and emotion” as it was clear and easily understandable. A motivation I personally had was how to make the workshop relevant and I feel we did this by using art direction and the Frozen film. We got each child to pick a film genre and colour there frozen poster in the colours that you would perceive to be from the genre. This was an enjoyable part of the day for me as this was new to me and I also learnt about art direction. This is something that I plan to look more in depth with in my own practice.