Hi! My name is Jackie Du and I’m an art educator currently teaching for Museum of Art and Design’s Arts Reach program and Creative Art Works’ afterschool classes.
A student once asked me: “How important do you think art is?” I replied confidently: “It’s the most important thing you can do because it is what makes us human. Agreeing she replied: “Oh, it makes us unique”. After some conversation about the topic, I pose the question back to her. She ponders for a long moment, then responds: “I think… that it helps us make sense of the world”. My students and I know that creating art is imperative.
Now as I am preparing to enter New York City’s Department of Education as a public school visual arts teacher, I am concerned with the aspect of assessing students in the classroom. As a current student teacher in a public elementary school, I know that when I’m teaching I have assessed students work as they went along in order to adjust my own teaching methods. If a student is not expressing interest or unable to progress forwards in their artmaking process, I rephrase my questions or directions to encourage their thinking and motivation for their artmaking. How is it possible to assign grades to students in an art class. The issue of subjectivity, or questions such as: how do you know if a child’s artwork is good or bad? To that I answer, it’s time we move beyond the binary of good or bad art. That is a problematic and faulty tool which to measure student work. Similar to how writing may be assessed, does the student make informed choices? Understand the tools and conventions of their materials and process? What are the ways the student applied their knowledge to approach learning objectives?
My research will focus on students’ artmaking process; the generative experience of creating ideas and physical art objects. My hope is that this exploration will shine a light on the thinking that happens during students’ artmaking process through analyzing the ongoing learning throughout the lessons and artmaking that happens in a New York City Public Elementary School art classroom. The question guiding my research is: How does setting goals as formative assessment impact 5th-grade students’ thinking about their artmaking process?
