Art Rooms as Centers for Design Education

Creativity and Innovation in K-12 Classrooms

George Szekely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317245278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Currículos educativos

Merging the teaching of art innovation through design with traditional art media taught in K–12 art programs, this book introduces art theories and histories in design, offers classroom-tested pedagogical approaches that emphasize innovation, and includes a wealth of graphics and stories about bringing in curiosity, play, and creativity into the classroom. Interspersed with engaging personal narratives and anecdotes, George Szekely paints a picture of transformed art classrooms, and shows how art teachers can effectively foster student risk-taking and learning with new teaching pedagogies and methodologies. By breaking down how teacher encouragement and stimulating classroom environments can empower students and motivate them to challenge themselves, Szekely demonstrates how art rooms become sites where children act as critical makers and builders and are positioned to make major social contributions to the school and beyond.

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DESIGN THAT OPENED THE DOORS FOR ART IN PUBLIC EDUCATION NOW ELEVATES ITS CURRENCY TO NEW HEIGHTS

Children design the future as players and innovators

To compete with European products during the Industrial Revolution overseas, American products had to offer not only quality and efficiency, but also, they had to look good. As part of the response to this demand for products that were aesthetically pleasing, art was recognized by American schools. Facing a national challenge, leaders and art educators together responded with a rational solution. In 1870, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts first mandated art to be a part of general education, and although art has retained its place in schools for over 150 years, for most of its existence it has been on the periphery of major subjects; an “outsider” having to continuously mount a defense for inclusion.

The United States may have dropped the ball where manufacturing is concerned: “Made in the USA,” is a label facing extinction, or at the very least, endangerment. American leadership today calls for a nation of innovators to replace products mostly made abroad. Art classes again have a historic opportunity to heed a national alarm. Art that includes the design and invention of three-dimensional things for everyday life is a way of meeting the needs of contemporary society.

This book describes a response to the need for innovation and details the establishment of art classrooms as Centers for Design Innovation. Art, as a subject, needs to clearly demonstrate value to the public to be fully supported. Goals in art classes must be finely tuned to meet the needs of society, and design creation must be a central focus.

Art, as a discipline, has many facets. For many, artistic endeavors invite a more private side to self-expression. On this level, art deals with individuality and private thoughts and feelings. In these expressive efforts, art does not necessarily reflect a social need or do the work of public service.

But art can also be a realistic force for innovation and rouse substantial public sentiment. In contemporary society, artistic innovation demands a sharp futuristic vision. In the public eye, art as building and designing can offer practical use of school time, rather than mysterious and foreign concepts best served by museums. As a school subject, art has to find a balance between personal expressions in drawing and painting, and practical application that is the design of original objects and spaces, aligned with professions that look toward the future.

Making Art Real

Inquisitive students are naturally interested in invention and design, and they want to participate in the world by creating and contributing real things. After days filled with sitting at tables and listening to school lessons they come to art to make and build. The art classroom is a place where they might freely move and take action.

It is important to note the differences between a traditional classroom and those things the art classroom must provide. The general philosophy is that children go school to learn the basics of each subject, as outlined by the curriculum and the teacher’s lesson plan. In tightly woven presentations, classes cover what every student is supposed to learn. Schools, like factories and businesses, run by the clock. Delivering information fast is efficiently planned and scheduled. The intake of knowledge is tested and clearly measured. There is no time to dream and explore, or for students to try different paths. There is no prize for patience; no prize to those who look for different solutions or find different answers that derail the teaching plan.

At the end of the hallway, however, is another classroom: the School’s Center for Innovation. Here, the culture of hands-on activities is key to learning. For students whose world has been outlined by parents, teachers, even adult artists and designers, it is easy to become fans and followers; passive audiences who feel that everything is already made and done. Students in art cannot just become patrons of knowledge, art, and technology. Art cannot be presented as another adult invention; one for students to admire as a world framed and pre-shaped. The art class provides important opportunities for the next generation to shape what is yet to come. In art class, students must learn that they are preparing the future as shapers and creators.

Art as design innovation takes place in a climate where exploration and experimenting is highly valued. A visit to the art room is like going to the park to explore the land and gather its bounties and respond to the experience in unique ways. The art room culture discourages single or correct answers. Students must actively search and appreciate the freedom that comes with looking for new inventions and design solutions.

Curiosity

A world-class art education includes designing the world. Art class education is the development of a life-long habit of curiosity, an interest in design and in the new. It is building the courage to propose, defend, and explore one’s own ideas. An education that celebrates, challenges, and values student ideas, produces a classroom full of confident innovators whose suggestions and ideas are taken seriously.

An art room that creates a climate of innovation engages children’s natural curiosity, but entrance into an art room should not be mysterious and unfamiliar. In the space of an art class, students learn as they did before school, by confidently taking charge of their education. Children come to school from play experiences that taught them to be explorers and designers, builders and creators. In art classrooms, they learn without workbooks, instruction manuals or handouts.

In homes, parents can witness budding inventors, builders and designers. For example, when my granddaughter Emilie came home from a disappointing shopping trip, she set out to make her own backpack. She crafted it from silver insulation materials discarded in the garage, and bubble wrap she’d saved from a recent Amazon shipment.

While some fields of study attempt to teach something new to students, art teachers acknowledge the artistic work done first, in the home, and build upon that. I recall my son Jacob, age 6, sorting through mom’s fabric scrap pile to make a quilt for his sister’s dolls. Gift-giving is an important motivation for children’s art, and gift design can be an in-class activity.

My children were often busy building with all the fine, empty boxes they found at the market and brought home. Many turned boxes into large-scale space ships only to be converted, later to a dinner table used in food-themed restaurant art. When Jacob received his first cello, Ana, my youngest, slept in the cello box as insurance that it would still be there and she could start working in the morning on fabricating a shapely bookcase for her room.

Dreams are also important to art room tasks. Fantasies are to be taken seriously because they can offer the blueprints to start innovative constructions. Student innovators are urged to dream beyond what exists.

So what does this art room for innovators look like?

What’s in an Art Classroom?

To make art class a space that invites physicality, rooms are filled with tangible objects to use, take apart and construct. Students build and design 3D items to play with, construct furnishings for a room, and design items to wear. Memorable art classes are based on materials students bring and ideas they planned. Lesson plans are in synch with the student’s real experiences and individual investigations.

The room is set to empower young designers to improvise with any material and media across the bounds of adult design professions. When playful hands and minds approach every object freely, innovative problem-solving skills are elevated. Art classes can lead to building student confidence in their innovative thinking ability, based on involvement in real building and constructing.

Anything missing or needed to complete a play set up or play mission can be found or made. Just challenge students to look down and around with “innovation glasses.” Need a cake for a birthday party? There is a great hatbox just waiting to audition for the part. Students learn to view all of their environments, both at home and beyond the art room, as subsidiaries of innovation suppliers.

Flipping the Space

In my public school classes, students all year looked forward to Hat Day. As hats were not allowed otherwise, on this day special creations proudly passed through the hallways. In art classrooms, every day is hat day. There are also inside out days, upside down days, backward days, and other occasions to challenge the norm. The art class, to a culture of innovation needs to feel and look different each day from the rest of school.

The classroom itself gets flipped, is in constant transition. The art room is a dance floor, a play-space, inviting active improvisation and the full-body movements. Move to the floor, tip the chairs, and take advantage of the room’s largest canvases on floors, walls and ceilings.

An experienced art teacher can allow art rooms to thrive on seeming disorder. Innovation flips by size and scale, from Giant Worlds, to Polly Pockets. In a climate of freedom, choice, and surprises, students create space stations from the stools, and architectural wonders from upside down trash cans. The soft sounds of light pencil drawings and gentle bristle strokes make room for noisy screwdrivers and hammers when builders need to dismantle, crush or break objects apart to create something new.

In an art class, the rules and challenges are constantly changing to invite the unexpected, to alter goals and styles of work. If students typically mix colors in search of beauty, point them in the opposite direction. Instead of asking students to work slowly and patiently on a sketch, challenge them to be the “fastest drawer in the west.” Make each day different from the last: use opposite hands, stand instead of sit, reach high vs. bending low, work loudly and not quietly, shift from forward to reverse. Changing the game plan allows for innovative ways to think, move, and work.

Real World Applications

Art needs to be real from the start, exploring alternative forms to build with, transform, and explore new uses for objects. In art rooms students need to fly away from writing and typing, from confinement and inaction, and land on the floor, or underneath the table. With an emphasis on design and innovation, the role of art classes becomes self-evident to parents and the public. The purpose of the art class is not merely to decorate the school hallway.

From Consumer to Innovator

Children enter the world and become consumers. Parent purchases and baby shower gifts outfit the child and adorn their first environments. Children move from cribs into rooms designed for them by parents, then into classrooms organized by teachers. Life is introduced by ready-made spaces and manufactured constructions. By the time a youngster is ready for school, all they have to do is select from the latest crop of school supply designs. If there is a need, there is a store, or internet site to find it, and a credit card to purchase everything.

While someone unknown, behind the scenes, such as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus is creating design innovations, ordinary folks just enjoy the fruits of their labor and sit back to relax and play video games.

Children simply learn to buy and receive; they learn about consumer choices from screens. With this vague notion of who the designers are, it can be difficult to kick-start students’ interest and possibly professional life as an artist-designer-innovator. Art classes need to fill the knowledge gap by introducing students to real people, designers in their unique studios, and by examining first-hand the best examples of their creations.

Art teaching can tip the balance in students who feel the need to get involved. Children intuitively design because of a natural need; they want to be active builders and participants in the game of life, and making one’s own things is a valuable life force, one of empowerment for everyone living among man-made designed objects. Doers and makers experience carving out a place in a home, a community, and staking their place in the world.

Some students, for example those seldom asked for their opinions or ideas about products or choices, find it difficult to jump into the role of creator. The tasks to imagine, plan and make one’s own product can seem overwhelming. Students only need to be reminded of their home inventions and designs while playing, dressing, and organizing. These skills and interests need to be at the forefront of design awareness and challenging fabrications in the art class.

How can teachers advance experiences of students shaping their own objects and spaces? How can we as art teachers encourage the desire to make and shape our own things? How do we convince students of what they can do? In essence, we need to start a revolution in every art room. Even when it seems that everything has already been made and invented, art classes need to value student designs and ideas.

There is a price to pay in living in a society of abundance; one often feels little connection or control. The balance lies in the art room where students can embody opportunity. Yes, art classes have always been about making and building, but in contemporary times it has been more efficient and less time consuming to teach drawing and painting pictures.

As life in an art class moves from painting to inventing-designing-innovating, many Goodwill finds by students are disassembled, revamped, remodeled, and restyled. Old shelves, castoff chairs, slippers and sneakers, umbrellas from rummage sales, all can provoke the power of invention. Humble home objects are assigned new roles and transformed into other things. Ignored wonders such as plastic utensils, paper clips, and sugar packets are used in ways with a dedication to transform and repurpose.

When students start coming to the art class with the notion that they want to participate in changing the world, they come to a class to build and reformulate, to design and make new things. Everyone becomes an ideas person, with lots of new things to propose and make, and the world becomes filled with hope and possibilities.

Build-A-Bear

A kiosk at the mall advertises a bear-building station for kids. Curious to see how this works, I visited a Build-A-Bear, one of the most successful marketers in the mall. Children lined up to pick from a number of ready-made samples. They were invited to witness the new bears’ births through a vacuum hose-inflated “placenta.” Every child was awarded a birth certificate with an invitation to the baby shower. Here, at a “slight” additional cost, a wealth of outfits and matching accessories could be purchased. The newborn bear was handsomely boxed in a cardboard case for safe travels to his or her new home.

In the Build-A-Bear world of pretend invention, there was no search for scrap fabrics, on experimentation with mom’s sewing machine. Build-a-Bear means shopping for your teddy bear, just one of many kits, from bears to STEAM robots, while retailers pretend that you are in charge of your creation. The ceremony was buying, not building. Much like Barbie worlds and Lego figures boxed with explicit pictures and instructions, Build-A-Bear pulls a child along on a theme park adventure ride – all destinations pre-determined. With limited choices, creativity and invention outsourced to adult designers.

Stiches by Dr. George MD

In 1946, I received a light brown teddy bear. The first big woodworking project I recall was crafting my bear his bed. Taking a portion of my Mom’s fabric basket, I used many remnants to create sheets, pillows, quilts and even slippers. As an outdoor project, I built the bear a custom tree house from twigs yard clippings. This was way before I dreamed of coming to America, where I met the Berenstain Bear family and read about their tree-dwelling neighborhood.

If my bear complained of even a scratch, I was prepared with customized wraps and bandages. In cases of extreme illness, when Bear was unable to go to bear school, I had to operate. You can see multiple stiches sewed by nurse Mom...