I sat in on a Media Arts class today. The course is an elective for students and is separate from a traditional drawing and painting arts class that is offered. One student I talked to loves sketching and was taking this class to broaden her media repertoire. Physically the class has some challenges though. They are about 10 computers short so some students spend the majority of class without a platform on which to do their work (thus either getting other work done or wandering around aimlessly). Today, the teacher gave a demo of some common tools in photoshop and directed the students to work on projects they started earlier.
My teaching moment came as I was wandering around the class talking to students about their work. One student asked the teacher a question about how to fill-in a picture of a sandwich-flip-flop with a burger print (it was excellent). He was an ELL student and asked her through google translate, which was cool to see, but she seemed to have other things to get to and told him to look it up himself. He continued to look a bit lost so I wandered over and asked (with some improvised sign-language because my Spanish deserted me long ago) could he use the clone tool the teacher had demoed earlier in class? At this point the student beside him lent the burger-shoe student his notes and they worked through the process together. This interaction led to others; a student nearby asked how to paste something he could get started with and we worked through that. The student beside him asked me the same question as burger-shoe and I pointed out the notes and process. Another student then asked how one created an image outline and I directed him to the student beside him who had done that earlier. When I left this cluster of students there seemed to be more discussion amongst them then there had been previously, and the teacher was pleasantly surprised when she returned to a student to find that student had solved an earlier problem with the help of her peers. From this experience, I learned that students can be remarkable independent problem-solvers, though they may need someone to initially break down the barriers between them. Perhaps these students were used to top-down instruction from the teacher–they always directed their questions to her first–and simply didn’t know that their peers could also be useful resources. I also discovered that I don’t have to be an expert in something to teach it: I facilitated a learning experience today in a subject I know nothing about. I have never used photoshop before but managed to work through questions about it by referring students to their notes and each other, something I think I can likely apply to almost any situation in the future.
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We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. Archives
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