Unit X educator..

The picture above is of both groups and the pupils that got taught on our final day in Daca, I appreciate this photo because I feel it really shows the hard work that got put into both workshops for year seven and year nine, the childrens faces as well as our own indicate exactly how they are feeling exausted after a fun filled day of exitment, something we hope they will never forget from there time in Daca, by the outstanding positive feedback my group got for year seven we ticked all the boxes, we walked away withour heads held high and could happily say mission accomplished, despite all the ups and downs and unexpected challanges that we had to face we all got there in the end.

As well as our feedback tshirts that ive mentioned previously, the children that had taken part in the day had also completed a wild colourful and vibrant long boarder of paper, the idea behind this was that as a group we would be able to take this back to univercity with us as a high positive reference of the day to look back on.

Key Blog Post three.. 15/03/2015

What new discoveries have you found within this unit, reflect upon your practice and experiences within unfamiliar or ambiguous scenarios?

Having a role, as a teacher is something that I never considered before this unit; being the one to give out the instructions and not the pupil that is listening and doing; feeling like I have to give a professional delivery; as well as actually teaching the children something. Providing something new that the children learn, can adapt from, and can carry on developing was harder than I ever thought. Having to rely and depend on other people, that sometimes in one way or another can let you down can be frustrating at times, too. Within my own practice, I only have to think about my own work and me. I have never collaborated, as a group of so many different practices before and in a teaching environment was tougher than I thought.

Throughout this unit, my confidence has grown dramatically. Speaking aloud and making my voice heard was something I was always afraid off and would run away at the first chance I got. Speaking to the public has now become a lot easier as it has been a weekly task throughout this project and a good example of an ambiguous scenario is when I was doing my micro teaching brief. I was very nervous before hand, but having prepared myself well and taking time out to make sure I had everything that I needed it was more of a success than I imagined, when I had my ten minutes ‘in the spotlight’ the support and involvement of my peers helped me to overcome one of my worst fears.

I’m still undecided if teaching is for me, and my next step within my education is going to be to try and sort out some work experience in a primary school. This will allow me to work with both age groups, to see if teaching is for me. Even if I don't go into this industry, I will take lots of valuable experiences from this unit, such as collaborating skills, group work and of course a much greater confidence in public speaking. As well as these key skills, I have a also learnt a lot about new types of processes and media such as powder paint and mark making techniques, if needed or required I could develop these when I go back to the Art School in September.

What did you learn and discover? How has this informed your practice and wider understanding?

During this unit I learnt and discovered a lot of new aspects not only about the teaching world, and the creative world, but new discoveries about myself too, things that I never knew before. One aspect that stands out for me is my drive and enthusiasm to get the work done and my positive attitude towards helping my group achieve what we needed to. Patience goes a long way when working with a large group as well as looking after yourself. I didn’t ever realise exactly how important collaboration work and in particular patience is until this project. The main reason for this could be is I’ve never had to deliver work to this kind of standard before. I will take away with me all the discussions and options we have each shared during our meetings and involvement of this unit so that it will impact and inspire me with my future work or projects. It’s been very important that we have had to think about every single challenge and dilemma that we could face, including child needs, disabilities, weather commitments, props and media. When I carry on with the rest of my degree after this unit, I will draw from this as I've realised that to be prepared is very important; being able to plan everything; knowing exactly how to react and what to do if something goes wrong within my work; or if I ever run out time, I will know how to tackle things.

Group work has taught me a wider understanding of all process within a plan; it has taught me that the key to success is to break things down and work things out slowly and thoroughly; time is the most important aspect of anything, and with the right sort of focus. One discovery I will most certainly take away with me from this opportunity is the delightful bond I had with some of the school children as well as fellow peers in my group, it’s given me the positivity of knowing I helped someone out, and that’s a great feeling.

Reflect upon your engagement with each aspect of the unit from primary research to workshop activities, tutorial groups, collaborative work and contextual understanding. Did you commit to each appropriately and contribute well? What aspects do you consider that you developed? What could you improve upon, and how might you now achieve this?

Even though we had frequent group meetings, maybe not as many as we should have but enough, we were still able to discuss different aspects on each occasion. As I’ve previously mentioned at our dry run it was all over the place and unprepared. The artist research was covered but nothing much else was in context, but other than that, things weren’t ready that should have been on the day. This meant that our run through was a disaster which resulted in us being told we had to turn it around in less than twenty four hours otherwise we weren’t able to deliver the workshop at all. Even though we all knew what we wanted to do and vaguely knew how the day was going to go, it was not set in stone, nor were we disorganised, which gave us room to adapt. After this, my group did turn it around and we were able to effectively complete the workshop, which proved to be extremely successful. We looked into different aspects like the Holi festival and art direction on our PowerPoint and gave them a bit of information about there background, then led an activity followed by a discussion. By the end, the pupils knew the learning outcome and knew what we were trying to teach them. Even though we were doing group work at this point it really didn’t feel like it. There wasn’t enough engagement happening within the workshops (this also felt like this with the exhibition night too). Our final objectives had clear links with all aspects of backgrounds including fine art, interactive arts and graphics and this really reflected on our project. Communication within my specific group, slowly got better towards the end of this unit, as there was a slight hiccup over the Easter holidays, as brief ideas and plans began to get discussed. The start-up meeting and getting everyone’s involvement was key, and there was a slight difficulty trying to find everyone and trying to get every body’s first opinions on the matter, partly because we didn’t all know each other. After the Easter holidays had commenced communication got better, friends were made, and lots more time was spent on doing what we needed to. In the future, I think it would be important to start earlier, we all thought we had plenty of time and the whole unit would be a breeze, it wasn’t until the last few days were we had to cram weeks worth of work in when we realised that as a group time management has been a massive problem for us.

Reflect upon your choices, from material, to process and research. Were they conducted at the right time and to the appropriate depth and level of interrogation needed to fully inform your ideal development?

By the materials and creativity that was made, it all came together that we had made the right choices for the process of the day. The initial ideas from each and every one of us who were involved in this workshop, all had some aspect of our specialisms. We all wanted to play it safe and do something we knew we could do, something we had each done before. We eventually came to an agreement that the final choices we were going to make had to be the right ones suitable for the children. The paint fight was a brilliant example of this, it was something that only half of us had done before, something educational that had aspects of culture, history and education behind it but still fun to do. Even though it didn’t work out exactly how we all imagined it would because we had initially hoped to complete this activity outside and at the last minute we had to improvise andiron the session inside. Within in 20 minutes we had to all come together and used our initiative to think of a plan B. We quickly put down dust sheets, covered up key areas of the room and began laying out paper. As we ran out of time, we got the children involved as they also lay out paper on the floor. They understood this to be part of the task, as they didn’t know any different. Lots of fun was had by all and even though it was a massive mess to clear up it worked out well in the end. The teacher of the classroom wasn’t too impressed with the mess but in the end he got a cleaner classroom.

It was interesting to see that every activity during the day as well as people who were involved all expressed different kinds of moods and let off different kinds of feelings, an interesting aspect as our theme was relating back to mood and colour.

The research that we did to produce the main part of our workshop was ‘Culture into the Indian Holi Festival’, ‘The Manchester Colour Run’, Spain and Italy's Tomato Festival, artist inspiration and media background research, and everything we did was focused on colour and these were all big aspects for the children to reflect back on and to remember.

Even though there were many brilliant ideas behind everything that we initially wanted to do, when we did have to change or where we didn't quite achieve our plan it was because we were too slow, and not fully organised from the beginning. Nothing was done in enough depth for example at the last minute we had to rework the whole work shop to be able to actually present it on the day. The most positive aspect from our difficulties is that we can show a brilliant development journey from start to finish for our whole project.

What learning did you achieve? What could you improve upon? Identify an aspect that you could develop further in line with your practice.

I have learnt a whole range of teaching skills. By teaching in different lessons you have to consider changing the style of teaching depending on the subject, this is very important. I discovered that different age groups need to have different ways of teaching to suit their particular needs - more common sense than anything but the younger you are, the more guidance they will need. I learnt how to keep a class focused; how to get their attention; how to gain their respect, and how to deal with a whole load of new challenges. Activities that help with concentration, involvement, stress, thoughtful work, colour and media, activities and games that we used confidently on the day of the workshop that I will be able to carry with me through my future work.

Personally if I had the chance to do something like this again, I would consider doing a workshop even bigger and better than the paint fight was this time around. I would make the work bigger, I would take it outside, I would love to have more children or people involved to produce something really spectacular. As confidence with speaking was a problem I will carry on practicing this so that my voice would be heard more in events, this could be developed on further with in my practice, as when I go into third year next year voice and opinion is something that really matters.

Based upon your choices made within the unit (workshop, theme, and process) identify and select the key motivations within this unit. Evaluate how these relate and have informed your practice and future ambitions.

Based upon my choices for this unit, personally and within the group, I have thoroughly enjoyed most things I have been a part of. The key motivation for me is how we evaluated everything in relation to each other. By doing this I have informed my own practice and future ambitions within any circumstance that I have to sell myself as an individual, this will include any future presentations or work experience I am a part off.

When something does not go right, after this unit I have learnt anything can be fixed, anything is possible. Next time I do a project will be by myself again, although I do not see this as a bad thing as group work has been very difficult. I will be able to keep calm, break things down and focus on one thing at a time. This has changed my practice in many ways, and in particular is confidence as I go into new disciplines and other kinds of specialisms and working with new kinds of media, that beforehand, I would not have considered. I am still unsure of my future ambitions at this point due to being excited over lots of different kinds of industries. To tackle this situation I’m going to try and look into doing a whole range of types of work experience to slowly narrow down were I want to be over the next few years, even if I don’t decide to go into teaching I still stick by what I thought before this unit. I never would have had the chance to be involved in anything like I have done with this unit, it has been a brilliant opportunity for me and opened up a door, I never would have thought about before.

Exhibition night.. 14/05/15

Exhibition night was the first and final time that we worked together as a whole group for the educating unit, this has allowed us to flow more big and exiting new ideas out there four our final end of year display at Federation house in Central Manchester.
Throughout the whole unit, we have been divided up into our two seperate groups, we both planned and delivered two completley seperate workshops in Daca, to two different year groups, from this the research was very important, as it was vital that both experiences got presented on the final night.
At Federation house we had a lovely window space to present our work, our space presented us with so much opportunity to put on a spectacular show for our clueless audience.
As both groups had outderwear gear from the workshop day, we decided as a group that they each must be a key feature of the show.
My group had feedback tshirts that our year seven class had written all over telling us exactly what they thought of the day, the back grounds of the white cotton was covered in the after math of our power paint fight. The other group had a number of wild and vibrant looking boiler suits, covered in a wide choice of acrylic colours and collection of differnet mark making tools that they had used through out the whole day. We decided to display both of these by hanging them all up in a rotation pattern in the centre of our space, directly underneeath the centre piece we designed the floor space with paint covered fabric from the other groups workshop, I would personally describe this as 'A rug splashed and drizzled with the beauty of colour.'
To complete our group display on one wall we had photographic evidence from both our workshops including a group photo of us and all the children involved in the day. We had a feedback table with a large roll of material on, where the visitors of the exhibition including everyone who was involved could comment and give there honest and confidential feedback of the unit. This was very interesting to be a part of and very interesting to see what kind of comments there was too, both postive and negative all make up what Unit X is all about in my opinion.
The sign above our show read 'Unit X and why?' My over all experience to this has been a rollercoaster, times ive questioned myself what amI doing? why am I doing this? frustration over one reason or another, meeting up as a group that hasnt gone to plan, peoples opinions that can change a decision in a split second, but seeing my personal confidence grow over the last few weeks and meeting new people that have now become friends have made the whole experience worth while.

  

The picture above is of some of our group on our final exhibition night standing in front of our final display of work, a very proud and happy moment that we successfully reached this point.   

Planning of our exhibition workshop..

The majority of us on the Educator group have managed to meet to decide what we should do to represent our work at the exhibition at Federation House at the end of the Unit X programme. It was decided that there were two alternatives, both holding many positives and negatives.

1.
We join the ideas from both our DACA workshops together, and create a simplier, refined version for the exhibition night- or think of something from fresh.

Advantages:
-Give us more experience in teaching
-Will ensure we have experience in catering for all ages/abilities
-Will be interesting for visitors to interact in someting physical rather than visual

Disadvantages:
-More complicated
-Will be difficult to meet as whole group
-Can't make the workshop messy as people visiting the exhibition may be dressed up/wont want to get messy at the exhibit
-Will have to make sure we cater for every age, and every ability
-Will people want to hang around? Probably prefer to mingle more and see childrens/friends work
-Don't know for definite what space we have. Therefore can't plan anything too extravagant as may not be able to fit resources into the space provided for us. May also be too squashed if people crowd and gather round our stall


2.
We show film and pictures that we have taken from our workshops at DACA, either mixed together, on a rota one after the other, or on different walls. We will then hang up boiler suits from both workshops (as it's something that links both workshops together,) and perhaps the feedback t-shirts we are hoping to get from our workshops from the children at DACA. This will allow the visitors to not only see what we did, but also how it affected the children.
Can perhaps make a feedback wall to see the visitors opinions on our work, possibily how we could have improved it, to give us another form of feedback.

Advantages:
-Quite simple to create
-Will allow people to see the work we have been creating over the unit as many are unaware of what we have been doing
-Allows us to gain another form of feedback on our workshops
-Less risk assessments to consider (also less things to go wrong!)
-Will allow us to be more free to talk to visitors about how the unit went for us instead of being caught up in the workshop itself

Disadvantages:
-Less experience in teaching different ages/abilities
-Less experience organising a workshop experience

Number 2 is the preferred option for us all. Although its less experience for us, we all agreed we would prefer to focus on our own workshops, and also the pros outweigh the cons with number 2.

The above picture is a quick snap of some of the work, we as a group were deciding wether to display or not in our final exhibition.

DACA Day Workshop.. 12/05/15

The day will proceed as follows;

 

* 8:45 Introduction

* 8:50 Activity one: The in or out game

* 8:55 Activity two: The ball game, when the ball gets thrown to you, you have to shout out a colour and emotion relating to one another: an example Red- Anger

This will be an ice breaker for the class to get them up and involved.

* 9:05 Discussion about the famous blue&white, black&gold dress

* 9:25 Activity three: colours on the powerpoint, shout out the colour of the word not the background

* 9:35 Activity four: emotion drawing, drawing/mark making work according to what emotion the child chooses

10:05-10:25 Break Time..

* 10:25 Powerpoint presentation on Art Direction

* 10:35 Activity five: movie posters, turn Frozen into another genre

* 11:05 Powerpoint, colours within food packaging, an example- McDonalds

* 11:15 Activity six: create packaging for drinks bottles as well as making a new drink with trendy suitable name.

* 11:50 Gender stereotypes, an example- why is pink recognised with girls and blue with boys.

12:05-12:35 Lunch Time..

* 12:35 Cultures that involve colour

* 1:00 Activity seven: The paint fight inspired by culture

(after tidying and cleaning up)

* 1:40 Activity eight: collaging together all work that the children have produced today

* 2:45 Final conclusion, what have the children learnt?

* 2:55 feedback, tshirt and paper collage feedback, childrens opinions of the day

3:15 End of the day..

Activity five: Turning the Disney film Frozen into a different genre by using colour.

 

Activity Six: (Food packaging) Designing a new drink and label for the market.  

The below image is an example of Art Direction, this spesific technique is called 'Colour Grading' this is used a lot in the graphic and media world to enhance colour on our screens, this makes a certain still or video image look a lot superier and adapt to a certain scene a lot more.  

The final activity of the day, the paint fight that the whole class were involved in.

The picture below is an image of one of the boiler suits after the paint fight had happened.

 

BEFORE THE PAINT FIGHT!!

 

AFTER THE PAINT FIGHT!!



Over view of planning the DACA workshop..

Group work isn’t something I’m used to, as when I’m working within weave, the work is all self initiated, we each complete a whole project ourselves, with no group work attached. Overall it has been quite a big challenge working within a large group for Unit X, having to get used to relying on others as well as myself has been extremely difficult, it has always seemed that something has cropped up, myself included at times. Getting everyone together at one time to meet as a whole group has been almost impossible until this last week before we do the workshop, therefore most of the talks have been missing at least one person. I do feel I played a big part in arranging the meetings to try and get everyone together, so this would allow us to form a plan of the day, as nothing really ever went to plan, it’s a relief now at this point as a group we finally managed to organise a brilliant workshop for the day.
Initially we were considering focusing the workshop on the Holi Festival, an ancient Indian/Hindu tradition that involves throwing brightly coloured paint at one another in a massive celebration throughout the county. Relating to this, we decided to have a powder paint fight at the end of the day, to recreate this idea of the Holi Festival for all the children, we thought it would be a nice idea for them to have an insight on other countries important cultures.
But when speaking to Claire about disaster management, we realised that we hadn't considered what would happen if the weather was terrible on that day. If it was raining for example, this would mean that we would have to complete the whole workshop inside. We had thought of covering the whole classroom with dustsheets but came to the agreement that the task probably just wouldn’t work as well and could be a major health and safety matter. This, along with the idea that students from the Hindu/Indian backgrounds may feel patronised that we are focusing a workshop around something that they know more about than we do, this could cause us more problems than what it would be worth, from this we decided to change our activities for the day slightly, and focus the workshop more on the general aspects of colour, with the hope that the weather is nice on the day to re create the Holi Festival, to cover the health and safety side of the matter we wrote a letter to be sent out to all of the parents of the children taking part in the day, to let them know what exactly would be going on during the day, so if there were any allergies we needed to no about or general causes for concern we would know prior to the lesson, we would also be supplying overalls, eye protection googles, hair/shoe protectors and face masks for all the children to wear so every caution is being thought about. Along with everything going on for this day, a risk assesment has been done to cover all areas.

We always had a rather clear idea of the activities we wanted to focuses on throughout the day, however we still need to revise it carefully to ensure we have covered every area that may encounter a disaster in lots of different ways.
Our final plan is to aim to focus our day on colour, as this is a very broad area to focus on, and we could really do a lot with it as well as the children getting a lot out of it we therefore will be able to come up with an extensive range of activities to complete throughout the day.

We are planning on looking at lots of different aspects of colour including the semotics of colour which will lead onto emotions within colour, we want them to do lots of experimenting with colour, involving a range of artist research that they can refer back too along with mark making and development work throughout the day, with a wide range of activities that we as a group have planned, all aspects of colour will be touched upon so that the children get a lot out of the day.
As well as ensuring that the children learnt something during our workshop, we also wanted to inject a clear element of fun, making it a day that they will remember for a very long time, this is why we left the final aspect of colour with in cultures till the very end of the day, when they will see what fun can really be within an art subject.  

At the end of the day we are aiming to gather feedback from the students, for an interest as to what they all thought of the day, but in a more exciting form than a paper questionnaire. Claire gave us many ideas for this, however we have decided to wear plain white t-shirts, and get the children to write their feedback on our shirts. I think this will be a fun activity to end the day on, and will hopefully be a successful way to gather feedback from all the students efficiently, it will also be a way that both the children and ourselves have never given or received feedback before.

 

                                                               Spain's Tomato Festival..

                                                           Manchester's Colour Run..

                                                                 Indian holi festival..

The picture below is of our final lesson plan for our workshop in Daca, on this lesson plan it has everything we need to know including time sceduale, topic infor, activity, resources, and the presenter, helpers needed for a particular part of the day.

DACA Dry Run.. 07/05/15

The first part of today we split ourselves up into our two different workshop groups, my group first of all had to be the challenging audience for the other group whilst they did a complete practice run through of there DACA workshop, when I say challenging as the other group and tutors we had to face them with small and miner incidents that they could face when doing this workshop for real, this was interesting to see how not only they adapted to the challenges but how my group adapted in such different ways, the conclusion as to why I thought this was because we are going to be having a year 7 class and the other group will be having a year 9 class, we had to participate for the other group where ever is was necessary just as the other group would have to do for us, apart from having to play a huge part of reviewing there work, it was vital that as a group we were taking notes to give back the relevant feedback at the end of the session. 
I thoroughly enjoyed the other groups project, with some very high quality points as well as some room for improvement, it was highly disappointing that our group's dry run couldn't have gone much worse. 
With a small lack of communication and a misunderstanding of what the requirements were for today, as a group we were all highly unprepared as to what we needed to do and what we needed to bring, I quickly picked up on the other group having bought lots of resources for there audience including a power point presentation, music and handouts, three important things they will be needing on the day, this allowed us to see a good insight as to what there delivery will be all about, my group had nothing of the sort and unfortunately due to no ones fault but our own had to quickly come up with what we would do twenty minutes prior to our run through, this definitely didn't go to plan.
After both our groups had completed our run through it was important a big group discussion of feedback was had. 
* My reflection of somebody that was the deliverer. 
To describe my own role I would say tragic, a complete disaster, an awkwardly embarrassing situation to be in, being unorganized was clearly shown to everyone. 

*My experience as the receiver of the other groups delivery.  
The other group did very well, and the complete opposite to my own, I was very pleased for them, and it gave me the personal encouragement as well as worry as I know how much work I exactly had to do. 

*My two pieces of critical advice for the other group was; 1) The whole day needs to be properly sorted into a time tabled order and 2) It would be nice for the whole group to get involved a bit more, as I recognized that the same few people were talking.  

My Group's personal feedback from Anna and Clare.

* We were all too quiet when speaking. 
* We need to be more responsible for what jobs need to be done. 
* As a group we need to support each other more. (i.e. When someone is delivering/speaking, we all need to listen.  
* Bad timing of the day. 
* The plan of the day isn't working, including the activities, too much of the same thing going on. 
* Our learning outcomes aren't clear enough or making sense, the children need to know exactly what these are to understand the day, and what they will be doing, its important this is clear to us also. 
* The workshop needs to be open to interpretation, we need to let them decide things, let the classroom be open to opinions, 
* When asking any questions, always ask why and get the pupils to expand on there answers.

After being a part of today and hitting our first main obsticle it was clear to all of us that a lot of work still needed to be done for us to go ahead with our workshop, tonight we all stayed till very late to turn our work around, with the chance of still trying to let our workshop go ahead, thankfully we turned it around and created a brand new workshop with some amazing new ideas that would link our learning outcomes together a lot better, both Clare and Anna were very pleased with us, and were all delighted that our workshop will be going ahead again next tuesday.