Art Class: Tree of Life Self Intro

Students' work

This year is my first time teaching graduating students. For a start, I've asked them to introduce themselves through this tree of life activity. It looks like a straightforward activity but it does require students to think deeply because it is a visual metaphor in which a tree represents your life including your past, present and future. You can see an image taken from my fellowship programme. 

From this activity, I could see that the students are influenced by the events happening around them. Even though they are not directly receiving the impact of say troubled times, they are aware of current affairs. The objective of this work is to get them to reveal a part of them that I would perhaps never see in the classroom context. When I'm kept updated of their taste in music or other forms of entertainment, it also helps to inform my lesson development and pitch my instructions in class. For example, a number of them expressed interest in memes and I have an almost perfect plan for blending pop culture and Art.