Art Class: Collaboration VS Cooperation

How do you collaborate with non-art teachers? In my previous school, there was a teacher who wanted to collaborate with the Art department (technically there was only me then) to celebrate National Day. She wanted the whole school to receive an identical SG flag template and fill in colour. The fact that you are using art materials such as colour pencils or oil pastels doesn't mean it is art. Another point that I have observed is that the term collaboration is used quite loosely.

For example, last year, I had the children to create this underwater theme "mural" towards the end of the year. We read the book You Be You by Linda Kranz and everyone created a self portrait in the form of a fish. I had the concept and I put up everyone's work. So, in a way, this was mostly cooperation because the children work on their own fish but they could draw their own ideas. Yes, it was tedious and time consuming to put up the children's work but it wasn't a complex task. Whereas in collaborating work, the outcome is to work together to solve an open-ended, complex task.

I was glad with the process and outcome of this year's collaboration with non-art teachers. The children created post-it mural of 百福图 (Hundred Fu Painting). The Chinese language teachers and I had a discussion before we decided on using pictogram as a springboard in the art lesson. The main idea about making meaning out of Chinese characters is here.

To read more about the difference between collaboration and cooperation, please click here and here. 

Art class: Festive-related art class

2017 is the year of the Rooster according to the Chinese zodiac. The Chinese New Year (CNY) is a gazetted public holiday. Since it falls on the weekends, the following Monday and Tuesday would be a holiday and a school holiday respectively. To increase pupils' awareness of the cultural festival, the Mother Tongue committee has requested to held an internal red packet design art competition. While the art making is done during art lessons, the form teachers would give an introduction of the tradition to the pupils.

With the festive approaching, many commercial establishments would capitalize on it to promote their own products or services. The newspaper is an accessible and economical resource to show pupils some cultural motifs to aid their artwork. I've chosen advertisement that have some aspects related to the CNY festive. By displaying all of them on the whiteboard allow us to see that the advertisement has a dominant colour - reds. We also discussed about the brilliance of advertisement by drawing a parallel between their product/ service to the festive. 

Since the pupils had only one lesson for this task, I've only skimmed on the surface of using advertisement as a form of communication. Providing the newspaper as a starting point for the pupils allow them to incorporate meaning in their artwork as illustrated in this pupil's artwork below:

Some teachers don't encourage students copying from an "original" source but have you heard of this saying: Originality is undetected plagiarism? While I value meaning making in their art, I would also like to see how they incorporate ideas from different sources and weave them together to create elements that compose a story. In the image on the right, the drawing is done by a pupil whose Mother Tongue is not Chinese. She had difficulty initially but she chose an image that she liked. While there are some similarities between the original source and her work, I think she had taken much effort to create positive and negative space to portray a rooster instead of just tracing from the newspaper image. She has intentionally left out some unnecessary drawings and incorporate a festive banner to frame the Chinese characters that also shows she's not copying mindlessly or racing to complete the task. For that, her work is one of those selected for class discussion.