This week I gave all of my students a “Get to Know You” survey asking what their interests are, including those that fall under the category of visual culture, such as favorite TV shows, movies, video games, etc. The students were also assigned a two-day assignment by my cooperating teacher (prior to my arrival) that involved them creating a drawn “selfie” that incorporated some of their interests as well. I notice that a lot of students are interested in similar things, which includes things like Netflix shows, movies, video games and internet memes. I am also familiar with a lot of those things, so I was able to use their interests to connect to them on a personal level and gain rapport with them.
Currently, the 6th graders are working on a drawing assignment where they create a tattoo design with their names, a banner of their choice and incorporate a visual culture element that speaks to their personality or identity. This is a symbolic element that relates to their popular culture, family culture/heritage or environment.
I am also planning to use some of their visual culture interests to inform my lessons. For example, for the 6th and 7th graders, a very popular meme is something called a “VSCO girl” which is basically a young female person who has particular interests and wears certain types of clothes. One of her interests is in “saving the turtles.” Taking inspiration from this, we are planning a found object sculpture lesson that has an underlying theme of environmentalism. We are planning on having the students collect recyclable materials and reform them into new nature related objects or shapes. They will also be working as partners, to emphasize the aspect of community and teamwork.
We are also planning a lesson with the 8th graders about self-portraiture and identity, also using left over materials such as candy/candy wrappers. The underlying theme using their “favorite candy” visual culture would be how our identity is shaped by what we see around us. They will create a collage based on portraits they previously drew of themselves and use the found objects to recreate and enhance the portraits.
All of the projects are choice based and teach students art skills combined with thematic concepts that relate to both art history and contemporary visual culture. For the most part this keeps students engaged in art making, in spite of perceived developmental and social limitations such as “not being good at art.”