Art Appreciation (Introduction to Visual Arts)
- Day 1 ( Aug. 28 T) of the fall semester, 2018
By Dr. Crystal (an artist with Sociology/Social Psychology, Sociopolitical Sciences, Learning Technologies, and the rest of trans-disciplinary background).
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Is it "nice" or not when the educator takes on the roles of the instructional/curricular designer (ID), and the contents deliverer (SME - subject matter expert), such as in my case? What happened is that Learning Technologies - the previous Instructional System and Technology is also one of my academic disciplines (a Ph.D. program), in addition to the rest of my other 4 majors and 4 minors (Ooouch! How many student debts were accumulated ???)
Generally speaking, in most of the post-secondary educational institutions, in particular, the four-year colleges, when the edu-budgets are not tight enough, the instructional designer (ID) and the academic faculty (SMEs) can be part of an ideal division of labor. For, obviously, in the hiring practice, the job description of the Instructional Designer is very different from that of the Humanity, Natural/Social Science Academic Instructors.
From the ID perspective, the designer lays out the foundation based on learning theories/philosophy, instructional design models (such as: Learning Styles, Motivations, scaffolding, Design Thinking, Quality Matters, Andragogy, HyFlex. Lists, frameworks, Venn diagrams, rubrics, templates. Six principles of Andragogy, five stages of the ADDIE development process, six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, forty-two review standards of the Quality Matters Rubric, and so on so forth. Furthermore, the instructional design skills/strategies, as well as the development process/cycle, or other relevancy, e.g., online learning and social media, and the rest of the constantly emerging "New" ideas or protocols.
As the SMEs in their specific disciplines in the natural, social sciences, and humanities, require intense academization.
As ISD (Instructional System and Design) has grown into a solid academic discipline with specific knowledge acquisition/credentials (they are SMEs in their field as well), the interface between IDs and SMEs raises questions for pondering. For example, "Should the roles of Instructional Designers and Subject Matter Experts be integrated or differentiated?" "To what extent, the SMEs are important to ID?" "Under what circumstance, can an Instructional Designer also be a Subject Matter Expert?" .... and so on are frequently asked. Many arguments and publications are available associated with these topics. In a nut shell, one can find the agreement of the beneficial reciprocity between SMEs and IDs, while, the disciplinary division of labor and the professional autonomy requires identity differentiation.
Ideally, a course design team entices the cooperation and collaboration of the design specialist, the subject matter expert, as well as the relevant specialists, such as software professionals, when budgets allow it to happen. Otherwise, alternative practices are adopted by different institutions based on a variety of necessities.
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The following information is casual writing (non-academic) about how I designed Art Appreciation from scratch to the final approval before the delivery with a dual role of an ID and SME. I shared a snapshot of my experience while skipping the theoretical part of elaboration.
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Art Appreciation (face to face, and am re-designing into an online), this course is truly my baby (since I don't have a human baby, I just created one without egg and sperm :)!) I have designed Social Problems and American Government online courses before. They are common disciplines of several community/tech colleges. There are course information, resources, and even design templates/examples available for reference. Because of the rich resource availability, "designing" those two courses, to me, was not quite challenging, nor exciting enough.
As to the Art courses (in this case, narrowed down to the Visual Arts), are popular in many four-year colleges/universities, but rarely found in the two-year college system. Under such circumstances, the "lure" of the adventurous qualities was hard to resist. Then, a blazing the trail journey has begun.
Though there are resources in the four-year college setting, many of them don't quite fit the two-year's learning conditions in terms of the college missions, open admissions, the characteristics of students, and the infrastructures of the school environment. For example, I taught at a four-year college before as a new instructor. I followed the ready-made course syllabus and objectives with an assigned textbook: no mandatory requirements of lesson plans/learning activities, nor rigorous assessment layouts for a specific learning outcomes to meet "certain educational accountability." It was a very interesting, free-lancing teaching experience, which I enjoyed with tremendous enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I covered only 1/3 of my current (a two-year-tech-college) course contents, and, I performed well too, for that type of "less is more" educational setting.
In short, in a technical college environment, it was totally a different kind of saga to facilitate an art course, specifically speaking. (That is, not just an Art course, other liberal art subject matters as well. Here is one of my experiences which can be episodic by nature, but not without sharing part of the truth pertaining to this strand of research: I taught Sociology at 4-year university stetting as a part-time instructor (with a master degree at that time.) The college mission statements, teaching philosophy, pedagogy, assessments, student body, status hierarchy among faculty, adjunct instructors, and administrators, as well as the whole economic-political environment/culture at the 2-year college, are very different from those of the 4-year's.)
Regarding designing your own course from the very first bit of materials and information is interesting. You have the ID knowledge and experiences, animated by the contents you prepared for. Like Ying and Yang, Form and Content, mutually facilitates and complements each other.
For instance, here is a tiny slice from the hundred pieces of interfacing between an ID and SME during the processes of analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation on a designed competency, called "Apply principles of design (to a work of art, or a hands-on project)". For the similar designing processes in details ( in that case, I took on a role as an ID to work out multiple delivery formats (MDFs) for my six social science courses as an SME in the Spring semester of 2009 - online, hybrid, teleconference, and face to face (4 MDFs) for my Diversity Studies, Contemporary American Society, Psychology, and Sociology (4 preps.) For doing this voluntarily, I got the privilege to earn a couple of points for overload as a tiny reward. But, the most significant psychological- reward was that it was truly a "HEROIC" deed! Even today (fall 2018), I could not fathom how I made it!
I captured that experience in a paper and presented at the AECT International Convention a while ago for your reference. See below:
AECT Convention presentation ...
More presentations from Xena Huang
Research Paper, title: “What is the Lived Experience of Designing and Teaching Multiple Delivery Methods -Live Meeting, Hybrid, Online, and Face To Face (f2f) within a Semester at a Technical College Setting”?
Presented at the 2009 AECT International Convention, Louisville, KY
Published in the Convention Proceedings, and in the ERIC http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED511355.pdf
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Based on the above-detailed designing processes, in this Art Appreciation case, you foresee the learning outcome first, then analyze student background from the initial survey (a small group of students may need one on one instruction), program enrolled (diverse demographic background and the disparity of academic readiness), the cost of materials/textbook, the level of difficulty of the contents. Technology-wide, check the availability of lecture notes and PowerPoint, the technological affordance/accessibility (needed software and hardware, such as BYOD and Labs), the possibility of educational gaming as part of assessments. Design learning modules based on the learning cycle, Bloom's taxonomy, motivation, inter-locus vs. external-locus...etc. variety of learning theories and practices accorded with a specific hands-on project via digital or f2f presentation to implement the learning objectives to align with the required competency. In this case, apply the learned Principles of Design to a hands-on project, such as "What is American culture?" At the end of the unit learning, learners engage in formative and summative assessments via peer reviews, individual mini-presentation and reflection paper writing (the worksheet with grading rubrics are attached to each hands-on project.) Finally, the unit learning is ended with informal quizzes and the formal exam.
Personal design-research interest allows re-design with remedial or alternative pedagogy via flexible assessment tools. As an ID and SME, you constantly switch perspectives as a designer, student, instructor, problem-solver, even pretending as an administrator, circumscribed within the specific classroom, online, and institutional setting. You are searching for various technical and academic resources incessantly and seek out the possibility of improvement. (This part of writing is an impressive expression without detailed theoretical information.)
It was the most fascinating "extra curriculum activity" that I have ever done of my twenty-one years' educational career in the US. (Note, most two-year colleges don't require academic research and publishing. Instead, a full-time faculty takes on 18 to 21 credit teaching loads per semester, which is 36 to 42 credits for an academic year, plus serving in various program advisory committees and inter-intra college activities.)
Recalling in spring 2016, in the beginning, the course title would have been named “Introduction to Visual Arts.” Since my work-setting did not offer any Art programs before, after a long discussion, it was changed from the “potentially intimidating or boring” subject matter into a fun-sounding title: Art “Appreciation.” (A short note: in a preliminary discussion, I even doubted that students would take this type of "elite" or "nice-to-have", but definitely "not-have-to" have the course at the job-training/pragmatic-occupation oriented institution!)
From the first idea to the final version of the curriculum project approval, except the textbook, all the step-by-step "Embroidered" processes were “made-from” scratches onto a software – WIDS/Worldwide Instructional Design System. Ya, be creative, but follow the sand-box, step-by-step rules, and regulation to prevent from going wild or astray :)! Each step demands rigorous requirements. The project approval is based on the criteria of “Quality Matters.”
Personally, I am familiar with the “Backward Design” approach which foresees the final learning outcome in my mind ( as aforementioned in the example) and then works back step by step to the beginning of the course design.
The curriculum project included several integrated segments: state-required competencies, college core abilities, course description, learning objectives/goals, lesson plans, learning activities, learning materials, and "most importantly," Assessments of each lesson plan aligned with objectives and competencies to implement the core abilities.
I expected (the tunnel lights) students to understand the basic D.B.A.E theories and practices (part of my Art Education master program, focusing on integrated learning of studio art/products, art history, aesthetics, and art criticism) into a 3 credits (48 hours) package. Among the four subject matters, surely, the studio art part was not feasible at the current 2-year tech college setting, since it requires the qualified MFA faculty to facilitate different art media learning (from drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, moving images/film, digital art, design disciplines, art-n-crafts, architecture, and the rest of emerging new art media.) Furthermore, the current college does not have different types of studios for art productions. Though I had intense studio art learning (drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, and mixed media), I have not earned an MFA degree, yet.
With the above learning outcome in mind, I created 9 competencies (to meet the Wisconsin State requirements) as a competency-based course design. These competencies also meet the College core ability requirements. Each competency stands as a module or a unit of learning, which requires 3 to 5 learning objectives or goals. Each objective/goal is reified by 2 to 3 learning plans. Each learning plan has measurable/observable learning activities for unit learning assessments. The assessment requires assessing rubrics and avoids the test-style of the high-stake-conventional summative methods. In short, each unit of learning needs several formative assessments to come up with the summative result.
Indeed, the competency-based learning tends to be challenging for the liberal art courses, due to assessing the cognitive learning outcomes being different from those of the occupational/hands-on-based degree programs. For example, assessing how a student takes a patient's temperature is less complicated than those of students' understanding the concept of hegemonic ideology, inequity vs. inequality, or the myth of meritocracy related to social stratification.
In short, using Competency-Based assessment to both the degree programs (occupational disciplines, such as Computer Networking Specialist, Culinary management, Central Technical Technician, Industrial Mechanical Technician... and so on) and the liberal art courses (such as Sociology, Ethnics, Diversity Studies...etc.) is without controversies.
Fortunately, this Art Appreciation class, being an entry-level of Humanities course and the nature of richness of the visual information, many hands-on projects are applicable to meet the learning objectives and the quantifiable assessments except, such as, art evaluation/criticism and censorship. The latter relates to cognitive, ideological, and philosophical learning domains which tend to be controversial and debatable, in particular, around Impressionism to the Post-modern art world.
I was confident that the rest of the three sub-fields could be packed into a three-credit course with the availability and accessibility of technological aids (sometimes, I also take on the role of software facilitator or demonstrator for some projects implemented via learning technologies.) The studio art/art productivity would be carried out by lecture/discussions with mini-hands-on projects, since the school does not have art studio facilities - at this stage. Obviously, this type of course would not have resulted in a “deep” learning outcome at an introductory level, and many students here, this might be their last official art class that they would take.
Here are a couple of Art Appreciation hands-on projects of the Spring semester, 2018 (with students' consent).
https://www.bookemon.com/book_read_flip.php?book_id=756262&check=0015c0dc2bb6250503f1636c4a251450&fbclid=IwAR2zF0oZ7v-ZdxrACQ3Y4Z8YDBf8Rx3rmOT2c7VNc806pAl3dr0B1Goevdc
https://www.bookemon.com/book_read_flip.php?book_id=756278&check=eaca534bb0ec4a4d34129dca96ebc9bb&fbclid=IwAR3_Fr7n4wEqcVJt9-swVV7mr_bC7YvwZ_I7qvyoIgQ6X2-MoPbIrQHbxq8
The following classroom hand-out was a major work-in-progress project guideline and grading/checking list of spring 2018:
This was a pure delightful and interesting journey for a course designer who is also the course contents deliverer (doppelganger?!) During the designing processes, as mentioned in the previous sections, you imagined all kinds of possibilities, for better or worse happening in the potentially predictable and unexpected teaching-learning environment via multiple roles (e.g., ID. SME, negotiator, problem solver...etc.) You are your course maker, director, screenplay writer, content activist, group leader, and problem solver. You created an imaginary movie inside your own head.
Due to my trans-disciplinary academic background, in particular, associated with Sociology (social psychology), Sociopolitical sciences, I was aware of how to balance the debates of the intersectionalities between Individual Artists' Creativity versus Social Forces, as well as theoretical emphasis (art criticism) versus artistic creativity/art productivity – was challenging.
Are you curious about how I have been doing with these odd-sounding hybridized engagements in a technical educational setting? Honestly speaking, among my Sociology (both the basic and the transfer track), Diversity Studies, and Art Appreciation courses, I can shamelessly say that this youngest course of mine makes me proud of myself, makes me happy. I am so blessed with this opportunity and the privilege to do it.
This fall semester of 2018 is my 5th time facilitating Art Appreciation. I am not guiltily saying that I love my Sociology less, (which has been my first love for a long long time). I just have to express a little bit more fondness to my "Art"kenstein (perhaps, Halloween is at the corner :)! )
In the near future, I will share all the detailed course design processes and documents here. Stay tuned.
