Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Trimis & Savva Reading Questions
I enjoyed this reading about how a teacher can incorporate the outside world into a lesson that will not only teach students about their surrounding areas, but help them to understand mediums in more depth. It also gives students a chance to get out of the classroom and into their real world, showing that "learning takes place in real situations and is not limited to the classroom" (Trimis and Savva 2009). My one big problem with this article is that the teachers took the children out of the classroom... Not that taking them out is an issue, but field trips are rarely funded or approved in schools anymore. Are art teachers even allowed to take students on field trips? And if they can, are they even funded trips? Though an excursion out of the classroom is not technically a field trip, are teachers allowed to take students out of the classroom during the school day? Other concerns I have about this article are time to complete, and time constraints. It says about letting the project run as long as children are interested, but in a regular elementary art classroom, you may only have the students for 40 minutes, and by the next class, they may have lost interest. But then you have a half finished or hardly started project, and no where to go with it because students have lost interest. I did enjoy this article, and it has helped me to think about my place-based art education project a little more in depth.
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i loved that quote too!
ReplyDeleteThings like field trips and taking students out of the classroom probably all depend on the type of school your in and in what district it's located in.
ReplyDeleteI was also concerned about the field trips, especially since one of the teachers was able to do it the very next day after it was proposed. I went to a school in a rural setting with significant cultural history (1969 Woodstock), but we never addressed these issues in school at all, ever. We weren't even allowed to explore the edge of the playground where it bordered the woods, but I think that the teachers probably could have, and should have, given us the opportunity to explore even the boundaries of the school grounds. If you were in a classroom though with limited time, maybe an alternative could be just observing the environment through the windows, just so students could engage with their own space.
ReplyDeleteAt my school back at home, we had a great woods area in the center of all the levels of school buildings which was used a lot for Chorotopos involvement in the classroom. We used the pond for biology, the trails for gym, and a lot of the nature just for art projects. It must be nice to be in a schooling area that is situated near an area that can be used educationally, and a lot harder for schools that are just located on a piece of property with nothing to offer. I read about a charter school in Albany that would use the community and the city to involve the children in local events that were happening, or just to go one walks to give the children a opportunity to question their surroundings. I couldn't imagine you'd need any funding for that, just consent from the parents to bring their children out into the town. It must also be nice to have a surrounding situation to be on an island like they did in the reading, just because such different things are so close together and you wouldn't need transportation to certain areas.
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