I. General Information
School Name: Nanaimo District Secondary School
School District: SD#68 Nanaimo-Ladysmith
Inquiry Team Members: Jean Kloppenburg: jkloppenburg@sd68.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: aly.bourgoin@sd68.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE Case Study
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Secondary (8-12)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Applied Design, skills & Technology, Arts Education
Focus Addressed: Other: ESL International Students and new students to the art room in a senior class
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? How can we create a senior inquiry-based curriculum that contains adaptations for our diverse art students while increasing a sense of belonging?
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: Who are our learners this year?
– Increased number of international students enrolling with English as a second language.
– Students who are taking art for the first time.
– Students who have taken many art classes at school and in the community.
– Students who are late enrolling because there is room in the class and/or it is the best option out of a list of classes to take.
Focus: We decided the biggest impact we could make was to create class studies of techniques that are engaging for the experienced art student, but also provide chunked, step by step instruction with images of the process for the beginning art student as well as international students. We selected this area because inquiry learning focuses on student interest, making it difficult to build technical artistic skills.
Hunch: What is leading to this situation? How are we contributing to it?
If we use a YouTube video to present an online fluid acrylic painting paint along technique to our classes, we can chunk the process into guided steps:
~Providing a specific painting palette
~Using video showing colour mixing
~Using video showing process and technique
~Using slides to break steps into chunks of manageable and meaningful steps that students can independently refer to, to stay on task
~ Each meaningful step will provide discipline specific language and vocabulary for all students to help with reflection on their learning
~ Each chunk of instruction will include images to guide the learning process
New Professional Learning: On our professional day, we participated in a fluid acrylic painting workshop. Our goal was to learn how to use a paint along YouTube video to learn painting techniques that we could then use in our classrooms. What we learned from following the video is that following a video takes time and patience!!! It was hard to follow the paint along and we had to stop the video and rewind many, many times to see what was happening. So… we decided to document our steps in photos and other information that would make the paint along more successful for our students.
Taking Action: We refined how we teach technical artistic skill with an inquiry-based art curriculum in senior art classes so that all students can practice, gain and refine their artistic skills at the level at which they are engaging in the creative process.
We developed a student reflection so that students can reflect on the techniques used and build knowledge and understanding that they can use for their next painting projects.
Checking: The student reflections provided us with the information we needed to validate that students can reflect on the techniques used, building discipline-specific language, as well as long-term knowledge and understanding that they not only used in their next painting projects, but also in their next art classes.
Reflections/Advice: The fluid acrylic study showed students an advanced painting technique that isn’t usually taught until college or university, so our goal was to break the painting technique down into smaller more manageable steps. All art students who participated in the fluid acrylic study gained some experience and understanding of how the technique changes the outcome of a painting. Based on the student’s underpainting study reflections and final art pieces, this teaching collaboration was successful and both of us would use this study again in our future classes.
The second semester art students who participated in the first semester inquiry continued to show understanding of what they learned in the first semester, and many of the art pieces were showcased at the spring Port Theatre art exhibit. One student who was new to an art class had someone offer to buy her painting after seeing it at the Port Theatre.