This past teaching experience refined my past perspective on the concept of story telling and the importance of it. Some students chose to create elaborate narratives, sometimes beginning with the text and creating illustrations for their stories after. This demonstrated how many of the students resolve problems through story telling differently. Sometimes being an artist we forget to tell stories. In my practice today, I try to just create an aesthetic work of art, without the idea of telling a story. Contrary to this belief, children are at the age where everything in their mind has a story and they need to understand how these stories can be represented in the proper way through art. Storytelling plays an important role in communication and its crucial to teach this to students. Another misconception that I had was that students already know how to tell their stories. What I actually learned was that some students struggle with this concept on how to create a proper story with a beginning, middle, and end. Throughout this lesson, I saw students creating a story board with just some of those components, either being the beginning, or a run- on plot that doesn't have an ending. This showed me that I cannot assume anything in the classroom and that I should be clear when teaching these concepts to students.
The work of art i created represents the idea of not assuming anything. I created an abstract piece that would actually promote the idea of many stories and underline ideas that could possibly occur while viewing. Art can be a great way to get a person to think about what is happening, even if its not 100% given to you on what is particularly going on in the work itself. I think that its important to have an open ended discussion that could emerge from viewing a work of art just like discussions can occur when telling a story. This work of art utilized many different colors so that it could tell a multitude of stories and ideas to people. Using a diverse color palette allowed for an open interpretation of the viewer, just like the students creating stories that could evoke emotion and interpretation amongst what they created.
Creating this piece reminded me of how important it is to utilize your color palette to enhance your story or what you are trying to convey in your work of art. When I teach, I want my student to know the importance on how they visually communicate their idea and how what they create may cause for different interpretations to occur.
