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EDCI 336: Week Six Reflections

October 15, 2021 / / 0 Comments

This week we had a presentation from Jeff Hopkins about his school The Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). I really loved getting a chance to hear about this school. It seems like an incredibly good approach to teaching that is deeply beneficial for the students. This model seems like an effective way of achieving my personal goals of wanting to educate in a way that doesn’t bar neurodivergent students from learning about the world. Its a bit scary to approach an education system that has been created totally from scratch, but it seems scary in a good way to me. I think that inquiry schools like this are extremely promising and the future of education. I think a lot of my fear comes from the pressure of wanting to do this system justice so it can catch on, rather than me being afraid of something new. Most of my experience with traditional models of education have been as a student. I was lucky with my ADHD being stereotypical enough to have it noticed early. Lots of students don’t have this luxury though and plenty of students with ADHD can make it through school fine without medication. These students aren’t lucky for that though. Frequently they reach university and suddenly face deep crises and need to jump through the extremely complicated hoops surrounding adult ADHD diagnoses. I think inquiry models help students with ADHD learn in so many beneficial ways. They learn the content, but the introspection and critical thinking really helps them learn about themselves too. Jeff discussed a student with ADHD and how she uses different spaces to accomplish work. I found it really uplifting to hear about a student figuring out strategies that took me until halfway through my undergrad to figure out.

I would really love to work in an inquiry school. The freedom and flexibility is scary, but deeply exciting at the same time. It gives so much room for students to take control of their own learning and give feedback to teachers. It can feel like a more complicated system, but I think teachers are often more afraid of the sudden loss of control and authority that they’ll need to go through. It’s scary to trust students with so much responsibility, but honestly if someone can’t trust students like that I don’t think they’d be the best at teaching in general. Trusting students with genuine responsibility like this requires teachers to see students as human beings. I think this process of trust would be incredibly great for students and teachers. Students deal with a lot of condescension and the devaluing of their experiences can be frustrating at best and totally alienating at worst. Inquiry models of education not only get rid of this effect, but replace it with something truly beneficial for students. The process of inquiry gives students confidence in themselves and a sense of control. This can fundamentally shift student’s self-image from a position where they see themselves as just inherently not good at something to a position where they believe themselves capable of overcoming obstacles and learning. This goes for specific subjects too. Students can see themselves as scientists, artists, mathematicians, philosophers, and countless other members of society in the present. Students aren’t forced to wait until they’ve spent mountains of effort, time, and money in a post-secondary institution to feel like they’ve earned that title. Students can internalize those titles because they’ve gone through processes truly representative of those fields. Memorizing scientific information doesn’t make students feel like scientists and has the potential to make them believe that scientists just do work rote memorization for a career. Giving students a chance to explore science through inquiry gives them an opportunity to truly do science.

This presentation has given me a lot to think about. I saw PSII as an appealing institution beforehand, but now I see it as something that I really want to fight to get involved with. Regardless of whether or not I end up there, I think these models of inquiry can be extremely beneficial in all teaching environments. Jeff brought up that they were helping Reynolds with setting up a program and I believe that is their Flex program? I talked with a teacher at Esquimalt High School who did his practicum in that program and it seems really appealing. I’d love to try to create programs like that in public schools, I feel like the future talk we’ll be having will help give me some strategies for doing that as well. No matter where my career in education goes, I’d like inquiry to be a core part of it. Even a regular classroom that isn’t in an inquiry institution or part of a special program would benefit so much inquiry strategies. I’ve been in a few high school science programs that have genuinely made me upset at how unengaging they present science. Science is really important to me and was one of the first things to make me truly start wondering about the world around me. It really changed my perspective to one of almost constant questioning and observing. It gave me a really good perspective to see the beauty of the world and students missing out on that is just deeply depressing.

PSII has made some absolutely phenomenal resources for inquiry strategies and assessment. I’m going to attach them to this post so that I can have easy access to them later on. Assessment is something Jeff talked about as being a critical aspect of what they were looking for in teachers. I see assessment as something that should allow students to apply their understanding in critical ways. This will show that they know the material and they know how to use it, but most importantly it will help foster critical thinking in students. I find myself thinking of Dr. Blades’ Explore, Discuss, Understand (E.D.U) model a lot and the ways that it can be used to assess students. I’m going to keep assessment in mind and really try to study the core competency assessment forms that P.S.I.I has developed. I think that they’re a great resources and would be really beneficial for my own understanding of how to approach assessment. The other thing they are looking for in teachers are broad passions outside of just their teachable. I feel somewhat confident about this requirement? My ADHD makes me really hyperfixate on my hobbies which is honestly something I really love. I can get passionate about subjects and topics super easily and I feel like an environment like an inquiry institute would be a great place for me because talking with students about their projects seems like a ton of fun. I really like things like art and writing so I think it would be fun to bring that to a classroom and try to integrate it with scientific concepts that are often difficult to pin down and give students context for. I’ll need to spend some time reflecting on my own hobbies and passions. Just saying “I’m enthusiastic about everything and would love to work with students on whatever it is they’re interested in” probably won’t give people a good picture of me. I’m really glad to have that idea in the back of my mind now though. I think the topics of visual art, the social contexts that affect trends in them, and how they use things like colour would be a good starting place. I’m not sure how well I can predict what I’m going to be engaged with though. I might just try to be introspective as things come up and try to take step backs to understand what I like about them.

Resources

From-Neurons-to-NeighborhoodsDownload
  • PSII Media and Outreach
    • TONS of incredibly useful CC resources here, will include the ones we discussed in class below, but will take a deeper look at all of them
    • PSII Assessment Framework
      • STUDY this, seems extremely beneficial and something I’d like to understand thoroughly
    • PSII Inquiry Flowchart
    • PSII Approach to learning diagram
      • Good connections to BC curriculum, literacies, and the values that PSII see as most important for students as members of society
      • I’m really on board with the things that PSII values. I think they’re all vital traits for people to engaging in meaningful ways with their communities and society.

My first and last sheet of boxes

Free Inquiry Project Post #2: Linework

October 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Linework is an important part of a lot of different art forms. It’s a skill that really bleeds into other artistic practices as well. Learning how to confidently draw lines carries over to things like making confident paint strokes. I REALLY struggled with linework when I first got interested in art and, like most things in art, I’m still working on improving it. My biggest problem was my anxiety. I’d feel a lot of sudden pressure before making a mark and would mess up my lines because of that. I could “ghost” the lines decently and practice the motions of the line prior to making it with no problem. When I actually needed to make the line I would feel a lurch of anxiety and overthink it. I found that enough practice helped me get over this effect which made a big difference for me. Linework is something that I come back to and practice regularly. It’s a nice fundamental of art because you make a progress in it by just doing creative things you enjoy. That being said, it’s really important to be vigilante about monitoring it and make sure you aren’t slipping into bad habits. For this reason I like doing exercises that are focused on linework and the fundamentals of art that can be practised alongside it like perspective.

The first few lessons in the Draw A Box Program

One of my favourite resources for working on this is Draw A Box. Draw A Box is a pretty intensive program, I fell off my first few attempts at starting it. It’s something that I try to come back to readily now. I’ve found that their advice has really helped me take large steps in my artistic abilities. The first few exercises focus largely on just drawing straight lines. It teaches a lot of really useful techniques like drawing confidently from your shoulder and arm instead of wrists and fingers. These exercises are largely focused on things like drawing a line over a ruler-made line, drawing a line between two points after ghosting it, and eventually drawing 2D planes. These exercises have a really nice through line to them. They slowly build up to the perspective exercises while never really abandoning a past skill. Things like the 2D square planes are still basically just exercises in drawing straight lines between points. There’s a few things that disrupt this mold a bit, the ellipse exercises diverge from this gradual process because of them being round ellipses not containing straight lines. Draw A Box still connects them to the past exercises by using the previously drawn 2D planes as “frames” for ellipses. This will help tie into future exercises involving cylinders and helps give students an idea of how ellipses behave in perspective.

Some of the later Draw A Box lesson 1 exercises focusing on perspective and distance

Some of the many many boxes I drew over the summer

During the summer of 2020 I got to the most dreaded part of this program (and the thing probably that gives it its name). This part of the program is called The 250 Box Challenge. There really isn’t much I can say to describe it that the title itself doesn’t say. During the summer I’d try to draw about 10 boxes a day. I was locked down for the summer which made for a pretty perfect environment for this challenge. I spent a ton of time either drawing boxes or wandering around outside, but it was a pretty enjoyable summer all things considered. I thought that this was a really useful exercise, despite the challenge it presented. It was really great for getting me a ton of practice with shapes that are really important for drawing construction. It helped me a lot with perspective as well. If you look at the exercises above you can see coloured lines extending from the lines that make up the boxes. These lines let me check how the box lines converge and assess myself. There were a few times were I extended them in the wrong way (I really found that boxes can create an optical illusion where they flip orientation depending on how I looked at them). It worked as a really good form of assessment, you might be able to see some arrows where I marked lines that went off course. Another form of assessment I had was critique from a friend who was doing the exercise at the same time as me. It was pretty difficult to critique each other because most of the time the lines told everything they needed to. It was good practice for getting peer-critique at least (something that I’m really bad at seeking out). It was really helpful to get motivation from someone else doing the exercises as well.

After that summer of boxes I actually dropped the program for a bit. It wasn’t because of a lack of motivation or burn out luckily, I just wanted to focus more on figure drawing for a bit and practice that for a while. I’ve been a bit of an actual art lull recently, mostly kicked off by the chaos of moving and working over the last summer. I’ve been slowly getting back into a rhythm of art again which has been quite nice for me. I decided to pick up Draw A Box and have been doing some gesture drawings to practice figure (something I’ll discuss in the next post). I still find creative drawings really scary and a lot harder to motivate myself to do. I find that just turning my brain off and doodling is good way to practice that while still relaxing and enjoying myself. I tend to motivate myself with new materials a lot too. I’ve been really wanting to play with some India ink so I got some recently. It lead to me making a piece of art that I’m really happy with, but didn’t really plan beforehand.

One of the organic forms exercises
My unfinished texture exercise. The right box is supposed to be a gradient of the texture being studied

Getting back into Draw A Box relates to my initial goal of painting some plants in watercolour too. The next few exercises are focused on organic form and texture, but they build up to exercises on construction. I’m really looking forwards to these exercises but definitely feel a lot of nerves around them too? I’m not entirely sure where the fear comes from, I’m not afraid of messing up and I kind of expect to. I think there’s a fear of failure that’s a lot more intense than failure itself. I’m not entirely sure if it’s been conditioned into me from things like school or the way my ADHD works. I often get extremely invested in tasks which can make it sting more when they aren’t exactly what I want. I put off the texture exercise a lot. I had actually halfway completed it prior to getting to this week but had dropped it before doing the “texture gradient” part. It took me a while to do the first part too. I had bought an orange to use as a texture reference. By the time I did the exercise it had gotten really dry and old. I was proud to get it done though. I finished the texture exercise this week and will be trying to move ahead in the program. There’s still a form dissection exercise before the construction stuff, but I think that should still be kind of fun (as long as I can remind myself that drawing is something I enjoy).

The finished texture exercise

I thought it would be fun to give myself a reference point for my construction abilities before and after the future construction exercise. I drew one of my plants as a study and tried to be as accurate as possible. I focused on drawing the things closest to me first so I wouldn’t have to deal with overlapping lines too much. I’m really happy with the end result of this exercise. There were a lot of lines that I really messed up, but once the whole picture was done they were pretty hard to notice. Nice to have this plant line-work too. If I get too interested in other things I might just come back to it and paint it to mentally check off my initial goal. Feels a little like cheating, but there’s no rules here. As long as I’m actively doing art I think I’m pretty content. I’ve included the India ink drawing I did down below.

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