Transcript Reflection on Instructional Practice

Reflection on Instructional Practice
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In a nutshell:
Description describes WHAT you did, what happened.
Analysis analyzes WHY you did it, why it happened.
Reflection reflects on HOW it impacts student learning.
DESCRIPTION asks the question: WHAT? What is the
setting? What is going on? What is the background? What does
the viewer need to know to "see" the classroom (must be
evidenced in video)?
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The richer the description – the more there will be to analyze. If you
don’t have enough detail in your descriptive commentary, you will not be
able to thoroughly analyze the teaching situation. When entries ask for
rationale – it is part analysis and part descriptive.
Reflection on Instructional Practice
ANALYSIS asks the question: SO WHAT? So you had a class of students
working on a math manipulative, small group session, finding the difference
between perimeter and area. SO WHAT? So what do you see in the video, or
what is seen in the student's work? What is significant????
REFLECTION asks the question: NOW WHAT? Now that you have
analyzed your teaching, what are you going to do next? What worked well and
will be continued as the class progresses? What did not work and, looking
back on it, could have been different? (Knowing what did not work and how
to improve that area is the sign of a reflective individual--no one is perfect.)
What do you need to tweak? Who needs more assistance? Who has the
information mastered and needs a next step? Why is it important to your
teaching?
Reflection on Instructional Practice
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WHEN WRITING, PROVIDE SPECIFIC EVIDENCE TO
SUPPORT YOUR STATEMENTS. For instance, when you
write about your teaching video, you need to provide specific
(clearly seen) evidence (proof that what you say is there) to
support your statements. A vague, unsupported statement is
worthless.
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PRACTICE REFLECTIVE WRITING IN YOUR JOURNALS
AND SKETCHBOOKS; apply this model to all components of
the ArtsAPS workshop by reflecting on your teaching, your
creative process, your aesthetic reactions.
Reflection on Instructional Practice
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Descriptive
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What is the evidence?
What type of evidence (activity, lesson plan, work sample, assessment
measure); we must be able to SEE it in videos
What happened?
What did I do
What was my role?
What is the context
When and where was it created
What was the setting
What were the circumstances
Context sets the scene for the practice, makes it come alive for the reader
Reflection on Instructional Practice
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Analytical
 Deals with reasons
 Why did it happen?
 How does this evidence illustrate the practice?
 How does the evidence meet the rubric criteria?
 Explains your reasons
 How does this evidence address the practice?
 How did the application of this evidence impact student
learning?
 Justify your rationale for the selected competencies and skills
as related to this evidence and practice.
Reflection on Instructional Practice
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Reflective
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Personal reaction to experience
Reflection occurs after an experience or teaching situation
Is based on analysis
Reflection is a tool for assessing your own level of competence
What is important about what I have learned?
What did I learn about myself ?
What did I learn about my students?
How will this action affect future instruction
How will you use what you have learned from experience to improve your
instruction in he future?
Reflection on Instructional Practice
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For example, “The 3 girls at the back table work collaboratively as evident in the video.” This is a
statement and as such, does not have evidence from the video to back it up. This statement is
stronger when accompanied with evidence cited directly from the video.
“The 3 girls at the back table work collaboratively as evident in the video when the girl in the pink
sweater asks the question about what to do when you add [1] to the equation. You will see that
the girl with the blue shirt turns her graph around so the girl in pink can see it and shows the girl
in pink the process.” This last passage has a statement and then evidence to back it up as well as
illustrate the candidate’s understanding of what was seen on the video.
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Statement + Evidence = Stronger Statement
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Think of supporting evidence for the following statements:
I ensure equity and fairness in my classroom as seen _______________________
Students understood the concept by the end of the activity.
I set high expectations for my students.
Students were able to verbalize several reasons to support their thinking.
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Statement + Evidence + ANALYSIS = EVEN STRONGER!!!
Critical Criteria of Naturalism
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Interpretive embroidery: Describing a scene on a
shield made by Hephaestus in the Illiad, Homer
tells a whole story of claims and counter claims
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“But the men had flocked to the meeting place,
where a case had come up between two
litigants…the defendant claimed the right to pay in
full and was announcing his intention to the people;
but the other contested his claim…both parties then
insisted that the issue should be settled by a
referee…”
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Ut Pictura Poesis—poetry and painting are simply two
ways of presenting a slice of reality in convincing
imitation—this theme has dominated European
thinking for centuries
From Leonardo to Lessing (1700’s): favorite topic of
debate to compare and contrast aspects of reality which
would be most vividly represented by either painting or
poetry (literature)
Commercial photography cut ground from under this
kind of descriptive criticism.
WHY??
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Compare this to literary criticism since the Renaissance: it did not place as
much emphasis on the exact imitation of reality as the visual arts and often
retained an appreciation for style and structure not seen in art until the 20th
century (ie literary criticism never saw literary work as transparent in the same
sense as the visual arts were seen, and so did not disregard its formal and
structural properties (think Shakespeare).
What rhetoric and literary criticism did do was emphasize the importance of
bringing scenes vividly and convincingly before the imagination of the
audience—this is analogous to the quality of “immediate presence” in the
visual arts, which is a quality highly prized in Chinese aesthetic criticism
Immediate, vivid presence links with naturalism but is not identical to its
critical criterion of correctness
Speculate: what is the difference between vividness and correctness?
This quality is present in Chardin’s work, but also the “metaphysical
compositions of De Chirico, Tanguy, and perhaps even Bosch. (Showing how
vividness an convincingness are different from correctness).
Naturalism vs. Chinese Aesthetics
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One consequence of naturalistic interest/descriptive criticism: a
failure to develop terminology suitable for talking about the
work of art as distinct from what the artwork imitates.
Became noticeable in the 20th century as critics concerned
themselves with talking about the formal qualities of a work as
opposed to its representational content.
Chinese aesthetics has talked about the artwork as a thing in its
own right for centuries—there is considerable difficulty
accurately translating Chinese aesthetic terminology into Western
linguistic equivalents as a result.
The Problem with Ugly
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Why we should enjoy pictures of ugly subjects (such as a corpse)
remained a fascinating problem for centuries. (Again, how many
kids and parents think this way? Even parents of graduate
students in painting want to know why their adult child leaves
out things, distorts, uses unrealistic colors…we will see how
there are developmental stages in aesthetic development when
we look at Abigail Houssen and VTS in more depth)
The attempts to solve this problem are an important guide to
aesthetic thinking throughout the history of naturalism in the
western world:
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Edmond Burke, who gave voice to the Romantic Movement, echoed
Aristotle in his solution: When the subject of a painting is attractive, we
disregard the artwork and take pleasure in the subject matter. When the
subject is unpleasant, we admire its representation as a tour de force of
imitational skill.
The Problem with Ugly
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This is naive
Ignores the fact that artists
tend to observe and
represent the natural world
in all of its forms, beautiful
and ugly
The diversity of social
situations, the grotesque,
common place, vulgar, and
banal have exercised an
interest for representation
and the high-minded and
lofty themes have not
survived outside the
academies (Washington
Crossing The Delaware)
Real consequences of naturalism
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This was—and IS—an important issue given
that we still confront parents, voters and policy
makers who operate with a naturalistic aesthetic
Aesthetic theories have REAL WORLD
implications
From the culture wars of the 90’s over artists
(Mapplethorpe etc) that resulted in elimination
of funding for individual artists to debate over
including the arts in the stimulus package
Aesthetics and Real World
Consequences
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These debates happen even though the arts
generate as much revenue as sports
Art is an easy target
Nuance and sophisticated work can be easily
lampooned
 Tied to the cliché of the artist as an alienated
outsider with a sour grapes, or playing on
stereotypes of artists smearing excrement
everywhere
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Back to the Ugly…
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The problem of depicting the ugly was dissolved when
the Romantic movement placed more emphasis on the
“characteristic’ over the beautiful and when theories of
art as expression/communication came to the fore—
repudiations of naturalism that we will discuss later
Also, social realism—Daumier, Courbet, Orozco (in
literature: Zola) —gave a different twist to depiction of
human misery because it was used to arouse people’s
conscience and to better human conditions—but these
are “extra-aesthetic” concerns
Mimesis—The Grand Theory
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Mimesis—root of mimic
Mimesis was central to the discussion
of the arts throughout antiquity and
remains important up to the present.
Basically the word means imitation,
but it has a broad range and we have
no single English equivalent that
captures all of its meanings.
Mimesis
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Aristotle defined what we
call the fine arts (minus
architecture—the architect
makes REAL buildings, not
imitation buildings) as the
mimetic arts—but we
would find it strange to say
music is a naturalistic art.
Thus, they are not
equivalent.
Mimetic: Music, Dance, Drama
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But music was regarded as the most
mimetic of all the arts because it
imitates, in one view, the emotional
dispositions and ethical attitudes of
people (men), and in another imitates
the mathematical harmony of the
eternal realm of unchanging Forms or
Truth—because music is demonstrably
mathematical in nature. Further, no
clear distinction was made between
music, drama, and dance—they were
integral to each other. Music was not so
much a thing as a quality.
Music—An ambivalent view
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Music was used as a tool of
character education—with the
belief that each individual
harmony would cultivate a certain
kind of moral sentiment—but it
was not valued for its sensuous
sound in the way we do today,
because it was also recognized that
music could lead men away from
the eternal verities and enchant
them with the sensual world—so
there was also suspicion regarding
music.
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QUESTION: When was visual art education
introduced on a broad scale, and what were the
justifications for it?
Mimesis, Naturalism—Splitting
Hairs?
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We talk of critical thinking—but do we practice it?
The objective is not to make endless logical
distinctions—but to develop the ability to make refined
conceptual distinctions that can then be related to the
big picture
We have to know how to do this so we can teach our
students to do it
This does not mean we need to teach ES students the
difference between mimesis and naturalism—but we
need to communicate how people in different times
and cultures thought about art
Mimesis: Origin of the Concept
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The origin is most likely to be found in the rituals of
the Dionysian cult in Ancient Greece, when mimesis
was simply a term that referred to the actions
performed by a cult priest. Far from imitating the
outer world, mimesis designated the priest's
expression, or the "reproduction," of the inner
world, of the cults mythos, through dance, music,
and singing.
It was in the sixth century B.C. that mimesis began to
be used theoretically by Greek philosophers and
started to mean the imitation of the external world.
Democritus: mimesis was the imitation of processes
found in nature, and was applied primarily to the
utilitarian arts: for instance, weaving imitated the
spider spinning its Web, singing imitated the
Nightingale, and building imitated the industrious
swallow.
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It was the philosophical triumvirate of Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle that articulated what was to become the predominant
interpretation of mimesis. All three agreed that mimesis was the
duplication of how things looked, but after that their
interpretations parted company.
Socrates was interested in identifying the essential functions of
paining and sculpture, concluding that their purpose was to copy
the appearance of things. By paying attention to subtle details, an
artist could “imitate the soul” when making figurative art;
Socrates thought that the artist imitates how things look, but in
so doing must also “express the workings of the mind," thus
showing a person's inner character. (Again, a NEW
PERSPECTIVE when compared to the Egyptians).
Mimesis: Origin of the Concept
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Plato, in his earlier work, actually flip-flopped between
the Dionysian and Socratic meaning in his use of the
term, sometimes applying it to music and dance, where
it meant imitation as expression of an inner reality, and
sometimes applying it the imitation of the external
world in painting and sculpture. When it came to
assigning a role for the arts in his Ideal society, Plato
finally decided that mimesis meant the mentally passive,
precise copying of nature; as such, it was an inferior
activity leading us away from the truth.
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This made sense from Plato’s perspective
because he thought the everyday, real world was
already a pale reflection or copy of the truly real
world of Eternal Ideas or Forms. This meant
that the visual arts, which imitated nature, ended
up being a copy of a copy, taking us even
further away from the original world of truth
than the senses do.
Mimesis: Origin of the Concept
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Aristotle’s theory of mimesis is
more generous in its estimation of
the arts, and stems from his view
that mimicry is a basic urge;
children imitate behaviors of
those around them in order to
learn. When an artist imitates,
Aristotle thought that they could
portray real things either more or
less beautiful than they really are,
and could also present them as
they ought to be.
And the Winners are…
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Aristotle: Further, the visual arts shouldn’t engage in a
slavish copying of every single minute detail, but
should imitate what is “general, typical, and essential.”
Eventually, the interpretation given to mimesis by
Democritus, that of the imitation of natural processes,
and the Dionysian usage were both supplanted by the
views of Plato and Aristotle, with scholars in later
centuries sometimes blurring the distinctions between
the two.
Bottom Line
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The idea of mimesis as a “photographic,” or
exact, reproduction came from Classical Greece,
and it is this sense of the term that came to
predominate.
Although different concepts, we should see
mimesis as the first and rather vague precursor
to the emerging concept of naturalism, so they
are closely linked.