Art teachers share lessons that focus on media arts, digital processes, and new technologies. Students design and develop meaningful side-scrolling video games, learn light painting techniques to capture long-exposure photographs, turn 2D drawings into 3D-printed models, create a digital floral folk-art piece inspired by their heritage, and more.
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These days, media arts include digital design, website design, virtual reality, 3D printing, robotics, digital photography and film, animation, and game design. Why teach media arts? Your students live in a digital world that is incredibly engaging to them. Why not take advantage of that engagement by teaching media arts?
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After I read aloud the book What’s the Weather? by Shelley Rotner (Penguin Random House, 2021), I introduce students to the work of artist Tokujin Yoshioka, who creates installation art about weather and the forces of nature. Students then create a crayon-resist watercolor painting of themselves outside doing their favorite activity in their favorite kind of weather. The lesson ends with students sharing their work and completing a prompt about their favorite season and weather.
When I was in elementary school, it wasn’t possible to play video games in the classroom. Today, students can design their own video games, full of unique characters and worlds using apps like Bloxels. (Other apps include PikoPixel, Piskel Edit, PixelApp, and Pro Motion NG.) Collaboration between the school library and the art room allowed students to use their visual and information literacy skills to create and share exciting, interactive games with their classmates.
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In their sketchbooks, students imagined a new world in which their clothespin would interact with the environment around it. It could be a real or pretend world, visited by humans or other species. As they narrowed down a habitat for their public art, they chose supplies to use to build a diorama. The scene was to include the clothespin (a tribute to Oldenburg’s sculpture) and tiny model people for scale. Students could incorporate drawing, air-dry clay, and any other available materials they might choose to complete their setting.
There’s something mystical, intriguing, and overwhelmingly loved by my sixth-grade students: dragons! Students adore depicting dragons, whether I ask them to draw entire dragons or focus on drawing their detailed faces. When COVID-19 safety protocols continued to have an impact on the sharing of art supplies, it was an easy transition from using oil pastels to Chromebooks to create these dramatic gradient dragon eyes.
If you want to engage students with an exciting hook, 3D printing will do the trick. They can create a two-dimensional drawing of an object and print it three-dimensionally. Today, companies use 3D printing to make prototypes, prosthetic devices, modular houses, and just about anything that is made with other materials. A painting like the Mona Lisa can be 3D-printed for a visually impaired person to experience through touch. Where this fascinating technology will go in the future is up to the students we currently teach in our art rooms.
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Students love to explore photography through light painting (also called light drawing or light graffiti), a technique of moving a light source while taking a long-exposure photograph. Recently, my advanced photography students worked in teams to create light painting portraits. I wanted them to learn light painting techniques and how to illuminate a subject using a long exposure.
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My purpose in hosting pre-service educators is to empower them to adopt the traits of a TAB facilitator. To achieve this goal, pre-service educators must have the intention of following the TAB guiding principles. (What do artists do? The child is the artist. The classroom is the child’s studio.) Following the TAB guiding principles will maintain a student-centered classroom and optimize the facilitator’s traits.
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Benji Reid’s photographs feature extremely personal narratives that explore his life within the British Black experience, as well as issues such as mental health, perceptions of Black masculinity, and the interconnection of race, national identity, and gender. Reid’s background as an award-winning performer and choreographer in contemporary dance and theater are clearly visible in his photographic tableaux, which merge performance with photography. Reid calls himself a Choreo-Photolist, blending choreography, theater, and photography into one body of work.
