Unit 3: Stories
Artists: Thomas Hart Benton & Diego Rivera
Group Murals: Drawing and/or collage
Artist: Faith Ringgold
Story Quilts: Watercolor
My story is a reflection of the time I was on vacation and a cocoanut fell off a palm tree and into my bag.
My story is a reflection of the time I was on vacation and a cocoanut fell off a palm tree and into my bag.
Artist: Jean Shin
Mini Sculptures from Found Objects
Unit 3: Stories Reflection
All three studios in this unit incorporated the big idea of stories. The Benton and Rivera studio incorporated story into political cartoons. These political cartoons help portray the artists emotions and personal opinions on an issue. The Ringgold quilt studio allowed us to take our own personal stories and turn them into a piece that portrays our emotions and relationships with the characters to our audience. In our third studio, inspired by Jean Shin, we took found objects and used them to create sculptures that represented a deeper meaning.
Teaching stories in the classroom is an important idea. And like Pink (2006) says, “Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, context, and emotion” (p. 103). In my own classroom, I would use the Benton and Rivera studio, integrated with literacy, to allow my students to create cartoons of their own. After reading a certain story as a class, the students would write an opinion piece. Then the students would create these cartoons to go along with their opinion pieces. Their artwork would have to support their writing as well. I would use the Ringgold studio in my classroom to introduce detail, and how details play a role in helping us tell our story. After doing VTS on one of Faith Ringgold’s quilts, we would talk about how all of the details we noticed helped us understand the story she was trying to portray. We would then try to create our own story. I would use the Shin studio in my classroom by helping my students understand that “stories can provide context enriched by emotion [and give us] a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters” (Pink, 2006, p. 115). Students would bring in found objects from home, and as a class, we could decide what to do with them that would help others develop the deeper meaning of why this, usually discarded found object, is important.
References
Pink, D.H. (2006). A Whole new mind. New York, NY: Penguin Group Inc.
Teaching stories in the classroom is an important idea. And like Pink (2006) says, “Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, context, and emotion” (p. 103). In my own classroom, I would use the Benton and Rivera studio, integrated with literacy, to allow my students to create cartoons of their own. After reading a certain story as a class, the students would write an opinion piece. Then the students would create these cartoons to go along with their opinion pieces. Their artwork would have to support their writing as well. I would use the Ringgold studio in my classroom to introduce detail, and how details play a role in helping us tell our story. After doing VTS on one of Faith Ringgold’s quilts, we would talk about how all of the details we noticed helped us understand the story she was trying to portray. We would then try to create our own story. I would use the Shin studio in my classroom by helping my students understand that “stories can provide context enriched by emotion [and give us] a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters” (Pink, 2006, p. 115). Students would bring in found objects from home, and as a class, we could decide what to do with them that would help others develop the deeper meaning of why this, usually discarded found object, is important.
References
Pink, D.H. (2006). A Whole new mind. New York, NY: Penguin Group Inc.