Art teachers inspire students to consider all layers of their identity and to celebrate their differences through a variety of exciting lessons. High-school students use photography to create abstract representations of their favorite icons, middle-school students envision their future selves while illustrating college IDs, elementary students celebrate their differences through self-portrait collage paintings, young students learn the value of collaboration while assembling a mural that combines all of their artworks, and more.
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SchoolArts is currently compiling a collection of high-school articles that focus on contemporary art and artists. After choosing the articles, we grouped them by the Big Ideas they shared. Identity was one of the themes that predominately appeared, and it’s a fitting theme with which to start the school year. It is personal and engaging to students of every age, and the artwork produced helps teachers learn more about their students and their interests.
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It’s important to remind our students to work together, to cooperate, to compromise, and to accept others’ viewpoints. We often suggest they are part of a classroom group—a team that works to achieve the best for each other as well as for ourselves. We discuss how each one of us is an important part of our student body. This led me to the idea of creating a collaborative mural that would include the artwork of every child in the school. Each student would be an active member and work together to achieve a common goal.
We are all different and unique! One of the many differences that can be seen is our skin color, but very rarely will our skin color match the “flesh” crayon in the box. Growing up, I was frustrated at my inability to represent myself through the predetermined and limited colors available. We are all shades of brown and, as art teachers, we can guide children to think outside the crayon box and show them there is beauty in our diversity. During this project, students will learn how to recognize, accept, and celebrate our differences through a self-portrait collage painting.
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Each student chose someone they would like to create a portrait of with fibers. This person could be an artist, an actor, or a musician. It could also be a self-portrait or a portrait of someone they know. Students researched different styles of portraiture. Each student practiced with thumbnail sketches and drew their final portrait in pencil on a piece of wood paneling. Once the design was drawn out, students could proceed to the fibers portion of the project.
One way I motivate students to become engaged is to introduce self-portraits, which are always popular, but I like to change it up and make the self-portraits more substantial than just drawing your face with a nice background. Then one day, while talking to the AVID teacher at my school, it hit me: Let’s look into the future. Where will you be in five years? College? Who will you be? What will you study? Let’s make some predictions.
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Incorporating recycled materials is an important component to my art curriculum because it encourages students to see possibilities where they may otherwise see limitations. This year, I couldn’t bring myself to discard the piles of cardboard that appeared in front of my art room door. As a material, cardboard is interesting because it varies in thickness, texture, and color—and it’s usually free. Despite the positive attributes that cardboard boasts, its shortcoming is that it can be difficult to work with.
One of the most fulfilling projects I’ve taught in my AP drawing class is based on the idea of the developing (and often conflicting) identity for young men. We start by watching clips of the film The Mask You Live In by the Representation Project. Students write about their reaction to the film, but we avoid group discussion until after they begin their drawings. I want students’ drawings to be intuitive and self-led. They use the basics of black paper and white pencils. Students need to compose an image that addresses what is hidden about themselves, contrasting with what is exposed, and how the physical and emotional interplay.
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This lesson comprises a self-portrait and documentary assignment that illustrates how icons are mirrors of our cultures and desires. This lesson asks students to investigate why icons speak to specific communities. What does it mean to be a fan of particular icons? For the self-portrait section of the assignment, I asked students to create abstract self-portraits in our studio. I required that students not be totally transformed, but rather incorporate a symbol or other element that represents or distinguishes their chosen icon.
A common dictionary definition of an advocate is one who pleads the cause of another, or one who defends or maintains a cause or a proposal. If you ask art educators if they are advocates for the arts, you’ll get a resounding “yes.” But, when asked to articulate what they are trying to accomplish with their advocacy efforts, many art educators are often hard-pressed to communicate their issues, objectives, and strategies for effecting change.
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Joel Christian Gill is a cartoonist, historian, and storyteller who stresses the importance of building connections with readers through his self-referential and historical graphic novels. They emphasize the need for empathy, understanding, compassion, and overcoming difficult circumstances. In all of Gill’s graphic novels, there is an overriding sense that these are not simple stories, but significant histories of the Black experience in America.
