One problem faced by some of my upper secondary art pupils when trying to conceptualise a new piece of art work is their shortage of ideas. I do not suppose it is totally true that pupils have got no idea at all on how to visually express themselves, it is more likely a situation whereby a sense of safety to experiment has not been fully achieved, or that they need a more systematised manner of thinking to facilitate idea generation.
A kind friend of mine shared with me a teaching strategy for strengthening the flow of creative ideas and I tried it out this week during my lessons for my upper secondary classes in preparation for their Paper 2.
The whole approach revolves around the relating of 3 elements when trying to create an image. They are 'Site', 'Object' and 'Identity'. A site refers to a specific space in an image, an object refers to a particular subject matter which is the focus of the art work, and identity refers to the context in which the above 2 elements are related. For example, when pupils are given a site and space such as 'train station' and 'pram' respectively, they are to generate 5 different identities relating the two.
A new set of site and object is refreshed at intervals of 5 min and pupils have to continually generate new identities for them. The lessons worked. Most of the pupils understood the objective of the exercise quite quickly and were prompt in their responses, which got articulated during a group sharing. Only a couple of pupils had some difficulty in understanding the meaning of identity and needed more examples for guidance.
Site. Object. Identity. A concise deconstruction of many conceptual 2D art we have seen. Useful. Going to do this again.
