Deephaven Elementary Art

Basics

"Inquiry" is defined as "a seeking for truth, information, or knowledge -- seeking information by questioning.”

We carry this on from birth to death naturally

Application

Useful application of inquiry learning involves several factors: a CONTEXT for questions, a FRAMEWORK for questions, a FOCUS for questions, and different LEVELS of questions.

ART = Provocations

• Art history
• Art Materials
• Art Application

What's Important

Memorizing facts and information is not the most important skill in today's world. Facts change, and information is readily available -- what's needed is an understanding of how to get and make sense of the mass of data.

Inquiry implies a "need or want to know" premise.

Inquiry is not so much seeking the right answer -- but rather seeking appropriate resolutions to questions and issues.

The Studio, The Atelier, the Sacred materials Headquarters

This is our place where students are free to explore but also have a critical scholarly mind about what is happening. They give thoughts to the plan for exploration which I like to think of as the beginning of their path. As they walk their plan can take many bends and sometimes a student must choose between a fork in the road or alternate pathways. Possibly veering completely away from an original plan while finding their new destination as a place with an even better understanding, more hidden beauty, and a sense of accomplishing a task in their own way.

I am merely a fellow resident artist in their studio helping facilitate their learning environment. We use the state standards as part of our goals for learning at the end of the quarter. We ask ourselves: Who is responsible for the learning? Who is responsible for the studio?. Every student is entering a studio where practice never makes perfect, it only furthers us on our path to competency in skill and development of ideas. Risk is something an artist must embrace. We need to use knowledge from other classes, be responsible for sharing and teaching that knowledge to our peers. On what I term the brain continuum from easy to challenging, we must as artists weigh our ideas and push ourselves toward challenge. The following are a few quotes I took from Art & Fear that really help a person understand the artist.

We ask ourselves these questions as we approach the finish of a work. “Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist’s work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third’s a zinger: Was it worth doing?” (p.93).
“There is a moment for each artist in which a particular truth can be found, and if is it not found then, it will not ever be. No one else will ever be in a position to write Hamlet. This is pretty good evidence that the meaning of the world is made, not found. Our understanding of the world changed when those words were written, and we can’t go back...any more than Shakespeare could” (p.106).

“Look at your work and it tells you when you hold back or when you embrace. When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes” (p.49).

Lastly but not least what we hope the most for our young artists. “In making art you need to give yourself room to respond authentically, both to your subject matter and to your materials. Art happens between you and something - a subject, an idea, a technique - and both you and that something need to be free to move. Many fiction writers, for instance, discover early on that as actual writing progresses, characters increasingly take on a life of their own, sometimes to the point that the writer is as surprised as the eventual reader by what their creations say and do” (p.20).