Reflection on Instructional Practice

1. Reflection on Instructional Practice • In a nutshell:Description describes WHAT you did, what happened.Analysis analyzes WHY you did it, why it happened. Reflection reflects on HOW it impacts student learning.DESCRIPTION asks the question: WHAT? What is the setting? What is going on? What is the background? What does the viewer need to know to "see" the classroom (must be evidenced in video)? • The richer the description – the more there will be to analyze. If you don’t have enough detail in your descriptive commentary, you will not be able to thoroughly analyze the teaching situation. When entries ask for rationale – it is part analysis and part descriptive.

2. Reflection on Instructional Practice ANALYSIS asks the question: SO WHAT? So you had a class of students working on a math manipulative, small group session, finding the difference between perimeter and area. SO WHAT? So what do you see in the video, or what is seen in the student's work? What is significant????REFLECTION asks the question: NOW WHAT? Now that you have analyzed your teaching, what are you going to do next? What worked well and will be continued as the class progresses? What did not work and, looking back on it, could have been different? (Knowing what did not work and how to improve that area is the sign of a reflective individual--no one is perfect.) What do you need to tweak? Who needs more assistance? Who has the information mastered and needs a next step? Why is it important to your teaching?

3. Reflection on Instructional Practice • WHEN WRITING, PROVIDE SPECIFIC EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT YOUR STATEMENTS. For instance, when you write about your teaching video, you need to provide specific (clearly seen) evidence (proof that what you say is there) to support your statements. A vague, unsupported statement is worthless. • PRACTICE REFLECTIVE WRITING IN YOUR JOURNALS AND SKETCHBOOKS; apply this model to all components of the ArtsAPS workshop by reflecting on your teaching, your creative process, your aesthetic reactions.

4. Reflection on Instructional Practice • Descriptive • What is the evidence? • What type of evidence (activity, lesson plan, work sample, assessment measure); we must be able to SEE it in videos • What happened? • What did I do • What was my role? • What is the context • When and where was it created • What was the setting • What were the circumstances • Context sets the scene for the practice, makes it come alive for the reader

5. Reflection on Instructional Practice • Analytical • Deals with reasons • Why did it happen? • How does this evidence illustrate the practice? • How does the evidence meet the rubric criteria? • Explains your reasons • How does this evidence address the practice? • How did the application of this evidence impact student learning? • Justify your rationale for the selected competencies and skills as related to this evidence and practice.

6. Reflection on Instructional Practice • Reflective • Personal reaction to experience • Reflection occurs after an experience or teaching situation • Is based on analysis • Reflection is a tool for assessing your own level of competence • What is important about what I have learned? • What did I learn about myself? • What did I learn about my students? • How will this action affect future instruction • How will you use what you have learned from experience to improve your instruction in he future?

7. Reflection on Instructional Practice • For example, “The 3 girls at the back table work collaboratively as evident in the video.” This is a statement and as such, does not have evidence from the video to back it up. This statement is stronger when accompanied with evidence cited directly from the video. • “The 3 girls at the back table work collaboratively as evident in the video when the girl in the pink sweater asks the question about what to do when you add [1] to the equation. You will see that the girl with the blue shirt turns her graph around so the girl in pink can see it and shows the girl in pink the process.” This last passage has a statement and then evidence to back it up as well as illustrate the candidate’s understanding of what was seen on the video. • Statement + Evidence = Stronger Statement Think of supporting evidence for the following statements: I ensure equity and fairness in my classroom as seen _______________________ Students understood the concept by the end of the activity. I set high expectations for my students. Students were able to verbalize several reasons to support their thinking. • Statement + Evidence + ANALYSIS = EVEN STRONGER!!!

8. Critical Criteria of Naturalism • Interpretive embroidery: Describing a scene on a shield made by Hephaestus in the Illiad, Homer tells a whole story of claims and counter claims • “But the men had flocked to the meeting place, where a case had come up between two litigants…the defendant claimed the right to pay in full and was announcing his intention to the people; but the other contested his claim…both parties then insisted that the issue should be settled by a referee…”

9. Ut Pictura Poesis—poetry and painting are simply two ways of presenting a slice of reality in convincing imitation—this theme has dominated European thinking for centuries • From Leonardo to Lessing (1700’s): favorite topic of debate to compare and contrast aspects of reality which would be most vividly represented by either painting or poetry (literature) • Commercial photography cut ground from under this kind of descriptive criticism. • WHY??

10. Compare this to literary criticism since the Renaissance: it did not place as much emphasis on the exact imitation of reality as the visual arts and often retained an appreciation for style and structure not seen in art until the 20th century (ie literary criticism never saw literary work as transparent in the same sense as the visual arts were seen, and so did not disregard its formal and structural properties (think Shakespeare). • What rhetoric and literary criticism did do was emphasize the importance of bringing scenes vividly and convincingly before the imagination of the audience—this is analogous to the quality of “immediate presence” in the visual arts, which is a quality highly prized in Chinese aesthetic criticism • Immediate, vivid presence links with naturalism but is not identical to its critical criterion of correctness • Speculate: what is the difference between vividness and correctness? • This quality is present in Chardin’s work, but also the “metaphysical compositions of De Chirico, Tanguy, and perhaps even Bosch. (Showing how vividness an convincingness are different from correctness).

12. Naturalism vs. Chinese Aesthetics • One consequence of naturalistic interest/descriptive criticism: a failure to develop terminology suitable for talking about the work of art as distinct from what the artwork imitates. • Became noticeable in the 20th century as critics concerned themselves with talking about the formal qualities of a work as opposed to its representational content. • Chinese aesthetics has talked about the artwork as a thing in its own right for centuries—there is considerable difficulty accurately translating Chinese aesthetic terminology into Western linguistic equivalents as a result.

13. The Problem with Ugly • Why we should enjoy pictures of ugly subjects (such as a corpse) remained a fascinating problem for centuries. (Again, how many kids and parents think this way? Even parents of graduate students in painting want to know why their adult child leaves out things, distorts, uses unrealistic colors…we will see how there are developmental stages in aesthetic development when we look at Abigail Houssen and VTS in more depth) • The attempts to solve this problem are an important guide to aesthetic thinking throughout the history of naturalism in the western world: • Edmond Burke, who gave voice to the Romantic Movement, echoed Aristotle in his solution: When the subject of a painting is attractive, we disregard the artwork and take pleasure in the subject matter. When the subject is unpleasant, we admire its representation as a tour de force of imitational skill.

14. The Problem with Ugly • This is naive • Ignores the fact that artists tend to observe and represent the natural world in all of its forms, beautiful and ugly • The diversity of social situations, the grotesque, common place, vulgar, and banal have exercised an interest for representation and the high-minded and lofty themes have not survived outside the academies (Washington Crossing The Delaware)

15. Real consequences of naturalism • This was—and IS—an important issue given that we still confront parents, voters and policy makers who operate with a naturalistic aesthetic • Aesthetic theories have REAL WORLD implications • From the culture wars of the 90’s over artists (Mapplethorpe etc) that resulted in elimination of funding for individual artists to debate over including the arts in the stimulus package

16. Aesthetics and Real World Consequences • These debates happen even though the arts generate as much revenue as sports • Art is an easy target • Nuance and sophisticated work can be easily lampooned • Tied to the cliché of the artist as an alienated outsider with a sour grapes, or playing on stereotypes of artists smearing excrement everywhere

17. Back to the Ugly… • The problem of depicting the ugly was dissolved when the Romantic movement placed more emphasis on the “characteristic’ over the beautiful and when theories of art as expression/communication came to the fore—repudiations of naturalism that we will discuss later • Also, social realism—Daumier, Courbet, Orozco (in literature: Zola) —gave a different twist to depiction of human misery because it was used to arouse people’s conscience and to better human conditions—but these are “extra-aesthetic” concerns

19. Mimesis—The Grand Theory • Mimesis—root of mimic • Mimesis was central to the discussion of the arts throughout antiquity and remains important up to the present. • Basically the word means imitation, but it has a broad range and we have no single English equivalent that captures all of its meanings.

20. Mimesis • Aristotle defined what we call the fine arts (minus architecture—the architect makes REAL buildings, not imitation buildings) as the mimetic arts—but we would find it strange to say music is a naturalistic art. Thus, they are not equivalent.

21. Mimetic: Music, Dance, Drama • But music was regarded as the most mimetic of all the arts because it imitates, in one view, the emotional dispositions and ethical attitudes of people (men), and in another imitates the mathematical harmony of the eternal realm of unchanging Forms or Truth—because music is demonstrably mathematical in nature. Further, no clear distinction was made between music, drama, and dance—they were integral to each other. Music was not so much a thing as a quality.

22. Music—An ambivalent view • Music was used as a tool of character education—with the belief that each individual harmony would cultivate a certain kind of moral sentiment—but it was not valued for its sensuous sound in the way we do today, because it was also recognized that music could lead men away from the eternal verities and enchant them with the sensual world—so there was also suspicion regarding music.

23. QUESTION: When was visual art education introduced on a broad scale, and what were the justifications for it?

24. Mimesis, Naturalism—Splitting Hairs? • We talk of critical thinking—but do we practice it? • The objective is not to make endless logical distinctions—but to develop the ability to make refined conceptual distinctions that can then be related to the big picture • We have to know how to do this so we can teach our students to do it • This does not mean we need to teach ES students the difference between mimesis and naturalism—but we need to communicate how people in different times and cultures thought about art

25. Mimesis: Origin of the Concept • The origin is most likely to be found in the rituals of the Dionysian cult in Ancient Greece, when mimesis was simply a term that referred to the actions performed by a cult priest. Far from imitating the outer world, mimesis designated the priest's expression, or the "reproduction," of the inner world, of the cults mythos, through dance, music, and singing. • It was in the sixth century B.C. that mimesis began to be used theoretically by Greek philosophers and started to mean the imitation of the external world. • Democritus: mimesis was the imitation of processes found in nature, and was applied primarily to the utilitarian arts: for instance, weaving imitated the spider spinning its Web, singing imitated the Nightingale, and building imitated the industrious swallow.

26. It was the philosophical triumvirate of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle that articulated what was to become the predominant interpretation of mimesis. All three agreed that mimesis was the duplication of how things looked, but after that their interpretations parted company. • Socrates was interested in identifying the essential functions of paining and sculpture, concluding that their purpose was to copy the appearance of things. By paying attention to subtle details, an artist could “imitate the soul” when making figurative art; Socrates thought that the artist imitates how things look, but in so doing must also “express the workings of the mind," thus showing a person's inner character. (Again, a NEW PERSPECTIVE when compared to the Egyptians).

27. Mimesis: Origin of the Concept • Plato, in his earlier work, actually flip-flopped between the Dionysian and Socratic meaning in his use of the term, sometimes applying it to music and dance, where it meant imitation as expression of an inner reality, and sometimes applying it the imitation of the external world in painting and sculpture. When it came to assigning a role for the arts in his Ideal society, Plato finally decided that mimesis meant the mentally passive, precise copying of nature; as such, it was an inferior activity leading us away from the truth.

28. This made sense from Plato’s perspective because he thought the everyday, real world was already a pale reflection or copy of the truly real world of Eternal Ideas or Forms. This meant that the visual arts, which imitated nature, ended up being a copy of a copy, taking us even further away from the original world of truth than the senses do.

29. Mimesis: Origin of the Concept • Aristotle’s theory of mimesis is more generous in its estimation of the arts, and stems from his view that mimicry is a basic urge; children imitate behaviors of those around them in order to learn. When an artist imitates, Aristotle thought that they could portray real things either more or less beautiful than they really are, and could also present them as they ought to be.

30. And the Winners are… • Aristotle: Further, the visual arts shouldn’t engage in a slavish copying of every single minute detail, but should imitate what is “general, typical, and essential.” • Eventually, the interpretation given to mimesis by Democritus, that of the imitation of natural processes, and the Dionysian usage were both supplanted by the views of Plato and Aristotle, with scholars in later centuries sometimes blurring the distinctions between the two.

31. Bottom Line • The idea of mimesis as a “photographic,” or exact, reproduction came from Classical Greece, and it is this sense of the term that came to predominate. • Although different concepts, we should see mimesis as the first and rather vague precursor to the emerging concept of naturalism, so they are closely linked.