Question 3

Deep Learning

There is a basic set of skills that a teacher can utilize and teach to students that helps them provide a space for themselves that allows them to learn. These skills have been called Emotional Intelligence Skills and if they can be taught to students a tremendous amount can be achieved in helping children become ready and motivated to learn.
The term Emotional Intelligence encompasses the following five characteristics and abilities:


1. Self – awareness—knowing your emotions, recognizing feelings as they occur, and discriminating between them.

2. Mood management—handling feelings so they’re relevant to the current situation and to react appropriately

3. Self--motivation –“gathering up” your feelings and directing yourself towards a goal, despite self-doubt, inertia, and impulsiveness.

4.Empathy –recognizing the feelings of others and tuning into their verbal and non-verbal cues.

5.Managing relationships—handling interpersonal interaction, conflict resolution, and negotiations.
(Wikipedia)

If an educator can create for students a physical and emotional space of well being as well as provide for older students the means for clearing or unburdening themselves they will have a much greater chance of approaching their learning with a wakeful calm anticipation, a state of readiness through which to tackle whatever life throws at them.
In planning a lesson a teacher must also consider the many different types of learning styles and temperaments as Steiner suggested or the Multiple Intelligences as per Gardner’s theory.

Gardner’s Intelligences are:
Verbal/Linguistic: sensitivity to spoken and written language

Logical/Mathematical: Capacity to analyze problems logically, carries out mathematical operations, and investigates issues scientifically

Visual/Spatial: learning visually and organizing ideas spatially.

Musical/Rhythmic: learning through patterns, rhythms and music.

Bodily/Kinesthetic: learning through interaction with one's environment and understanding through concrete experience.

Interpersonal Intelligence: learning through interaction with others.

Intrapersonal Intelligence: learning through feelings, values and attitudes.

Naturalist Intelligence: learning through classification, categories and hierarchies.

Existential: Learning by seeing the "big picture". This intelligence seeks connections to real world understandings and applications of new learning.
(Reference Walter Mc Kenzie)

Rudolph Steiner’s positioning of the temperaments in the classroom to enhance learning through placing opposite temperaments facing towards each other brings attention to qualities that one temperament lacks by showing examples of other ways or temperaments at work.(see above diagram)

In a Stage 4 Visual Arts Portrait series of lessons Gardner's MI could be used to design parts of the learning activities for each Intelligence or take the one lesson and explore it from all 9 intelligences.
Here is an example of how different parts of a lesson could be taught through a focusing on one intelligence.

Verbal/Linguistic
An oral presentation could be given on a particular artist and his ideas on portraiture as an example for an assessment task to be done by the students.

Logical/Mathematical
Presentations given on the historical development of portraiture form cave paintings to postmodernism with a time line. After this the students would be asked to research how this process through the ages is also mirrored in the single life.

Visual/Spatial
The creation of a self-portrait without a mirror to visually learn what ideas the students have about creating a portrait.
Teaching through demonstrating how a portrait is made up of a scaffold of the correct proportions of the face in its division into three equal parts, line drawing to establish planes of the face and a build up of tonal structure.


Musical/Rhythmic
An example of a song describing someone’s face could be played to show how music can produce a mood and how moods can be represented through colors in a portrait.

Bodily/Kinesthetic
Portraiture in terms of creating three dimensional space on a two dimensional canvas could be taught through allowing the students to close there eyes and explore a sculpted portrait with their hands or even explore another students head and face!

Interpersonal
Showing how the styles of portraiture can infer meaning and feeling to an audience by making a case study from at Fauvist, English Romantic and Cubist period.

Intrapersonal
Constructing a collage portrait with a group that emphasizes one of the four frames

Naturalistic
A theoretic study on the different types of portraiture in the postmodern era.

Existential
Finding ones own meaning in their own self-portrait through the use of color and symbolism.

A teacher must also provide for deep learning, or critically reflective thinking in each lesson. This can be done by using a taxonomy to learning to provide a scaffold that addresses each stage of learning in a subject as suggested by Benjamin Bloom.

In a visual arts lesson this could be applied as follows:
Remembering: recalling as a class previous knowledge of portraiture
Understanding: Write down in own words the groups findings.
Application: Create a simple portrait using the understandings gained.
Analysis: Explore the work through the Four Frames, Structural, Subjective, Cultural and Postmodern.
Evaluating: form judgments about how best to emphasize each Frame through choice of subject matter and medium in portraiture.
Creation: Out of an understanding of Frames create a work that has pre-determined execution of the frames gained from own experience.