>I am hoping that the proposed semi-circular
>layout of the class will help, as it will be quite difficult
>for students to see anyone's easel except their own.
Difficult with large numbers of students perhaps.
I agree - and this is the main limiting factor on class size for this proposal. I don't think it would be practical to do this with more than 10 students in a class. If one had space for a complete circle, instead of a semi-circle, you could probably squeeze 15-20 students in - but this would then create new challenges for presenting the actual teaching material (unless you had space for two completely different "zones" for the two different activities).
The problem here I would think is people's natural curiosity about
other's work - they will just want to look at what other;s doing. Looka
t what happens if you paint outdoors - people lways stop and look at
what you are doing. (Which I particularly enjoy, as I am an extremely
poor and untalented painter (I just enjoy the activity) and it is most
amusing when people look over your shoulder and just don't know what to
say because it is such a mess - the best time was when I had decided to
paint using entirely wrong colours for everything and had green sky and
yellow sea and stuff. People were perplexed)
Perhaps the trick here is to convince them that this is exactly how it looked five minutes ago, before the light changed....?
In a classroom without passers-by, though, in my experience there is hardly ever any wandering during the pose, and once the pose has finished students who wish to flip their work before anyone else can see it can be very quick to do so. Sometimes you then get the conversation: "let's have a look" - "no, it's awful" - "go on, you can see mine..." and then the negotiations begin.
Surely some of the material on attention span could be used here or are
you proposing to have whole periods devoted to drawing?
Not long periods, no, just short bursts. My first draft schedule is: 30-40 minutes teaching, 10-15 minutes drawing, 30-40 minutes exercises/workshop, another 5-10 mins drawing, then a short break/contingency, all adjusted to fit a single 90 minute block; to be repeated 4 times during a day. Additional ad-hoc 5-minute bursts of drawing, especially if we're getting mired in threads or inner classes. Option of a longer end-of-day session for those that can stay. I imagine this would all change as soon as I tried it. So to your suggestion - yes, material on attention span could well be applicable, I will look into it.
Personally I
would just go ahead and do it and not bother asking anyone (in fact I am
now definitely thinking about trying it or something like it next year)
- if someone complains you just say it was a pedagogical experiment.
Unfortunately I don't have a pre-funded course to inflict it upon! My search for supporting research and interest is to help build a funding case for a short (2 to 3 week) trial.
I'm also considering the question of how to measure the success of such a trial. One possibility I considered, as the proposed course is in preparation for the Sun Certification exam, is to split the group into two, and have half of them leave the room for an "ordinary" (inactive) break whilst the other half are doing life-drawing; then collect average exam scores for each sub-group. However the trial would have to be repeated many times to get a large enough sample to make this result meaningful. On the plus side - assuming we are limited to 10 for the life-drawing - this approach could double the full class size to 20 students...
Failing such a large-scale statistical measure, however, I suppose the next best thing would be to collect student responses to the course via a suitable questionnaire.
Is there any evidence that making a life class stop drawing and
spend sometime writing about what they are looking at improves their
performance? (Sauce for the goose etc.)
That's an interesting suggestion - I might try that in a life-drawing class. Thanks for all your input.
Daniel
