Patty's Personal Reflection

My research will take me into the classroom of AP art students, to observe and document their work as I try to answer how visual culture influences their perception of identity as created through their portfolios.  It is my wish to observe these students for a few weeks and take the role of the student, as they are the teachers teaching me what I need to know. I believe this research to be phenomenological. What I am trying to learn from them is deeply personal.  It is an essence of who they are and how that is reflected in their chosen medium.  What influences these choices? I think visual culture has some influence, but I am not sure just how much.  I hope that this exploration will be beneficial to my research, but also to the students.  I would like the students to understand how they form their ideas, and what influences them to make the artworks that they create.  I would also like the instructors of the school to understand how their students form ideas, so that their teaching practices can better benefit their students.  I am expecting this to be a pleasurable learning experience for the students, the class art instructor, and me. 

I wish that I could say I learned a great deal about research from this course, but that would not be true.  What I did learn is that research is more complicated than I ever thought, or so the academic writings would have me believe, and just when I thought I was beginning to understand, another method, methodology or approach came along to muddy the water.  I’m not sure why the selected readings for this course where chosen but they were, in most cases, difficult to understand.  Such as Beittel (1983), who seemed to be writing for the privileged few who could understand the language of research at a much higher level than the beginning researcher ever could. I felt he was pompous and he perpetuated the idea that art is too difficult to understand for the mere mortal. That being said, there were a few articles that were quite enjoyable, including Keifer-Boyd (2007).  As I return back to past posts on the discussion forum, I do not find them as helpful as they have been in other courses.  The ability to write freely, and from the heart, has been hindered by the need to write in technical terms.  It has been these forum “conversations” that have helped me greatly in past semesters.  I suppose this was the reason for the creation of this blog, but I do not feel it had the same impact.

As we near the end of this course, I still am having trouble organizing concepts in my mind. The various methods and approaches along with difficult terminology may have been better understood if an outline of terms, their definitions and some examples would have been provided at the beginning of the course, like a primer. Perhaps this course should not be condensed.  A sixteen-week course might give enough time for understanding to occur; or maybe it just delays the inevitable, that research is not to be understood until you are immersed in it.  What I do know is that peers can be a valuable resource to bounce ideas off of and to help you stay sane, and I’d like to thank my critical friend for that support. Without her I may have decided not to continue, finding the course too difficult and abstract for my need of the concrete.  She has helped me to focus and take the process step-by-step, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Earlier today I posted my final research map.  It is simple and focused, and concerns only the research I am about to undertake.  I needed to remove all other language that was not specific to my project and keep only what I know I will use in my research. This new map allows me to see completely the path I must take to complete my research project.

Beittl, K. R. (1983).  The phenomenology of the artistic image. Visual Arts Research, 9(2), 25-29.

Keifer-Boyd, K. (2007). From content to form: Judy Chicago’s pedagogy with reflections by Judy Chicago. Studies in Art Education, 48(2), 134-154.