Revised Questions

Refining Questions
Blog Post by Carolyn
Hill


I spoke with Leslie this weekend and found that my
previous question: “How can art education remain relevant to high school
students in the 21st century?” was too broad. I cannot possibly hope
to answer this question, much less in the time allotted to do so. So Leslie advised me to focus more on my
classroom and narrow my question. I have come up with a new question after
doing some research.

Saturday I read a great article called “Beautiful Brains”
from this October’s issue of National Geographic magazine. In it the author
talked about how teenage brains are evolutionarily programmed to be the way they
are to help them “leave the nest” (Dobbs, 2011). In this article,
Dobbs also reminds us of teen interests in “excitement, novelty, risk and the
company of peers” (Dobbs, 2011). I decided to
incorporate these interests into my question after reading the article.

Question: How are
teenage inclinations toward excitement, novelty and peer influence incorporated
into teaching art to my high school students? (I decided to leave out risk.)

Question Revised:
How are teenage interests incorporated into art instruction at Wayne Country
Day School?

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to make
them. I will post more about this later.


Work Cited:
Dobbs, D. (2011, October). Beautiful brains. National
Geographic , pp. 37-59.

Lesson 2 Blog Entry:
Research Topics and Map

Currently my research question is: “How can high school art education stay relevant in the 21st century?” I want to demonstrate that today’s art education on the high school level has to use various means to remain interesting and real to students as well as their teachers. I want to
study the means by which exciting and fun lessons can be created to stimulate
lifelong learning in the arts as well as current interests. I plan to use the
elements of humor, play, contemporary issues, current events, and surveys of
student interests, and teacher professional development to achieve my end
result. To me, this is the combination of best of the ideas I have gleaned from
participating in this master’s degree program with the reasons I began the
program in the first place. I had to hear someone else state similar reasons
for joining this program for it to really become clear to me about what I had
been feeling. Before joining UF, I had begun to enter into a professional slump which has affected my students as well as me. I needed re-energizing
educationally and professionally. I believe this happens to many teachers in
all areas, not just in art education. But I think that ever-changing or “living”
lessons can help teachers and their students both at once. These lessons could have a central core and branch out from there into adjustable units that reflect current student
interests and the educational character of each year’s classes. I don’t know if
this is possible, but it would help me and possibly others if I could achieve it.

Welcome to ARE 6746 Blog

Hello, ARE 6746 students.

We moved the blog outside of Sakai based on your feedback. Remember that the main information about your blog post assignments (you can read it here) still apply. The purpose of this post is to highlight some features about this new blog.

1. Make sure you are signed in to the blog using the email address that you gave to Leslie. She manually added each of you as authors to the blog. When you go to http://are6746.blogspot.com, click "Sign in" in the top right hand corner. If your email address appears in the top right hand corner, you are already signed in.
2. To create a new post, choose "New Post" in the top right hand corner. Give your blog the proper title according to the assignment paper that I linked to above.
3. Write your post.
4. Embed images and video when necessary: Click on the image icon in the toolbar above
   

which will generate a window that looks like this
If the image you would like to add is on your computer, choose "browse" and find the image on your computer. Then choose "Open." If the image you would like to add is on the web, copy and paste the web address into the box beside "URL." Then choose the orange box at the bottom of the screen that says "upload image."

Your image will appear in your blog post. Often the image will be inserted at the very top of the post. You can move the image wherever you want by clicking and dragging or by cutting the image and pasting it into a new location.

In order to upload a video from your computer to your post, you chose the video icon (just to the right of the image icon), which will generate the following window:


Click "browse" and find the video on your computer. Type in the video title and check the box to the left of "I agree to the Upload Terms and Conditions." When you click "Upload Video," your video will be inserted into your post.

If you'd like to embed a video that is online at a site such as youtube, you can follow the directions here. An embedded video will look like this:




5. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! When you are finished with the text and images in your post, you must add 2 labels to your post. One label must be your first name (see the labels listed at the bottom of this post to see the label I've created for your name). The other label should be the assignment (e.g., Research Reflection Week 2, Research Reflection Week 3, etc.). If you are posting but it is not in response to a specific assignment, just label it with your name. This will allow for easy sorting both by person and by assignment.

You can see where the labels go on the right side underneath the editor. When you have added your labels, click "Publish Post" (big orange button on left under editor).

I hope this helps us get off to a good start.