Whickham School

Below is an account of my classroom experience so far, I have spend four days at Whickham School and in my return from The Fiji Islands, volunteering by teaching and other youth projects, I will return to Whickham on a more permanent bases where by I will be observing and comparing the teaching styles and functions from the schools I will have worked in within the different cultures of Fiji. Some of the lessons I observed have been displayed in my research sketchbook as in those particular lessons I took photographs of the pupils work as those lessons were more relevant to my Fashion Design practice and/or were more relevant to the multicultural research, I am currently carrying out.

Whickham Comprehensive School

My Classroom Experience

The first day on placement at Whickham School was very different to what I had expected. I was extremely fortunate to receive a placement in my previous secondary school, there is something comforting about going back to a placement you are already familiar with. The fact that I was going back to the same familiar teaching staff, the same old buildings and classrooms, and the same structure in which I was used to, relaxed my nerves. 

I wasn’t anxious at first. When I walked into the Art classroom, the teacher hadn’t arrived yet, so I sat on one of the Art tables and waited. The teacher walked in and didn’t even realize that it was three years later and I wasn’t one of her students, she did a sort of double take and then realized that I was on work placement.

Year 13 B-tec Art

Projects 

• Personal Sketchbooks
• UCAS Applications
• Interview preparation
• Portfolio preparation

I began to feel the nerves when the year 13’s started to file into the classroom, after all they are only three or four years younger than me so I felt that they wouldn’t take me seriously as a student teacher. I asked them to call me ‘Charlotte’ as I felt it would be best to go into a classroom of older people with a more like minded attitude rather than make the pupils feel uncomfortable by having to call me ‘Miss Appleby’. 

The pupils were preparing for their university interviews so they were quite focused and acting very independently through the duration of the lesson. The atmosphere was very laid back and relaxed, as was the teacher. She was always present within the classroom, floating around incase her assistance was needed but she informed me that at the stage the students were at, they need to able to work independently in order to prepare for the massive leap to university. 

I sat around a table with a bunch of students; of which looked slightly unmotivated. Rather than telling them what was right and wrong and instructing them what to do etc,  I offered my advice, from past experience I talked about the intense design based interviews I endured when applying for several universities. A few of the students that had already been to interviews previously in the week were overwhelmed by the process of interview and the quick paced manner of the lecturers. I informed them that it wasn’t a personal attack and that it was purely a process of elimination, they try and challenge candidates to reveal their best efforts, as many of them felt that their work wasn’t good enough and felt disheartened by the whole thing.  

I remember how daunting it was to present your personal art work to somebody who sat through several interviews a day, so I could very much relate to their experiences.

When looking at the pupils sketchbook they were all very different, one of the things I found fascinating was that most of the art work was very controversial and some very daring final pieces. Many pupils touched upon fragile topics such as anorexia, body image and poverty.

Whilst discovering different ways in which I could advise sketchbook direction I discovered some cultural art being produced by a student discovering her roots. She had based her final project around Mexican fashion and did several research pieces on the history of Mexico. I took this opportunity to ask the teacher if there was much cultural influences thrusted upon the students and the teacher explained that in most research projects she advises the students to research in cultural art history in relation to their themed projects. The teacher informed me it was difficult to teach a common culture throughout a class with so many different projects, she explained it was even more difficult to encourage cultural development on older groups of students as they already have their own views and opinions set in their mind.

Ten minutes before the end of the lesson, when everyone was packing there things together and tidying their paint supplies away, I took this opportunity to look around the classroom, only to pleasantly discover their were several various cultural influences such as tribal face painting displayed on the walls, influence from popular culture such as film and the music industry. There was a particular common theme around the walls - spirituality. The teacher seemed to be very spiritual and open to different religious traditions. There were lots of symbols and historical references to a diverse range of cultures, this gave me confidence in the multicultural education in this particular art classroom, that the students were being encouraged to research into cultural traditions. The teacher told me she had previously designed a project for her year 12 group based on idols and icons which was very much religiously based and students had the option of cultural backgrounds to choose from for their final piece. Although I think its extremely important for teacher to include various techniques to encourage cultural development, I think its even more important to give pupils a choice. This project seemed to be a very open brief giving the class many different routes to discover yet had a very structured cultural based theme and outcome. 

Year 9 Art

Projects

• Following a booklet for the proposed scheme of work.
• Using a variety of different media including paper mache and clay to make 3D pieces of art.

The next group of students were a year 9 class, where they automatically called me ‘Miss Appleby’ which I believe to be just their way of giving an elder person respect whether they thought I was a teacher or not. The class teacher also introduced me as a ‘student teacher’ which was helpful in establishing authority. The Art teacher was very hands on with all projects, no matter how much they differed from pupil to pupil. At the beginning of the lesson the teacher introduced the topic of the day, explained the tasks at hand and then set them off to work whilst giving a helping hand when needed. 

He later explained to me that at this stage he was preparing the class for more independent art work as a lot of them are very talented and will be taking art as a GCSE the following year. After observing the first half of the lesson where by I learned the structure of an art lesson, the teacher assigned me to a table of individual students who had been separated due to their lack of effort and creativity, therefore these students had been set a particular task designed by the teacher, rather than experimenting and developing their own idea. I found the teachers method to be slightly odd at first, it was as if he was paying attention to those that didn’t need it, and ignoring the students that seemed to be struggling. I sat with the struggling group and realised that the teacher had given them a template of a mask and they were told to use paper mache to build up the structure of an abstract face in any way that they wanted to. It was clear to me that these students weren’t naturally imaginative and had to be given a push to get the work done, it was a group of girls and they just didn’t want to get their hands dirty. I decided to get really involved in this group and try my best to get them motivated, making my own mask, I got stuck in to the paper mache bucket and started forming a basic mask which inspired one of the girls to get started and once one of them got stuck in the rest followed. I could see where the teacher was coming from, the idea of the lesson was to get the students to think outside the box a bit but from what I could see the girls were just quiet prepared to sit their and do nothing for the entire hour. The teacher assigned me to that table, but what if I wasn’t there? It got me thinking, at what point does a teacher interfere in a students creative path and how do teachers deal with students who just do not want to do anything? This is something I plan to observe more in future lessons and in other future work placements.

Overall, the atmosphere within the classroom was very calm and controlled, even though there was a lot of chaos with students up and down experimenting with different materials and techniques, the actual structure of the lesson was very productive and the class did not have any disruptive students at all. 

The appearance of the classroom had slight cultural influence from where older age groups had left work behind to dry or for the next lesson etc, yet there was nothing permanently displayed on the walls that appeared to be encouraging cultural development. 

Year 13 Textiles

Projects

• Personal Sketchbooks
• Statement of intent
• Final Piece

I observed another Year 13 class, where they were working on individual projects producing a final sketchbook and product for their A-level coursework.  Although all students were working toward their final piece and continuing various work within their sketchbooks, the teacher still put structure to the lesson and informed me she needed to set aims each lesson or they would just keep going on the same thing, rather than start and finish a task. In the introduction the teacher used the white board computer aided facility where she took the register and displayed the aim of the lesson. Each student had to complete their ‘Statement of intent’ before  the end of the lesson. The panic started to set in amongst the students which had not started, yet some of them were one step ahead and had already finished their statement. It was interesting to see a definite divide of groups in terms of effort rather than ability as it would be grouped in younger years.

Again I found it difficult to act as a ‘teacher’ with the year 13’s but some of them were creating garments and were coming across construction problems, and although pattern cutting is not my expertise I found I could be more of an assistance in the ‘fashion’ side of things. Once student had started off with a standard size 10 pattern and somehow through pattern cutting and construction it had reduced to a size 6 and would not fit on the design mannequin. The teacher encouraged the student to try and research into solving the problem, suggesting to add another panel in the to back of the dress and making it into a feature panel, which would technically solve the fitting of the dress but the student was very passionate about her design and felt it would take away the simplicity of the dress. Myself and the teacher left the student to test out various ideas yet to no avail. Before the end of the lesson I came up with a suggestion to lower the back of the dress so there was no need to insert another panel and take away the minamalistic design. The student and the teacher were both happy with the suggestion. I felt almost relieved when the problem had been over come, almost as if it was my own project and I had a strong need to make it perfect. I think if in future if I become a successful teacher I will be very passionate about students projects and I think its important for pupils to know you are interested in the progress of their individual projects. 

The actual brief the students were following was to create a sketchbook of research and development and eventually a final piece which was personal to them. Several pupils researched and designed products in terms of their hobbies and/ or  likes dislikes but one student that particularly interested me was a girl researching her roots. She was developing a design based around classic Russian architecture. She explained to me she hadn’t lived in England all her life and she has a strong instinct to keep her culture the main focus of her self development. Her work was experimental and mostly photography based where she had visited her home city and evidenced this in her sketchbook. After when discussing this with the teacher, she informed me the student may be passionate but in terms of ability and quantity she was only on a grade D for the project. The teacher and I discussed cultural development and the pupils choice of project, the teacher explained she found it difficult to help the student in terms of research as it is a topic she knows nothing about, and has never had to deal with before. Technique, structure and problem solving is as far as the teacher gets involved at this stage as the students should already be aware of what is expected etc. I couldn’t help but think that what if the teacher new more about the subject this particular student was researching, would the student end up with a higher grade as she would receive more encouragement from the teacher? But if the teacher has never had a case of this particular culture then why would she know about it? And if the class doesn’t have a variety of multicultural students then how will these creative artists ever experience and learn the artistic backgrounds and textile traditions of other cultures?