Context elaborations are possible contexts for learning, with a suggestion of how they might be used with the focus achievement objective.
The listed context elaborations are examples only. Teachers can select and use entirely different contexts in response to local situation, community relevance, and students’ interests and needs.
E1 | E2 | E3 | E4 | E5 | E6 | E7 | E8 | E9 | E10 | E11 | E12 | E13
The following context elaborations refer to specific artists, contexts, and technologies. At the end of each elaboration, an explanation is given, making explicit the thinking behind these selections.
Local artist Donn Ratana visits class and talks about his work and his motivations for making it. Students make and share online a short video about the links between Ratana’s life experiences and his work (UC, PK, CI).
Working face to face with a local artist enables students to build a sense of connection with members of their local art-making community.
This artist is selected because of his ability to make explicit the reasons he makes his works. His role as an educator, as well as an artist, makes him an accessible artist for students to work with.
Making a short video about his life experiences and art works provides an opportunity for students to engage in an authentic inquiry and to reflect on what he has said to them during the visit, as well as providing a document that they (and others) can refer to in the future.
Sharing the video online helps them to communicate their understandings with other learners beyond their classroom, making potentially global connections.
Visit an exhibition of work by Graham Percy and hear a curator talk about the work on show. Students produce a wiki unpacking the relationships between the artworks viewed and the times and places in which they were made. They then go on to produce their own drawings showing their own interpretation of a 'kiwi abroad'. (UC, PK, DI CI)
Seeing and hearing about the work of an artist like Percy helps to stimulate students’ curiosity, both about the reasons artists make works and about the place of New Zealand artists in a wider context of global art-making.
Making their own drawings with a similar theme to Percy’s work helps them to consider their connection to global communities.
The decision to visit such an exhibition is based on the accessible nature of Percy’s illustrative work, and the availability of the book resource A Micronaut in the Wide World — The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, written by Gregory O’Brien (2011), that has been gifted to all New Zealand schools by Chartwell Books in Schools.
Percy’s work questions what it means to be an artist and a New Zealander, providing a useful starting point for engaging students in discussion about links between an artist’s heritage and the work they produce.
Such an activity is dependent on the accessibility of an appropriate exhibition. However, much of the learning could take place in a classroom if an exhibition visit is not possible.
Collaborating to produce a wiki fosters creativity and connection by enabling students to incorporate multiple 'voices' into one document. It also provides them with opportunities to participate and contribute in a group setting.
Students visit the website about Neil Dawson’s sculpture 'Ferns' and view, listen to, and read about the intentions and meanings within this the work. They summarise their findings and present them to their peers as data show. (UC, CI)
The decision to focus on a work like 'Ferns' is based on enabling students to learn about the technical inventiveness of arts practitioners. It also makes explicit the connections that are often made across a range of fields (in this case, geometry and botany).
Following a talk by a visiting artist Jo Ogier, link to Jo Ogier. Students then produce their own woodblock prints exploring the materials and conventions used by Ogier. (UC, PK, DI, CI)
Learning about Ogier’s motivations for making work helps students to reflect on the natural world they live in and their potential to transform other people’s responses to it. Ogier has been selected because she presents her environmental concerns in a way that is accessible to students. Her works provide a platform for discussing environmental issues, as well as a stimulus for students to think about issues that matter to them and how they might communicate these concerns to an audience.
Ogier’s printmaking techniques are relatively achievable for secondary students, enabling them to produce work that uses the same processes as the artist they have studied. A video resource about this artist (The Art of Nature: Copper plate etching and woodcut by Jo Ogier, Natural History NZ) is available.
Following a visit to a gallery to see an exhibition by Don Driver, students work in small groups to produce their own works that are inspired by, and show the students’ interpretation of, Driver’s assemblages. (UC, PK, DI, CI)
Students use their inventiveness to re-contextualise materials.
Working in small groups helps them to build a sense of connection with each other, and fosters ako as the varied skills of group members are acknowledged and relied upon when making the work.
Driver has been selected because his work is quite obviously made of material that would usually be found in a context other than an art gallery.
Artists like Eve Armstrong (who presents collections of found objects as artworks) or Regan Gentry’s 'Of Gorse of Course' exhibition (of finely crafted objects made from gorse) would provide a similar stimulus.
Through viewing and then making their own similar work, based on a clear model of established practice, students are challenged to be inventive with materials.
Student work is linked through the exploration of collage conventions, materials, processes and procedures, and they are asked to show awareness of the key practices in the work of the artist/designers.
Working with the processes and materials used by innovative artists, who have global audiences, helps students to develop their own inventiveness and connection to global communities.
Studying the work of a combination of artists/designers, who have disparate practices but which are linked by certain techniques (in this case collage), challenges students to consider the connections between various forms of practice and explore the range of ways in which they can be inventive with art-making processes and techniques.
Have the students collage found images and their own hand-made line drawings together to create a series of sketches illustrating a place that is important to them.
They select the best of these images to scan and work on digitally (manipulating colours, adding text, cropping, cutting, and re-composing) and then print out onto wet-strength paper using an ink-jet printer.
They then further re-work the prints using ink and acrylic paint, then re-scan and format them for printing as A3 images. (PK, DI, CI)
Using a combination of processes and technologies in their art making helps to foster students’ willingness to take risks when making artworks.
Producing artworks using a mix of analogue and digital processes provides students, who are confident when working with either media, with a platform for moving into less familiar territory.
Studying artists who use this mix of media in their work would be worthwhile prior to or alongside this type of project.
Producing works based on a theme such as a significant place provides a structure for a whole class to work from, while enabling individual students the flexibility to take ownership of their own particular project.
Working individually, students use a series of drawings to develop an alternative persona to represent themselves.
Once the individual personae are developed, students work in small groups to combine their images into a composition for a mural. Once the composition has been refined, students work in the same groups to apply the mural to a suitable wall. (PK, DI, CI)
Working collaboratively helps students to develop a sense of connection with each other. The negotiations needed when combining individual works into a collaborative mural require students to interact effectively with their classmates.
Combining individually produced elements (the personae designs) to create a collaborative work enables students to benefit from the experience of negotiating to produce work as a group, with a sense of individual production of artworks.
This can be a useful form of scaffolding for students (and teachers) as they explore producing more collaborative pieces, and enable an assessor to clearly identify which student has produced which element of the work.
Art collectives like Cut Collective can provide a useful example of this kind of work.
Students use digital cameras to record images of easily recognisable objects and brands from popular culture.
These images are manipulated digitally and reconfigured into compositions that communicate ideas about popular culture and the pressure to ‘fit in’. The digital collages are presented on a class blog. (UC, PK, DI, CI)
Reflecting on and reconfiguring symbols of popular culture helps students to experience the transformative power they have to comment on and challenge society’s values and practices.
Producing a class blog provides opportunities for students to communicate with and connect to other learners and art makers.
A project like this could operate in conjunction with (or develop on from) the project based on Jo Ogier’s work (See example 2 above), and use artworks like Wattles Saddleback Soup (2010) or Extinction Guaranteed (2010) as a focus for discussion.
Guide and scaffold students through the reading of Loretta Lux’s Study of a Girl 2, and the recording of their initial response.
They then share these responses with a peer, discuss the work further, and record any additional understandings they have developed.
Finally, after being supplied with additional information regarding the relationship between Lux’s work and historical portraiture, students record a third set of responses to the work. (UC, CI)
Students reflect on how their understanding of an artwork expands through knowing about the context in which, and for which, it was made.
Learning about the connections between artworks and their contexts helps stimulate students’ curiosity about a range of social and historical contexts.
Discussing their understanding of an artwork with a peer exposes students to others’ perspectives and provides them with an opportunity to share their learning with each other.
The choice of an artist like Loretta Lux for this kind of study is influenced by her use of subject matter that students can identify with, the availability on the Internet of information about Lux’s intentions when making works, and the links her work has to a range of historical artistic practice.
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Artists Dr Victoria Edwards and Ina Johann are invited into the classroom to show and tell about their work.
Students discuss with the artists and each other how the performance artworks are interpreted and why they are interpreted in these ways.
Students then move on to developing their own performance artworks in collaboration with Edwards and Johann. (UC, PK, DI, CI)
Working with local artists enables students to build a sense of connection with members of their local art-making community, and allows students to take managed art-making risks in an environment supported by experts.
Collaborating on projects develops students’ competencies in relating to others and participating and contributing.
These artists are selected because play (encompassing creativity, invention, and transformation) and collaborating with a range of artists and audiences is central to their practice, enabling students to become actively involved in the project.
Additionally, they work across a range of traditional and non-traditional media and art-making practices.
A range of web-based examples of these artists’ works are available, giving students an opportunity to become familiar with the artists’ work prior to their visit.
Students visit their local marae and view the wharenui.
They are encouraged to ask what, when, where, how, and why questions of the kaumātua about the whakairo, tukutuku, and kōwhaiwhai that they see. Once they return to the classroom, they view and read about Te Hono ki Hawaiki on the Te Papa website.
In small groups, the students create a wiki providing their own analysis and interpretation of the two wharenui, with links to other relevant sites and resources. (UC, CI)
Visiting a local marae helps strengthen students’ connections with their local community.
Learning about the wharenui from kaumātua and members of the class who belong to the local iwi fosters ako.
Linking this learning to Te Hono ki Hawaiki, and using a wiki to present their learning collaboratively enables students to connect with wider communities.
Students compare and contrast artworks by Ruud van Empel (for example World #7, 2005) and Henri Rousseau (for example, The Equatorial Jungle, 1909).
Visual similarities and differences are identified prior to students carrying out research about the contexts in which the two works were made.
Following this research, students present what they have learned in a Venn diagram identifying the elements that the works have in common and those that are different. (UC, CI)
Comparing art works from disparate contexts challenges students to consider unexpected connections.
These two artists have been selected because of the visual similarities between their works, providing students with an easily identifiable initial connection to begin their inquiry, which may then lead on to identifying more dissimilar elements.
Other pairings of artists who could be used for this type of learning include Francisco Goya (from his Black Paintings period) and Alex Pardee or Olaf Breuning (for example, Installation in Chapelle Du Geneteil, 3 July – 29 August 2010) and Gregor Kregar (for example, Vanish, 2008).
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Last updated March 13, 2024