Final Reflective Practice Portfolio (Literature Review)
Literature Review
Introduction
Planning and instituting classroom management is a chunk of time that has been a large (sometimes cumbersome) part of teaching for most educators. It is one of those things that helps create a stable learning environment. Numerous studies(Ryans, Kounin, Gump, & Ryan, 1961; Marzano, Marzano, & Pickering, 2003; Plump & LaRosa, 2017) have been done regarding classroom management and most have similar findings. “Effective teaching and learning cannot take place in a poorly managed classroom. If students are disorderly and disrespectful, and no apparent rules and procedures guide behavior, chaos becomes the norm. In these situations, both teachers and students suffer.”(Marzano, Marzano, & Pickering, 2003) My research began as another way to push myself to be a better teacher. It was an attempt to structure a new system of classroom management in a middle school digital art classroom but quickly became more than that.
The theoretical underpinnings of my middle school digital art curriculum are based in a lot of ideas from Dr. Sydney Walker and her writings on Deleuze, Artmaking, and Meaningmaking and tie into my ideas of creativity. As Dr. Walker asserts, “In regard to pedagogy, the encounter [Deleuzian thought catalyst] suggests overtly creating art assignments that deliberately interrupt students’ habitual ways of thinking and practicing.”(Walker, n.d.) My curriculum is based on using creative thinking and “encounters” to produce students that are not only more meaningful in their art but also throughout life. Using these ideas, I was looking to create a classroom management system that begins to combine the concepts of good classroom management and creative meaning making.
It was through this combination of curriculum objectives and classroom management system that I started looking at, and exploring layered realities. Layered realities is an idea that I have been working on the last two years and still requires further exploration, but also something that has been done by a large portion of teachers already. I define layered realities as allowing layers of information beyond the physical world to influence and inform learning and “reality.” This idea came into being as I was developing my classroom management system “D’Artopia.” My research focuses on how layered realities affect student engagement, actions, and collaboration in an art classroom through the use of the developed “D’Artopia.” As my research focuses on the joining of two separate ideas, my literature review included selections from each realm.
Literature
Creativity and Artmaking
As I look back over all the literature that affected my teaching philosophy and ultimately my research, it all started with a TED talk (Robinson, 2006). In his talk, Sir Ken Robinson, an author and theorist on education and creativity, delivers this talk during the TED conference 2006. He directs his ideas to educators and other intellectuals hoping to inspire new ideas. He talks about creativity and its relation to education. “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” (Robinson, 2006) He challenges the current structures of school and champions creativity. As teachers we need to realize that academic ability is not a direct relation to intelligence and success as a human. This talk started my path through creative artmaking study.
Another early influence on how my teaching style progressed was Dr. Sydney Walker. I was fortunate enough to have her as a professor both as an undergraduate student and then again during my graduate studies. In her writings, I was able to really explore the relationships of creativity, meaningmaking, play, and learning. Walker states, that creative play “is paradoxical, representing a complex and complicated phenomenon that can produce serious thought about the world and self.” (Walker, n.d.) She continues by making the assertion that play is not merely a means of amusement but “a strategy of resistance against the conventions of both art and society.” (Walker, n.d.) In other words, play is a place that a student can safely test out current impossibilities in the hopes of connecting them to realities. Play has “the ability to dislodge ideas from their usual moorings and precipitate new ways of thinking.” (Walker, n.d.) As she continues about play and it’s rhizomatic effects, “The pedagogical goal for fostering rhizomatic thinking in student artmaking is never simply about being clever or entertaining, such as it might appear when artmaking turns toward play and deviance from traditional ways of working, but the aim is to prepare the ground for thinking about self and the world in new ways.” (Walker, n.d.) As art educators we need to wary of teaching art in the same way it has been taught for decades. We need to prepare students to understand and interact with contemporary artists working now. As art evolves so should art education. These ideas gave birth to some of the “playful” learning elements in my “D’Artopia” system.
Classroom Management and Gamification
Beyond studies of the effectiveness of good classroom management, I really wanted to look at what’s known as “Gamification” of a classroom, or creating game like attributes for a classroom management structure. I started looking at premade structures such as Classcraft (Young, Young, & Young, 2013) but decided I needed to build my own system. As I built the “D’Artopia” world, I borrowed from Dr. Jason Cox (2015), who studied teacher relationships through the use of role playing games. Another author I came across was Michael Allen. Allen writes about serious gaming and how to integrate instructional content into those games. Allen contends that the best games do accomplish serious learning goals while engaging the student in something they consider fun. He also states that games don’t need to be expensive or complex to be successful but rather have a solid set of rules. “What actually makes many games fun is discovering how to use rules to achieve desired outcomes.” (Allen, 2016) These ideas are essential as we look at creating learning content that is both exciting and essential to our classrooms. Making sure a student is engaged in serious learning is what separates a classroom from a playground and should always use it’s best tools available.
Another piece of literature that I looked at to begin to bridge the gap between creative thought and classroom management was Making by Tim Ingold (2013). While this literature selection doesn’t directly involve classroom management, I included it with my classroom management piece because through it I best began to see the bridge between the two. Ingold looks at what it means to create and how that creation can allow us to correspond across different ways of thinking. He explores what knowledge is and how it is best attained. In his book, Ingold argues for learning by doing. By allowing ourselves to be immersed in something, we can better understand it rather than just record what we see. Ingold also looks at the blurring of the terms Material and Object, at how we can create using our knowledge rather than recording knowledge. When talking about spending a day making baskets, Ingold states, “Later they would tell me that they had learned more from that one afternoon than from any number of lectures and readings: above all about what it means to make things, about how form arises through movement, and about the dynamic properties of materials.” (Ingold, 2013) I felt that this quote defined how I wanted my classroom management and creative thought project to progress.
Conclusion
Throughout my literature review, there is a lot of research and exploration on creative studies and classroom management. While some of the writers begin to bridge the gap between the two, it is my intent to research it more in depth. I want to explore the idea of layered realities that allows me to not only create a workable classroom management but a meaningful and intentional environment for learning and self exploration. It is my intent to look at student engagement and its effect on productivity and collaboration within my middle school digital art classroom.
