Splashing with paint like Jackson Pollock: free visual education lessons
Pabo teachers Ino de Groot and Ellen Nillezen teach students to teach visual education. The lessons that the teachers-to-be are developing are available for free download in the hope of making the world a better place.
“Enjoy, admire, experience, experience and amaze, that's what visual education is all about,” says Ino de Groot, a visual teacher at the Marnix Academy in Utrecht. “You don't have to be able to draw well to give good drawing lessons. We therefore focus on the art of teaching instead of training one's own skills. ”
Together with colleague Ellen Nillezen, De Groot trains Pabo students to give visual lessons that meet the three core objectives: imagining, getting to know art and culture and reflecting. De Groot: “Our advantage is that we both attended art academy and worked in primary education. Guiding students feels like a party because we know exactly how things work in the classroom. ”
Chaos
The students are instructed to develop a lesson themselves that is linked to a work of art. For example, preschoolers splash with paint like Jackson Pollock and senior students draw themselves in the style of Keith Haring in a dancing pose in the schoolyard. The PAB students first try out their lesson on their own classmates and then in practice. And then it soon turns out to be one of the more difficult subjects to teach. "Apparently it is always chaos in the classroom," says De Groot.
No child does the same, because they are all different and that's the fun part.
''The students therefore also gain their first success experience. Because everything that happens is good. Children can't get it wrong and so neither can the student. A child's drawing is the starting point with which you can continue as a teacher.”
Flat
The lessons are tailored to the development phase of children. While pre-schoolers want abstract art because they mainly look associative and want to experiment, students in the upper years want to represent everything as realistic as possible and the technique to do this becomes important. In the middle building, children still mainly think in diagrams: a bird is drawn as a v, a house as a square with a triangle. “Every child draws a house like this, even if they live in a flat. But then that drawing is not wrong ”, the teacher explains. By asking questions, a teacher can help a child to take the next step. What does your house look like, how many stairs do you have to climb, what color is the door? Then they draw a house with stairs that go right through walls, which is fantastic because it shows that they have become aware of their own world. ”
And that's what the lessons are all about:
Awareness of yourself and the world around you and the expression of feelings, thoughts and emotions.
Each lesson is therefore concluded with a reflection in which children name and indicate what they have made. What is special is that each work shows something personal, says De Groot. For example, a child carried out the assignment to make a 'Sinterklaas incognito' very well. “It was a little man on a mouse ladder, but I couldn't tell that it was the Saint, which was the intention. "Look carefully!" He said, then pulled a cotton wool beard and a rumpled red cloak from the tiny backpack. Brilliant! What I didn't know was that the boy loves acting and dressing up. ”
Free lessons
The more than ninety lessons can be downloaded for free from the website of Ino de Groot. That number is growing steadily and the lessons are supplemented with, for example, instructional videos and examples of reflecting with students. Everything can be found under the name Reggio Utrecht, after the pedagogical concept Reggio Emilia that is based on the talents of a child. “If you give children the space to imagine, they make the most beautiful things”, De Groot explains. “They can proudly tell you what they made and what else they need. That is beautiful. Under the motto 'sharing is multiplying', I hope to stimulate this and make the world a better place. ”
