Monthly Archives: November 2011

Micro/Macro at the Zoo

I’m very excited to be part of the Big Draw in Singapore this year. I’d heard about the event in Britain, and it is only the second year it is happening here.

Micro/Macro is a workshop happening at the zoo on the 19th of November from 10am to 2pm at the proboscis monkey enclosure (behind the Fragile Forest).

Macro

The participants (children or adults) are invited to try their hand at “Gesture Drawing”, to capture the essence of being a monkey. Those creatures move fast and you have to be fast with your charcoal, let go of the details, capture the movement. This kind of drawing is usually used to draw people, capturing them on the go, and artists use this as an exercise, to loosen up and tune their mind to drawing and observing.

Micro

The participants are then invited to try their hand at histological drawing. This time, they are given a piece of monkey tissue to observe, in the form of a histological section slide. These slides are ready to be slipped under the microscope, which can be focused to reveal different structures. In this case, the drawing is used as a means of observing detail. There is plenty of detail, and often repeating patterns.

The result will be a display side-by-side of these two different ways of capturing “what a monkey looks like” from different people, with different personalities, different abilities and different goals…

I can’t wait to see what people come up with! See you at the zoo….

Posted in Adult, Art, Children, Creativity, Drawing, Environment, Events, Science, Workshop

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Tags: Drawing, Workshop

Teaching?

Nov 12

Posted by Isabelle Desjeux

It has been a curiously intense week in terms of confronting learning environments for children. Let me clarify:

I have been giving a presentation on the history of printmaking in Europe to a group of 180 9-year olds at the French school; followed by visits in individual classes to lead printmaking workshops (I even lug my 1-ton etching press to school!).
I have visited The Blue House Nursery, a beautiful Reggio-inspired pre-school at the edge of the Bukit Timah forest reserve;
I have given a drawing lesson to a couple of 4-year olds, a group of 5-8 year olds and let a threesome of tweens loose in my painting studio (instead of the usual drawing class);
I have sat on in a meeting of young French mothers entrepreneurs… discussing business but with young children at the back of their mind.
I have been reflecting on what my “teaching philosophy” would be for a teaching job in Middle School and then for University-level;
I have come up with new art-and-science workshops for walk-in crowds for Playeum;
I have been solidifying my ideas for L’Observatoire, an art-and-science education workshop (more on that soon);
I have attended a student-led “Unplugged” concert at UWCSEA.

… and checking that my own 3 kids had done their homework.

And from all this, I come comforted in a few things:

“Emerging Curriculum” really exist (at The Blue House Nursery). I have always resisted following a strict curriculum for my classes (which makes it difficult to hire other teachers to do the work…), preferring to have a general idea of what the students should have been exposed to at the end of the session or series of sessions, and then letting the group of students lead the path. Now I now that this has a name and it’s not “unprepared lessons” but rather “over prepare and go with the flow”….
Telling kids answers to questions they have not yet asked is robbing them of the essential pleasure or finding questions. Presenting facts as the result of our own investigation might be a better teaching approach. I have still not watched Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” despite being directed to it many times. I suspect the content might in essence be the same … I invite you to listen and give me your thoughts!

Posted in Art, Children, Class, Creativity, Drawing, Environment, Teaching