The Design Club by prof. Laura Nitu
Abstract
The paper
presents the results of a research into an extracurricular activity for Art
students, which we call The Design Club. This involves a master-disciple
learning partnership intended to improve the traditional relationship between
the Art teacher and her students. The main aims of the club are to encourage
talented teenagers to practice the techniques of book illustration and to learn
how to make public their works. The club also promotes a social dimension of
learning – the students come together and have the opportunity to discuss and
support one another even if finally their products remain individual ones.
© 2010 Published
by Elsevier Ltd.
Keywords: learning partnership;
master-disciple; extracurricular
activity; art education; book
illustration
Introduction
Book illustration is hardly a focus of
the Art Education curriculum in Romania, this particular domain being rather
marginal in the Art teachers’representations as well. Nevertheless, some Art
students have the potential to develop their graphic skill. I always propose
some design exercises to the students at the beginning of the term and each
year I can see some very good work. Actually, Art students can be seen quite
often drawing comics or cartoons. They do it without any clear purpose, they do
it without guidance, in isolation. Some of their results are exceptional and
yet nobody in the Art highschool takes it into account.
This is how I came to the idea to
support the students’ talent and interests by inviting them to an
extracurricular activity that focuses on the practice of the techniques of book
illustration. My intention was to gather in a club those who are interested in
drawing, to challenge them with exercises that stimulate creativity but also
with topics they would have never worked on without the advice of an expert.
Besides the training in book
illustration, the Design Club also tries to solve some other problems that the
young participants face. These are old
problems in Art Education in Romania and nobody seems interested to solve them
as it is more comfortable to forget about it. I faced these problems myself
when I was a student in the same school where I am teaching now. I understand
very well my students’ expectations, questions and needs. Not long ago I was
ruminating on them from the teenager perspective. The youth that are enrolled in Art school lack
confidence, are demotivated, quite often approach Art in a superficial way, are
afraid of failure, and above all they are not taught about the importance of a portfolio
with personal works and sketches. All these are connected with the little
involvement of the Art teachers in the actual development of their students.
The teachers do not have a vision for their students’ future. What they are
doing after graduation is not a matter of concern, generally speaking.
I decided not to ignore the “state of
the arts” and to support my students. I considered a different type of
relationship that could inspire both of us. With my experience as a book
illustrator I could try to help them become more than real artists but
independant, responsible, disciplined and target-oriented personalities as
well.
That was the starting point of the
Design Club and of the research the partial results of which are presented
here.
The
foundations of the Club
The participants at the club (and the
target group of my research) are 15-17 year olds who showed interest in book
illustration, chose to join the club and who belong to all the three
specializations of our vocational Art Highschool, that is Music, Visual Arts,
Architecture. They are all very gifted but the school they attend is more
interested in preserving its traditions than in reorienting towards
contemporary trends. This is how the students become demotivated and quite superficial. My
first goal besides the technical solution of persuading them to develop portfolios
– like real artists, was to find ways to encourage them to go deeper into their
skill and talents.
The theory of the multiple
intelligences (MI) and the more recent developments regarding the ‘five minds’ (Gardner,
2004, 2006, 2007) helped me with valuable insight. The readings from Gardner made
me to admit that Romanian Art Education lacked purpose. Parents and teachers
persuade the students to choose the Art School but nobody thinks of what they
can do with their competence later on. Students are not encouraged to reflect
on this issue. Instead of training genuine artists, who can benefit from the
niches in the society and create cultural assets as well as cultivate a public
for their Art, the present education just provides a technicist training. There
is no perspective for life outside the school walls. The teachers themselves
are technicians when they come to class and they ask the students to obediently
repeat a technique.
When I started teaching in the Art
School I knew for sure that I do not want to be that kind of teacher. Yet, until
the beginning of the Design Club I couldn’t name the exact type of teacher I
desired to be for my students. The planning for an extracurricular activity
reminded me of the Renaissance apprenticeship model. Artistry had been learned
like that for centuries and it was successful both in terms of technical
acquisition and artistic value (Gardner, 2006). The Design Club could reinvent
such apprenticeship and my research could document our changes. My statement of
the study became the following: The constant support offered by the expert
illustrator propels the disciples
towards recognition of their talent and results.
I view this relationship as a learning
partnership where both sides have the opportunity to progress in remarkable
ways. When I stepped into this partnership I started to reconsider my schemes
of thinking – I was no longer just an artist by myself – but one who needed to
adapt to the needs of the disciples (otherwise the latter could quit the club!).
The students who turn into disciples try to better know their master’s craft,
attempt at doing something similar in a global sense not just like nowadays
when they repeat a technique. The ‘master’ is an artist with a developed
personality which is not hidden from the ‘apprentices’. The transfer is not
merely technical but an interconnection comprising various issues, the esthetic
and ethical values included.
Values are fairly important but we tend
to marginalize them in school because we do not know how exactly we can deal
with them in the absence of the authoritarian inculcation. At the club we have
the courage to talk about our choices and deal with the issues that concern
values.
Last but not least, as a ‘master’ I am
tuned with each individual who comes at the club. The special relationship we
develop makes me to apply an individualized approach for book illustration, which
is adapted to individual-artists-to-be. This important feature of the
methodology at the Design Club involves a flexible planning within the
theoretical framework of the illustration as it is understood and agreed upon
by the experts in the field.
The book illustration is meant to
explain or to be complementary to a text, sometimes highlighting some parts of
the text, but it is always influenced by the personality and the interpretation
of the artist (Brown 1958, Carneci, 1981). The artist can retell the
information in the text in a descriptive way or s/he can improve it by adding a
personal touch to it, while tempting the imagination of the receiver. The illustration
can also be extremely decorative, without a clear connection to the text as
such but by enriching the reception of the reader. Whether the illustration is
literary, scientific, didactic or for entertainment purposes, it is always in
an interdisciplinary connection. The illustrator needs to understand the domain
that s/he is illustrating and also to operate with communication competence
both visually and verbally. At this point, book illustration represents a
generous topic that relates naturally to an MI-based approach and to the
educational trend that pleads for integrated perspectives in the class.
In order to keep track of my study
about the partnership’s benefits and to check the statement mentioned above I
use a research diary of our face to face meetings that are scheduled every
other day and use observation grids for the students’work during the class
sessions as well as for the analysis of their drawings and of their developing
portfolios. During the observation of the learning process within the club my
criteria refer to interpersonal communication and its role for building my
students’ confidence. One of the assets of the Club is the group discussion
about the text meanings, the choice of techniques, the impact on the receiver.
I assume (but I need to prove) that the work at the club develops communication
among students that are trained to work in isolation and that communication
builds their positive self as future
artists. The analysis grid for the portfolio is intended to mark the progress
they make in the illustration competences as shown in the passage from one
drawing to another. Contrary to the traditional view that only the final –
perfect! – work is worth keeping I’m trying to raise my students’awareness
about their learning acquisition by the recording of all the intermediate
products, in the sense of a “processfolio” (Gardner, 2006).
Work in the Design Club
The first steps in the club were taken in
order to encourage an ongoing communication among us (between the face to face
sessions) as well as the promotion of our work. Consequently during the summer
months of 2010 I worked along with a few IT experts to develop our site. The
students’ effort to work some extra time beyond the compulsory curriculum needed
to be publicised, so we thought of starting an online magazine with illustated
texts. So far the site was successfully launched, but the magazine is still a
draft.
Among the first steps, I could also count
my thorough planning and the lobby in the school to obtain support from the
principal – mainly an adequate environment for our Club meetings. In both
directions I was not very successful. To the present we still lack a space of
our own. We need to go into a classroom where the young students are out for
PE. Their belongings are on the desks and moreover they come back after 50
minutes and for the last part of our club meeting (which is scheduled for two
hours) we move into another classroom the occupants of which go to the Computer
Room for their IT class. This is quite unconfortable.
As far as the planning is concerned – In
the beginning of the “club work” I planned a lot and also made a lot of
mistakes. It is well known that every start is difficult! The first official
meeting of the Club was the result of such a planning miscalculation. I
suggested them to do an illustration of the 10th Sonnet of
Michelangelo. I started with this piece of literature because Michelangelo is a
total artist who changes so easily the representational codes in his art. He
was meant to be an inspiration for the future book illustrator. Secondly, my
choice was motivated by the generous nature of poetry when it comes to visual
interpretation. Thirdly, I love poetry. My miscalculation was that my students
do not exactly have a taste for it. I
was also surprised they ignored the meanings of some of the words in the poem.
I had planned that first session by the point of view of the traditional
teacher who looks to her students by the binoculars of her personality, likes
and dislikes. Nevertheless the club discussions on the text analysis, the look
at the Renaissance art in albums
supported the students in coming closer to what I intended to do and
some of the drawings they did were quite good. Yet I was very unsatisfied and
shared with my final dissertation supervisor about the shortcomings of the
first club event. The discussion with another type of a “master” mobilised me
to go through the planning again and came up with a story for the next meeting.
Full of renewed hope, I read them the
beginning of The Prince and the Pauper
by making use of adequate intonation. I shared from my experience as book
illustrator by giving a speech about the illustration’s composition, and
layout. I told them the illustration should not tell the story but offer the
reader a reason to meditate upon as well as a reason to admire the craft of the
illustrator. Here is a part of the dialogue we had during the “Prince” meeting:
“Teacher: What is the fragment about? Who is it about?
Student 1: About two boys...
Student 2: I’d rather say it’s just one
Student 1: Well, there’s the prince and there’s the pauper
Student 2: Sure. But it’s as if someone had a first look in the mirror
of a lake and observed himself with the eyes of the other
Student 1: Humm. That’s rather philosophical, don’t you think?
Teacher : Well, what do you think we are? As artists are we imitators
of the reality or interpreters of it?
Student 1: Humm…”
They
liked this idea of them being interpreters of the world. They seemed very
thoughtful. We talked for an hour about the role of illustration. They made
some drawings but very few caught my attention. My students had started to be
reflective but they were still inhibated, they were not exactly in the right
mood to create original ideas. I was happy though because I had managed a breakthrough.
(see Fig. 1 below).
Fig. 1 The first breakthrough – The Prince and the Pauper
The first month at the Club was full of
ups and downs. All of them surprised me. These surprises do say something about
my adjusting to the ‘master’ status. The diary helped me a lot to reflect on
“the surprise” and to find a positive interpretation of it plus some added
value for my research.
An interesting discussion about the
results of the club is the attitude and skill of the ‘master’. What is a master in this respect? An expert artist
who can share from his/her experiences? The fourth and fifth meetings of the
Club brought two complementary answers to my question.
We had decided
to participate as a group to an exhibition on the topic The text(ures) of the postmodern city. Our work is supposed to be a
visual essay about the postmodern city, about the street sensitivity. For more
flavour at the club I had invited Liviu Ghituleasa, one of the organizers of the
event and a very opened and relaxed teacher to explain the objectives of the
exhibition to my students. I had hoped this will stir their interest, make them
curious but they received him with silence. Only after Liviu left the classroom,
had they started to ask questions. The sophisticated language that expert had
used made them feel inferior. They actually couldn’t understand very well what
was all about and they were quite fearful about being involved in that
experiment-exhibition. Liviu Ghituleasas is definitely an expert but when he
came to the club he did not manage to be the least of a “master”.
The
second answer came soon after, again in the context of an art event. We visited
The European BD exhibition in Bucharest in October 2010 and we participated in
the workshop of Olivier Grenson, a very gifted and famous Belgian comics artist.
And a ‘master’ as I soon could observe. The club members were thrilled about
the exercises he did with them. Some of the students had brought their
portfolios along and they could show to Olivier how talented they are. The
dialogue between the artist and the students was extremely profitable, he
encouraged them and praised one of the girls for her portfolio. Olivier also
had the patience to correct some of the works of my students. He gave them the
same items of advice I did. He told them they need to practice drawing, use the
axes and do sketches. He also told them to thoroughly read and look for
complementary information before they draw and also to use photographs during
the work so that they keep to the truth when they represent scenes, objects,
attitudes, persons...
The
encounter with Olivier was a great step forward for the club partnership – for
the students it was good to work with a recognised artist who earns a living
from his art. For me it was a good lesson of ‘mastership’. Explaining is good
but involving everyone in the practical excercise all in the same time is far
better. When we got back from the European exhibition we remade one of the
Belgian artist’s exercises – create a character, first from a frontal
perspective and then from different other perspectives. The results were fine
and discussion and attitude were excellent. We could even face the Postmodern
Text(ures) project with different eyes. The students came out with interesting
ideas about it.
After
a new replanning on my behalf, our last experience at the club dealt with the
schoolbook illustration. I had realised the club started quite awkwardly as I
had not involved them first in illustration for books from their immediate
environment. I had rather put them into the shoes of the adult which obviously
they were not. Consequently we looked at some Romanian and French textbooks, we
discussed the illustrations and identified mistakes. We tested some representations
for books in the primary education by trying to put ourselves in the place of
the young readers. This was the first topic they really enjoyed. I could see
their interest and commitment to do a good job. And the results indeed were
good since they had the opportunity to make something useful and admired by
adults.
The
Club participants got involved in designing the setting for the 4 graders’ end
of term play. We had an initial discussion and then they did the
job. They did it autonomously and enthusiastically, by improvising when they
fixed the set - so it should fit better – like genuine artists. I could not be
present when the event took place, but here is the account from one of the
students: “The class teacher insisted
that we stay and introduced us as our
friends from the Design Club who did this extraordinary set. We received a
great applause. And later the students, the teachers and the parents - they all
praised us. This was cool. We are not very used to praises and it feels good. I
loved it.” The ‘extraordinary set’ was
the fruit of excellent teamwork, a lot of endeavour (they spent twelve hours
during two afternoons) and self-confidence. It was also a good promotion for
the Club. We even received an offer – to paint the walls of the classroom where
the play took place. The class teacher was thrilled with the students’ talent
in illustrations for children and since the next school year she will take 1st
graders she invited us during the summer holidays to decorate the classroom!
Conclusions – The Club is still on
The
learning partnership we are building is a challenging experience that requires
a lot of perseverance. It is not easy to be a ‘master’. The quick response I
had when I saw Olivier at work and my desire to do the same shows I am a good
‘disciple’, or maybe just a more advanced one as compared to my students. My
study so far does not contradict my hypothesis – it shows that the
relationship, the perspective on learning and the practical experience together
do motivate the students. The Design Club is visited on a regular basis by non-member
students who are curious about what we are doing; the IT teacher is also a
regular visitor and we will try a cooperation; we have an offer from a class teacher;
the atmosphere is pleasant and students feel safe to create originally and to
share their work as well as albums and other sources; the online activity is
growing; there are Art teachers in the school who encourage our experiences,
talk to the students and praise their work. There are some who criticise my
initiative which they call “kitsch”.
As
the strengths are far “stronger” than the “weaknesses” in our partnership, the
club is still on and works well. My study
will continue at least to the end of the academic year when I am to present the
results in my dissertation for the master degree. But my hope is this research
is just one step in an ongoing partnership.
Acknowledgements
I express my gratitude towards my
former highschool colleagues Irinel Ditu and Stefan Buturuga who supported me
in developing the site of the Club. A big thank you goes to my students Andrei
Ionut Carpen and Ioana Dragomir who worked along me during the summer holidays
to make the site of the club functional.
Last but not least I thank all of
my students who support me become a valuable part in a learning partnership
References
Brown, Marcia (1958) Distinction in Picture Book, in Dalphin,
M., Vigures R-H, Miller, B. Illustrators of children’s books 1946-1956
, Boston: The Horn Book INC.
Cârneci, Magda (1981) The Book
Illustration (in Romanian) in Art
nr. 9/ 1981
Gardner, Howard (2005) The
Disciplined Mind (in Romanian) Bucuresti: Sigma
Gardner, Howard (2006) Multiple Intelligences. New Horizons (in Romanian) Bucuresti:
Sigma
Gardner, Howard (2007) Five minds for the future (in Romanian)
Bucuresti: Sigma
