Art and Music of WWI: A Constructivist Approach

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919

The lesson involves a collaboration on the parts of the music and art teacher. It is designed to cover the art and music of WWI and tie these in with social studies discussions. 

For this lesson, the teacher will lead students in a discussion of WWI events, show students examples of DaDa art, play recordings from WWI, and lead a discussion on how the war influenced and affected art and music during the time. Teachers might also need to scaffold students in terms of creating a collage, and interpreting a musical piece.

Students will be expected to achieve the following based on teacher presentations and prior knowledge from the social studies classroom:

Using information presented by the teacher, and their prior knowledge and experience from social studies, art, and music classes:

- Describe a musical piece after listening to a recording
- research and discuss how the war and propaganda were related to the DaDa movement
- Create their own DaDa collage, relate it to contemporary social events.
- Discuss pieces of music and art from WWI and relate them to the war and other social contexts of the period being discussed.

This is a good website with many links to articles on connecting art to other disciplines. 

Chapter 6 (PLE 4&5) : Cognitive Learning and Memory

PLE #4: What are the essential skills and/or learning outcomes you want your students to know and be able to do that relate to cognitive learning? 

I want students to be able to relate the information presented in a lesson to previous knowledge, to identify key points in the topic, and to be able to discuss these ideas at a later date. I also feel like it is important for students to generalize knowledge and skills, and to be able to apply prior knowledge to new concepts and procedures. All of this relies on students' ability to identify and store main ideas. Students need to be able to organize and filter main ideas from the large amount of visual, audio, and textual information they encounter at any given time. From there they must categorize and relate this information to something meaningful, in order to move it past their working memory into their long term memory, where it must be logged for retrieval in order for students to generalize their knowledge and apply it to new concepts. 


 PLE #5: How might your knowledge of the memory processes guide your instructional decisions?


I personally really wish I had been taught better memorization strategies early on in school. I never truly learned how to study and store information until my later years in college. In order to better help students with the instructional goals listed above, I would practice several strategies with them for encoding information and accessing previously learned info to build on. Before starting an activity I would work with students on identifying the main ideas took look out for in a lesson. If my subject was expressionist art I would question the students on their predictions for the lesson. Based on the last art movement we studied, what do you think might have been some key motivators for the expressionist movement? Do you know any expressionist artists? Lets look at the root word in expressionist: expression. What clues does that word give us about the art from this movement?

I would ask students to log their responses in their portfolio as prior knowledge and predictions. I would give them guided handouts to take notes on during the presentation, with organizational charts if the amount of information needed to be broken down into groups for better comprehension. At the end of each class I would go over what the students felt they had learned for the day, and ask them to relate it to previous knowledge we had gone over. 

10 helpful strategies for helping students' memorization.

Assessing without tests.

I would like my art classroom to be a cultural experience for my students, as well as a spark for their own investigation into diverse peoples and cultures. I believe that learning about diversity at an early age can help foster respect for "outsider" peers the students may encounter. For this particular lesson in an elementary class room, the students would be looking at Australian Aboriginal paintings. The focus would be on shape and pattern in conjunction with a discussion of The Dreaming and Aboriginal culture. Students would be asked to select an animal from the out back, break its body down into shapes (ex. circle for its head, triangle body, rectangle body etc.). After drawing these shapes on different colored sheets of construction paper, the students would cut them out, and assemble the bodies on a larger sheet of paper. A discussion of Aboriginal use of patterning would follow and students would be asked to embellish each part of their animal using simple markings (dots, circles, lines, etc.). Finally, students would work in groups to create a story about their animals' experiences in the dreaming. This lesson includes some geography, "Where is Australia? Northern or Southern hemisphere?" As well and some geometry in dealing with shapes. And of course some social studies (as any art lesson should).
(PowerPoint presentation for this project can be viewed here.)
I'm a big fan of pre-assessments. I think its good to have some understanding of your students' knowledge base before you begin a unit or project. For this lesson, I would do a verbal assessment of my students' knowledge about Australia and Aboriginal art at the end of the class period before I began the project. Older students might write what they know on exit passes. These would help me plan my presentation on Australia and give me some idea of what I needed to cover.

After the presentation, I'd go over daily goals the students should try to meet. This will help me assess their progress and investment in the task, as well as their on task behavior as the project progresses. Students would begin their projects.

The final project serves as its own summative assessment. I would develop two rubrics, one that sums up their on task behavior (non graded, this would be just to help me get an idea of who needs more help in the classroom and how I need to tailor my instruction for them) and a final project rubric.



  http://rubistar.4teachers.org/    is a good resource for creating rubrics. You can select categories in different subjects or create your own. Even if it doesn't have the specifics you're thinking of, it gives you a good idea of what to look for and how to break evaluation up.

Finally, I would ask students to keep a working/developmental portfolio in their sketchbook. This would include their notes, sketches, project plans, graded rubrics, feedback, and worksheets. This serves as another formative assessment that will help me see which students are progressing and which students need differentiated instruction. Separately, students would keep a best of work portfolio to document their final, graded projects (no self respecting art teacher lets her students store their masterpieces haphazardly).