Thursday, February 2, 2017

Thursday Think Tank: Printmaking Social Issue

Last year I stumbled upon this amazing art teachers Instagram @artofteaching (you can click that link to see it) and she had a great idea for printmaking and was kind enough to email me when I asked her about the process, so all the credit goes to her!

Real Talk: I've never done printmaking with real printing blocks and ink as a teacher in my entire 7 years of previous teaching. In elementary it would have been too expensive to buy materials like that for over 700 students. Since being in middle school, while I have taught basic printmaking skills, I never had the materials for an entire class until this year.

So you can see that I was a little nervous and was glad to have the help of a more experienced teacher for this project.

First I began with my advanced students by simply asking them to discuss what they believed a social issue to be. From there we discussed the different types of social issues and where they fit in within different communities within the globe.

A social issue is a problem that influences a considerable number of individuals within a society. 

The different areas of social issues that we addressed were the following:

1. Self
2. Family/School/Friends
3. City/Community
4. Texas/USA
5. Global

After brainstorming as a whole, the class then spent time drafting a design based on a topic of their own choice. Once they finalized their art, they then rubbed the pencil drawing onto the blocks and began carving. Students were expected to create a test print, a ghost print, and then two final prints. They were also expected to label them correctly as artist prints and then label the Edition on their final prints.



This project was done just before the elections in November, so a lot of these were influenced by politics.

Printing!

Writing an artist statement!
I had many great projects come out of this and I was very impressed by how much my students really cared about these different topics. I am one proud art teacher!


How do you incorporate world topics and issues into your curriculum and how do you create meaningful discussions? Let me know!

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