Field Observations at Hunter College High School

By Jessica Gordon

Hunter College High School:The School at a Glance.

Grade levels: 7 to 12

Class size: 25

Enrollment: 1200

Ethnicity %: 40 W 6 B 4 H 50 A

Graduation rate: 99%

9th-graders who read at grade level: 100%

College admissions: excellent

Neighborhood: Upper East Side

Admissions: By exam/selective, entering 7th grade only

Free lunch: 15%

Hunter College High School:Background Information

• Hunter College High School officially begins in grade 7 (admission by exam) but it is housed in the same building as the middle and elementary schools.

• Art and Music are required courses throughout the high school years, and meet 4 times weekly (40 minute periods) usually with at least one double period. Art is taken for one semester and music for one semester every year.

• Each art class has roughly 25 students.

The Curriculum “The goal of Visual Arts instruction at Hunter College High School is that students better understand how art is made, appreciate the roles art has played through the centuries, and realize how much enjoyment they can have in both making and looking at works of art. The Arts faculty believes that in order to realize students’ creative potential in the making of art, students must understand the history of art. The making of art and the understanding of creative concepts, aesthetics, and criticism are essential to one another and should not be separated.”

The Curriculum

• As the arts department motto suggests, all the classes (aside from electives) are a mixture of art history education and studio art practice. Most classes include outside of the studio trips (to museums, galleries, etc).

• The advanced level art classes begin in grade 7 with “World Art”. Grades 8, 9 and 10 are foundations classes. Grades 11 and 12 are electives (printmaking, painting, drawing, ceramics and photo).

• The classes I observed (Grades 8 and 9) were foundations classes (Art I and Art II)

The CurriculumART I-art history concentrates on the art of Greece and Rome as well as the European

art of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Special emphasis is placed on the art of the High Renaissance. Students participate in slide lectures and discussions about ways that art reflects and influences the dominant culture. Students visit a relevant museum collection and complete a term project. Studio art focuses on the formal concerns of positive and negative space and the hue, value a saturation of color. Students continue to develop their drawing skills through the techniques of shading, volume, one and two-point perspective, and portraiture. More advance painting and printmaking techniques are introduced.

ART II-art history explores the European Baroque, Neo-Classic, Romantic, Realist, and Impressionist movements. Students participate in slide lectures and discussions. They visit a relevant museum collection and write a term paper, and take art history exams. Formal concerns in studio art include two and three-dimensional composition, under painting, glazing, figure drawing and technical drawing.

“Expanding the Frame”

Every semester, there is at least one museum or gallery trip. Usually this trip is taken by students individually rather than as a class. Each course has a different assignment, but generally the students are asked to view several artworks and respond to them in a written assignment.

Classroom Management

In general, classroom management was kept to a minimum. Ms. Rich was very relaxed with the students, allowing to sit wherever they liked, speak while they worked and listen to ipods during class. The students were by and large exceptionally well behaved and motivated, requiring only minimal management.

Vocabulary and concepts

* Each class has a list of vocabulary words and images which the students are required to learn and tested on. The vocabulary relates both to artistic practice and art history. * As each foundations class has an art history component, there are required readings and exams for each session.* The exams are usually short answer and are graded by Ms. Rich.

Studio Practice

• Most of the art classes are dedicated to studio practice, and the art room is generally open and available to the students all day.

• Students who complete assignments ahead of schedule may begin the next assignment, revisit a past assignment, or work on artworks of their own choosing.

Homework Assignments

• Weekly homework assignments are given to every class. They are usually aimed at allowing the students the opportunity to explore and practice the skills which are being taught in the class. Assignments are graded by Ms. Rich and returned to the students with typed comments on their work. They are allowed to resubmit any assignment they have done. Finished assignments are generally displayed on the classroom wall to inspire the students as they work. All the student work is displayed.

Assessment

• The students grades are based on their scores on quizzes and exams, homework grades and assignment grades.

• There is no formal assessment tool. Grades on student art work are based on Ms. Rich’s personal assessment of how much effort was put in to the work.

The Art Classroom

• The art classroom is filled with student art work from the current year and previous years. There are a few posters from art shows, but other than this the room is almost exclusively used to display student work.

The Art Classroom

• There are 4 long tables where students sit. There are no assigned seating arrangements. Ms. Rich has a desk at the front of the room from which she presents lectures. During class time she walks around the room helping students.

The Art Classroom

The Art Classroom

8th Grade

• During my observations, the 8th grade class worked on three projects. One focused on negative versus positive space, on eon perspective and one on mosaics.

• All of these projects consisted of an art history lesson which linked the concepts of the art historical period of interest to the studio practice.

8th Grade

8th Grade

• Greco/Roman architecture and sculpture were studied, with a focus on concepts of positive/negative space and perspective and on the practice of creating mosaics.

• Following the art history lesson, students were asked to complete several assignments based on these concepts.

8th Grade• The Perspective project I

observed was to create an imaginary space for the students favorite cartoon character and draw it from either one or two point perspective.

• The cartoon character itself did not have to be drawn in perspective, but was drawn with colored pencil, cut out and glued into the created space.

8th Grade

• The mosaics project was to create a self portraits using small plastic tiles.

• There was not much of a conceptual aspect to this lesson, more just an examination of Roman mosaics leading in to the creation of mosaic self-portraits

8th Grade

• The Positive/Negative space assignments were: 1) A homework assignment where the students set up a still life and drew only the negative space. 2) Looking at themselves in profile, drawing the negative space and then turning these drawings into silhouettes of themselves and 3) Using black paper strips to create self portraits depicting only the positive spaces.

9th Grade

• The 9th Grade focuses largely on the Renaissance (its artists and design concepts).

• The projects that stemmed from this art historical lesson were about shading and contouring and creating the illusion of depth in the picture plane.

9th Grade• The first homework assignment

for the 9th grade class was to copy this famous M.C. Escher work.

• Ms. Rich feels that by copying an existing artwork, students become more comfortable with new skills and techniques without the pressure of creating their own composition.

• This type of lesson was generally used in the art classroom in lieu of an exploration lesson.

9th Grade• The assignments I observed for

the 9th grade class were: 1) to draw a roll of toilet paper using the techniques of shading seen in Renaissance paintings, 2) to draw a self portrait based on techniques of contouring and shading and 3) to create an image of hands plying apart tissue paper (to which actual tissue paper was later added) to examine how depth can be portrayed in the picture plane.

9th Grade

Final Thoughts

• Although I found the idea of linking art historical concepts to studio practice unique and interesting in theory, the links between the art history and the studio practice were often weak and/or not clearly stated.

• Students seemed motivated to create art and often created well thought out, skillful artworks, yet the parameters of the set curriculum seemed to stifle creativity more than encourage it.

• As a result of this, many students hurried through the assigned work in order to have time to work on their own projects.

THE END