Pandemic Reflections: Cultivating Authentic Learning Through Reflection in Art Class

During the global pandemic, I found myself with more time to create a painting I envisioned during a trip to Israel in February 2020. As I painted, I reflected on my pedagogical practice. I realized the need to create opportunities for authentic learning or students’ construction of knowledge through reflecting on relevant life experiences and real-world issues (Gnezda, 2009). During this challenging year of a pandemic, social unrest, and isolation, I realized I needed to focus on three pedagogical practices to promote more authentic learning in my classes:

1. sharing my creative process and how it reflects my experiences,

2. empowering student voices through higher order–thinking questions to connect their experiences to the unit’s topic, and

3. encouraging students to create art that profoundly connects to their experiences.

While visiting Israel and Palestine, I witnessed the prejudice and segregation Palestinians endure. I have known for years about the turmoil between Palestinians and Israelis. Nevertheless, I was unprepared for the stark reality of the isolation that so many Palestinians face in their daily lives. The group I traveled with visited the Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem, where we listened to the plight of many Palestinians who desperately want peace but are growing weary in their segregation. That trip inspired my painting, Suffer the Little Children: Israel’s Apartheid (Figure 1). The painting reveals the glaring difference between the new Israeli settlements built against international law in Palestinian-occupied areas and the less-than-stellar living conditions of many houses within the walled-in regions of Palestine. Palestinians are also highly restricted in traveling beyond the confines of their walled cities.

Figure 1. Amber Tackett, Suffer the Little Children: Israel’s Apartheid, 2020. Oil on canvas.

With a new focus on these three practices, I shared my painting with my Art 1 students at the end of a unit on interpreting art. Before providing any contextual information about the painting, I asked my students to answer three questions. What do you think the subject matter of this painting is, and why? What details in the artwork do you want to know more about? How does the image make you feel? For the second question, most students asked, “Why is there a wall?” After explaining my painting and its subject matter, I asked students to reflect on how the information made them feel and if it changed their minds from their initial interpretations of the artwork. Most students noted they were unaware of the situation in Palestine. One student summed up her reaction: “Now that I know the background, it makes me feel a feeling of sadness and emotion towards the citizens who cannot travel from the land behind the wall” (personal communication, December 4, 2020). Giving students space to reflect on art helps them connect what they see externally to what they know internally (Yancey, 2016). Millman (2010) suggested that reflection can “allow students to examine their feelings and thoughts and to analyze their new knowledge” (p. 24).

Stewart (2009) asserted that “art education is empowering students to own their own ideas, develop their own voices and to listen to the ideas of others” (p. 16). Her prescription for cultivating student empowerment is through “processes of questions and answers” (p. 15). Lampert (2006) also affirmed that “developing thoughtful rejoinders to open-ended questions, and considering the varied responses of fellow classmates enables students to reconcile and link the new ideas of classmates with their own existing thoughts on content issues” (p. 47). Thus, higher order questions can lead to authentic learning.

When discussing art movements in my art one classes, I continued encouraging students to reflect on their experiential connections. In a lesson on the Great Migration series by Jacob Lawrence, I inquired about students’ emotional reactions to the series. One student replied, “I feel uneasy. I feel that his paintings are racist because the Black people have no faces” (personal communication, October 19, 2020). His statement led me to ask if they perceived any correlation between the depiction of Black people in Lawrence’s paintings and current events or their personal experiences. Students drew various connections to the Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, immigration, unemployment, and diverse experiences of prejudice and inequality. Next, I showed Helen Zughaib’s series, Syrian Migration, and discussed how she modeled Lawrence’s work to convey a contemporary event. I then challenged them to create an artwork connected to their personal experiences over the past year, using Lawrence’s series as inspiration (Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2. Student drawing, The COVID-19 Pandemic Changed the Way We Live Our Daily Lives, 2021. Marker on paper.

Figure 3. Student drawing, The Black Girls That Matter, 2021. Colored pencil on paper.

According to Gnezda (2009), “Art in the adult world is often created as a meaningful response to personal and cultural experience,” and “students, like adult artists, should have opportunities to deal with their potent experiences through the sensory, creative, and manipulative process that is art” (p. 49). When students create art that constructs meaning from their experiences, it can “enrich their knowledge of themselves in relation to the world” (Gnezda, 2009, p. 49). During my Drawing and Painting course this school year, I shared Suffer the Little Children: Israel’s Apartheid. I explained my inspiration and why I felt personally moved by the isolation I witnessed while in Israel and Palestine. We discussed how the global pandemic has made people feel isolated—especially poignant because this discussion occurred virtually. I then asked students to reflect on and create an artwork about isolation through a series of questions: What was the event or moment you felt or witnessed isolation? How did the experience make you feel? In what ways could you represent or symbolize your experience of isolation? How could your choice of media best reflect that experience? In their initial idea development, students answered the questions in writing and drew a series of sketches. After discussing their ideas with them, students began working on their final artworks.

A few students represented the isolation from the pandemic. One moving example was a student who decided to draw herself as a faint outline in the window of her house because “we couldn’t leave our houses at the start of the quarantine” (Figure 4; personal communication, December 4, 2020). A couple represented isolation of others, such as the separation of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border (Figure 5), while the majority represented very personal experiences with isolation.

Figure 4. Student drawing, Stuck Inside, 2020. Pencil on paper.

Figure 5. Student drawing, Tears for Liberty, 2020. Graphite on canvas paper.

One student reflected on her experience being hospitalized with a severe health condition: “I sat in a hospital bed, 4 hours away from my family, my friends, my home. I was poked and prodded and I was tired and scared. I fought harder than I ever have to go home” (Figure 6; personal communication, December 4, 2020). Another student represented the internal struggles with feeling different from her peers:

Figure 6. Student painting, Hospital Isolation, 2020. Acrylic on canvas panel.

This illustration is designed to depict anyone, not just me, who has experienced the feeling of otherworldliness. At times, I feel so different and alienated from others. It is like being locked away in a bubble, separated from everything, so far away from all others. (Figure 7; personal communication, December 4, 2020)

Figure 7. Student drawing, Otherworldliness, 2020. Charcoal on paper.

After showing their work in a critique, I asked students to reflect on their peers’ work. One responded,

I realized that there is not just one form of isolation, but both mental and physical isolation. I was shown that everyone goes through hard periods differently than others. Sometimes isolation can be a good thing. I would’ve never understood their experience of isolation until I saw and heard what meaning their artwork had. (personal communication, December 7, 2020)

Gnezda (2009) stated, “By teaching artmaking that asks our students to deal creatively with their authentic experiences, we help them to make constructions—both cognitive and concrete—of their knowledge about self and world” (p. 49). Rather than just creating lessons that result in cookie-cutter art, art educators should create lessons that promote more authentic learning because it fosters students’ engagement and helps them formulate their positionality in the world. Through teachers sharing their approach to artmaking, encouraging students to formulate their voice through reflective questions, and empowering students to create artwork that connects to their experiences, students will discover they are not isolated from the universal human experience. ν

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Amber Tackett

Amber Tackett, Instructor of Art Education, The Art of Education University in Raceland, Kentucky. Email: [email protected]