Teaching Art
In Target Driven Unit Based Curriculum Study it would be very easy to not recognise talent when doing Tick-Box Assessment, and too easy to dosh out Distinctions to utterly talentless, but neat and conscientious students...
BTEC AT NORTHBROOK
The Scrutineer tutored in Fine Art & Design at Northbrook College, Worthing for 10 years (often under the guise of Studio Support).
Teaching a 16-19 year old is surprisingly satisfying. One minute their annoyingly sarcastic and gobby arrogance has you sending them off to the canteen for fear they’d end up with the fine point of your Pilot pen in their eye – the next, you’re standing gawping at their thrown-together project which displays utter creative splendour.
The London Trip (The London Eye), November 2006.
Key Stage 4 – Summer School
An annual Summer School organised by Northbrook College for Year 10 pupils during their ‘work experience’ week. Feeder schools from the surrounding area would send up to forty pupils to experience Art College… Between them, Rachael Adams, Pat Thornton and Clive Goodyer ran this highly successful five day course for several years!
Above: This was a Chuck Close portrait for a Summer School project.
Key Stage 4 – Six Week Project
Organised by Jennifer Littlejohn at Northbrook College, and taught by Rachael and Clive Goodyer – this course was developed for Year 10 pupils from surrounding schools. The pupils were deemed to be academic ‘low-achievers’, with a range of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties… They came to college every Friday for six weeks…
Week 1:
Portraits – understand facial proportions and produce a portrait on A1 of the person sitting opposite
Week 2:
Information Graphics – make a sequence (tell a story), using photocopied icons from ‘Information Graphics’
(Story titles: An Accident, A Crime, A Disaster, A Holiday, A Trip to a Sports Centre, A Trip to the Theatre)
Week 3:
Animation – Flick books and the Zeotrope. Produce a sequence of images which appear to animate in the Zeotrope and/or create a flick book animation
Week 4:
Storyboards – take an event from your own life and work it into a graphic sequence (narrative illustration)
Week 5:
Storyboards – fine tune your graphic sequence (narrative illustration)
Week 6:
Storyboards – colour your graphic sequence (narrative illustration)
We gave them opportunities to engage with their task and achieve! The response from Jennifer afterwards:
“We are working towards their Key Skills Level 1 qualification in Working Together – and they are pleased that they might get a qualification. They were quite difficult to settle because they wanted ‘Clive and Rachael’, so you were very popular and despite the difficulties they presented you with they loved what you did with them”.
