Individualizing Education?

I teach art. While the students at my school have to have a “Fine Arts” credit, it can come from visual arts, music and theater. So my classes are basically electives. I’m not complaining about this, I’m just establishing the context for what I want to discuss. Only one of my classes is part of a sequence. Because of this, my classes are filled with an extreme age and skill diversity. I have freshmen with no art experience and seniors who have had three years of art and are in two other art classes this year all co-mingling in a single class.

This raises all sorts of questions. How do I grade equitably? Do I try to put their work in the context of their particular trajectory, or do I simply have the same expectations for everyone? How much can I expect a freshman to draw upon life experiences to create meaningful art? For that matter how much can I expect from the senior? How can I custom tailor my class to be relevant to my student’s lives when they are spread across such a broad spectrum?

This last question is one that is particularly pressing to me right now. In my Digital Imaging class (a class revolving around computer based arts) we finished getting the basic technical skills necessary to function in Adobe Illustrator. We have also discussed some of the key elements and principles of art and made several projects around combining these two types of skills into coherent work.

Then I decided to perform an experiment. I let them self-assign. I gave them links to some particularly wonderful websites with examples of all sorts of effective digital art. The work ranged from fine art to web design to movie posters. Then I asked them to think about what they would like to be doing with this program. They had to pitch an idea to me before they could start, but they were pretty free to choose a route that was exciting to them.

Sounds easy enough, right? But then it started. How do you establish a due date for such a project? Such varied skill levels, combined with such a wide variety of projects was leading to a huge discrepancy in the amount of time it was going to take each student. I suddenly had to improvise. For those students that were finishing more quickly, I had to think on my feet and present other problems that they could solve. How could they extend their project to a higher level?

If a student had designed a new logo for a band then I asked them “How would that look on a T-shirt?” What could you take from your design that you could use to unify an entire line of products; posters, hats, shirts, stickers? For other students it was simply suggesting refining their craft and building upon what they had started.

Something was happening though. I was developing an individual lesson for students that was appropriate and effective in having them synthesize what they had learned into a new project. And that’s when a scary thought went through my mind. Why doesn’t my whole curriculum look like this?

Well, I’ll tell you why. How do you manage due dates in such an environment? How do establish an objective rubric for each project (the significance of an objective rubric is for another blog)? How in the world would I ensure that everyone is learning the same core material while carving his or her own creative path?

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between. One thing I know for certain is that the reason I doubt this approach is because it breaks from everything I’ve ever known about teaching, where everyone is doing the same thing in the same time frame always. It also takes me even more out of the position of power. I become a facilitator. But I become a facilitator that has to be able to think 30 different ways in each class period to be able to serve my students.

I feel a little inadequate in posting this blog, because it doesn’t have answers. It really just starts to ask questions. Questions that once answered could radically shift the way my classroom looks. But I get the feeling that means these are just the kinds of questions that I need to be asking.