Our printmaking class was a great challenge, and the DVS students crushed it!
In design we often say someone created a project from concept to completion, meaning you solved a problem from beginning to end. The students in class were shown a short video of the printmaking process. They had to come up with a creative solution and execute it entirely on their own, and the first challenge was finding inspiration from their personal experience. It can be unusual and uncomfortable for the students to be expected to take the time and make the effort in pulling inspiration entirely on their own to fuel their creative solutions, but they're absolutely capable of this. Even though this was an individual project, the class setting allowed them to discuss, tell stories, and inspire one another while they worked out their ideas organically.
On day one, they were given a theme, and told they had to make at minimum 3 scenes of a story relating form their personal experience of Christmas. They started with sketches while discussing ideas, exchanging stories, and giving each other feedback. They got their ideas out of their heads, and into the material realm. Next, they had to visually copy and etch their sketches into printing plates, translating 2D into 3D, which is very, very challenging. Working with new materials and techniques requires a great deal of learning, which develops hand-eye coordination and spatial intelligence.
It's at this stage when a teacher may realize how strong the effects of culture's promise of instant gratification is on children, and how important it is to give them opportunities to feel positive about working through their frustrations and challenges. Western University recently published a study that children's screen use went up during the pandemic to an average of 6 hours a day, and up to a stunning 13 hours a day. Will those numbers decrease to the WHO recommendations of maximum 1 hour, now that the norm has been increased for parents and their children?
When the most used daily object is a flat screen you only have to tap and swipe to get continuous instant gratification, how do you find the desire or motivation to apply yourself to other ways of attaining gratification? We can be sure without question screen time is stunting motor skills, creative thinking, and problems solving abilities. There is increasing scientific data that screen use is undoubtedly causing mental health disorders. The data is scant, and there is no definitive scientific consensus on the long term outcome of excessive screen use (we are simply talking about screen use, not digital content). Does that mean we don't need to act proactively to minimize potential and foreseeable harms? Absolutely not.
If a child can give their parent a drawing, and that parent can take a picture with their mobile device, upload it on the internet in a matter of minutes, order a beautiful set of Christmas cards that can be delivered to them by mail in a day or two at a low price, why should that parent pay a premium fee to register their child in class, drive them around in traffic multiple times, just for their child to learn an archaic method making the same thing? The availability and accessibility of technology makes it seem almost absurd to invest time and money in traditional methods of making things.
The reasons a parent would put their child in a class like this is because they are aware it may have an impact on their child's development and understating, and that it's valuable for the child's experience. The DVS curriculum is designed with projects specifically to combat the effects of increasing dependence and negative effects of technology and screen time on children, on the way they think, feel, and use their body. Aside from seeing something neat their child makes, the parent isn't going to see immediate outcomes or notice anything significantly different after one creative project. This is why there is a full homeschooling curriculum spanning the fall/winter semester for homeschoolers. Over time, activities like these accumulate and compound, the result is an interdisciplinary mode of thinking about the way we see and deal with the world around us, and it applies to everything the child does, and supports every subject the child undertakes. The DVS creative curriculum is a comprehensive and wholistic approach to supplementing any homeschooling curriculum, and it's worth every penny and every minute. S.T.E.M. may use multiple disciplines at the same time for teaching purposes, or be used in a way that people from different disciplines work together to solve problems, but it's this creative process being described here that is the actual process underlying the S.T.E.M. model. In the classroom, whether the projects are individual or group projects, is trivial, they work together regardless.
Once the planning and preparation for this project was completed, the students had to wait until their next class in the following week, to do their printing, which was another challenge for them. Though their hard work was done, they had to break for a whole week and wait to do the fun part! In the moment it was hard for them, they are used to instant gratification, but boy were they excited to get to work when they got back to the studio the following week. They learned the technique of rolling and applying ink, got to know the quirks of their plates and materials, created prototypes of their prints, and fine tuned them before making their final prints to turn into Christmas cards. They took stock of failures and successes, and learned to take the time to make assessments, and adjust their technique to improve their work to a standard of acceptance in the least, but aiming for excellence, to their own approval and satisfaction. It takes a lot of energy, patience and perseverance to go through a tedious process of multiple stages of planning and preparation, tweaking and adjusting, but when that first successful print comes out, there's nothing like the look on their faces. They might say something like "it worked!," or "I did it it!" In that moment they discover something about themselves and the world around them.
At the end of this two week project, the kids had made a full set of Christmas cards and envelopes to take home and give to friends and family. It was a perfect way for loved ones to participate in their accomplishment in a memorable way. Students learned that creativity is useful, worthwhile with good planning and preparation, and meaningful to them and the people in their lives. For parents, it takes a bit of investment, and some mindful planning to incorporate opportunities which combat the effects of screen time and the appeal of instant gratification on their children; the DVS curriculum provides this opportunity. Our printmaking project was a huge success in more ways than one, and it's just one sample from the full curriculum. We'll be doing it again in the fall/winter 2023/24 school year.
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