28 January 12.30-1.30 Group Room 2, EHU LRC/Library, Ormskirk, Lunch provided, all welcome.
Shirley Brice Heath, Shelby Wolf
Focus in Creative Learning: Drawing on Art for Language Development
Literacy, v39 n1 p38-45 Apr 2005
This article asks what happens to the learning of young children when they work regularly with a professional visual artist in their school. Through Creative Partnerships, a national programme initiated in 2002 to bring creative professionals into schools across England, some school children have had the opportunity for sustained project work with artists. Examined here is the context in which children (ages 4, 5, 6 and 7) worked one day a week during the academic year of 2003-2004 with Roy Smith, resident artist in Hythe Community School. Key to the children’s drawing, painting and talking was close focused attention on details of three-dimensional objects, portraits, still-life works and their own creations. Smith’s conversations with the children routinely included three and four-syllable technical terms, biographical details of artists’ lives and comparative critiques. Within several months, the art of the children reflected understanding of concepts such as foregrounding, and they showed confidence in working with problems Smith set up for them (What do you think would happen if…?). Particularly important here is the combination of manual and linguistic work that demands attention to detail, receptive understanding of complex terms and processes, and familiarity with the analytical and sequential thinking needed to identify and solve problems.
Proposer: Jeff Adams
The academic reading group is for staff and research students who enjoy reading and who would like to share their thoughts with others. It is intended to encourage and support new thinking and writing for publication and research. People from all subjects and faculties are welcome, and nothing more will be expected than the pleasure of debating a text as a group. Last year saw our first series of meetings and it has proved to be especially helpful for becoming familiar with authors and theorists in a supportive group atmosphere.
One text is chosen for each meeting and it will usually be contemporary and relevant in some way; it will also be short, in the form of an excerpt, journal paper, chapter or short story. Hopefully people will be inspired to read further should they find the text useful or interesting. There is no requirement for all texts to be overtly ‘academic’, and some texts chosen for past sessions have been extracts from novels, web pages or graphic novels. Members of the group nominate the texts for future sessions.
Where the texts do not already exist in digital form through the electronic library collection, the LRC have helpfully agreed to digitise copies of the texts for you to download and read, and are usually available from the library catalogue by performing a module code search for REA101. Staff will have to log in with their library number and pin, whilst students log in with their student number and password.
All meetings take place on Thursdays, 12.30-1.30pm, Group room 2, ground floor of the LRC at Ormskirk. Lunch is provided. All welcome.