A few TATI thoughts from Erica:
First topic: artistic directives for students at 37r.
What I ask them to paint, how I ask them to paint, what demands I put on them to paint
such and such, or in such and such a way - as you all have noticed, I do not ask them to
paint anything in particular or paint any way in particular. It is a "just paint" directive,
move the paint around the surface, mix the colors as you wish.
One might think an art teacher should give more direction, structure, guidance. Am I
teaching art? What am I teaching? Am I saying art for children is a free-for-all?
No. Absolutely not. Painting is very serious work for children; they take it seriously and
so do I.
I would like to explain my pedagogical philosophy with this particular population at 37r.
It does not apply to all students with ASD, but has proven appropriate for most of the
students at 37r.
My intention is to let the art materials "teach" the students, to let the students learn from
exploring the art materials. My job is to set the students up with the art materials in a way
that will entice them to want to explore. Then I step back.
So my first level of concern is simply engagement, engaging with the art materials. This
starts with choice: choosing to take an art material from me when I hand it to you,*
choosing a piece of paper (size, color), choosing a brush (short, longer, wide bristles,
narrow bristles), choosing a paint color, choosing where you want to put the color on the
painting surface. All these choices, simple as they are, invite a student to begin to own
what he is doing.
* since it is not a desk that paints but a student, I don't drop art materials on a student's
desk, but expect a student to take them from my hand.
Another avenue of engagement is physical movement and physical attention - ability to
go back and forth, up and down, move to the corners and the center and the edges of the
painting surface, have eye hand coordination. Attention, and pleasure (which is
intimately connected to attention), begin in the body. If I ask a student to draw some
representative thing (a face, a flower, a house, a dog), attention moves out of the body
and into the head, away from sensori-motor pleasure. Sometimes I prompt a student to
paint a shape I have drawn someplace on the surface that will invite the student to look
up and reach, but I have drawn the shape, and shapes are the building blocks of art, so the
abstraction of representation is avoided (at least that is my intention).
This all said, more generically, it is my belief and my observation that when kids draw
and paint, they are perpetually making decisions; what might appear to us to be a chaotic
motoric assemblage of paint has often been generated by intentional and pleasurable
steps. The steps are practically invisible to us, except for the intense expressions we can
observe on the students' faces when they paint. Take a moment to notice students' faces
and bodies when they paint instead of their art products. What the painting "looks like" to
us is given an extra layer of what it means to the student when we notice the intense
engagement of his whole body when he paints.
Children, neurotypical or autistic, hardly ever need to be told what to paint. Needing an
assignment of what to paint is more a state of affairs with adults because we mistakenly
deem visual art to be primarily a visual product that hangs on walls. When the
developmental stage of a child's drawing kicks into the self-conscious age of "dawning
realism," students become more concerned about what their art looks like too, but they
still find their own subjects. Many of my students at 37r are not even at the pre-schematic
stage, when first representational attempts are of interest. But if they were, they would go
there and do that naturally. I would not need to give them subjects to paint; they paint
what they are ready to paint and want to paint. The fact is children simply paint - they
will paint with water, they will paint with white paint, they will paint with black paint,
they will paint over and over the same surface when it is already covered with paint.
Moving around a brush with paint on it is incredibly pleasurable. Mixing colors is
unfailingly intriguing. Doing these things is good.
Second topic: structure in this work.
Many people speak about the importance of structure and planning in this work, the
details attended to and the layers of adaptations of activities for a day's lesson. I think we
should talk further about this since the notion of structure is rich and positively iridescent
with layers. But to be simplistic and basic, there is overt structure and covert structure.
There is the structure imposed/prompted on the child as he works, people monitoring
what the child does, “teaching,” correcting, advising; this I call overt structure. There is
another structure, the structure of the environment we create; this I call covert structure.
The balance of these two structures is key to true learning (I believe). But with the
populations I work with at 37R, I believe our structure/structuring should be heavily
weighted to the latter. I feel I “teach” better if I manipulate the environment in which I set
the students to work rather than manipulate the students themselves as they work. This
means I try to create an environment so that the students want to work, so they have
freedom to explore and discover, so independent discovery can take place without my
prompting. Focus, excitement and pleasure is in their discovered self-discovery, and that
pleasure is central to learning. They become their own drivers, find the energy of their
curiosity. I see my job as to create appropriate stimulus-es that catch their attention, and
then give them safe materials to explore and react to these stimulus-es. Then I step
back....because sometimes our most important teaching moment is when we restrain
ourselves from interfering, from talking, from "teaching," when we just let a student just
work. If we have created a good environment for that to happen in, the student will
discover and learn and will enjoy it and be happy.
Sincerely,
Erica Rooney
©