ACTION RESEARCH

During my first year at MUIDS, each teacher was asked to create a student-centered goal and implement activities aimed at achieving this goal within their classroom. As all of my students are ESL learners, I felt that utilizing critiques in art class as a way to support their development as learners of the English language would be a good starting point. I focused that first year on working to develop means of incorporating ESL teaching techniques, such as the utilization of sentence stems, into the conversations shared within the classroom. I furthered this practice during subsequent years by challenging myself to also find means to support the development of the student’s writing, speaking and listening abilities, as well as their use of the language of ART, through ESL activities corresponding to those objectives explored within the art curriculum. In other words, rather than creating an environment during critique where students felt like, “this is the day we practice our English in art class,” I wanted for them to feel like critique was an activity where we utilized English to help us explore the objectives we were currently investigating through our art practice.

The three areas of the curriculum I decided to focus upon through my action research were interpretation, audience engagement and collaboration.

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