How does one tie cultural heritage to their personal artworks?
On the heels of our German Expressionism unit we discovered as a class that several students are from a German Heritage. While this isn't surprising given our area of Ohio, it did lead to an interesting conversation about students who strongly identify with their heritage and those who do so less. Nearly 30% of one particular class is made up of students who have lived in other countries, and most of these students highly identify with their cultural heritage. In one day all students were alive with discussion about what things they "claim" as their heritage and culture. With this conversation, we decided to explore the idea further in our next unit.
To begin with, we played a class favorite: a kahoot quiz. This set of quizzes can be found here:
In the first quiz students were asked to identify what country or culture a specific artwork was from. For example, a sarcophagus from Egypt, a marble statue from Greece. The artworks were the expected, almost stereotypical works one would expect to see. Not surprisingly, the students did very well guessing each country of origin. Next, we played again, only now with contemporary examples of artwork. The students did decidedly worse this round, despite the quiz containing all of the same countries/cultures as answers. This led into a class discussion about what artworks are stereotypically "from one place or time," and what characteristics might have been carried over from one to the other. From here it was a quick leap into the idea of cultural heritage.
Students spoke with their families to discover what country of origin, culture, or people they feel the most connected to. Many of my students who have lived in other countries were ecstatic to be able to share parts of their heritage with the class. We had impromptu presentations about Algeria and Morocco, and conversations about Mexican music and politics. Students shared traditions from Vietnam and Korea, and one group dove into a rabbit hole of Iranian architecture.
They then learned about tangible, intangible and environmental aspects of cultural heritage. Each made lists for each category, making sure they included some new information as well as things their families may already connect with. From here it was all about making the connections between their own personal art style or interests and that of their cultural heritage.
At first some students struggled with not simply copying an art form, but how to meld the two together. Students toiled through days of sketching, coming up with new ideas, changing them, and a good deal of creative problem solving before determining the final form their project would take. Here are some of their results.
In the end this was a highly successful unit on many levels.
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