Passive Advocacy

Consider how your hall displays of student artwork can advocate for your visual art program. What information can you share with viewers? How can you engage them and lead them to look at the art in a deeper way? How can you share what your students learned in order to create that artwork? What are the key details you want your stakeholders to notice?

Here are a few ideas to consider adding to your hall displays next school year:

Include the standards you taught as part of that project.

You are teaching students important things; show administration that you ARE important because you are teaching lessons that fit into the Utah Core Standards.

Give a brief description of the process students went through in their artmaking to achieve the final goal.

Keep it simple and brief, and consider your audience. Are you writing it for students, parents, or administration? Add some images of the process if you can.

Include examples of the students’ process.

Include examples such as student sketches (or photocopies of their sketches), written mid-process critique reflections, or anything else that is relevant to their art making process for that project. Just one or two examples if fine, to give viewers an idea of what students went through to achieve their final product.

Include images of students actually working during class.

If you can remember, take some images of students actually working on the project during your class, and print those off for your display. It gives the audience an exact visual of the important moments in the process.

Take the opportunity to educate the viewer.

Consider printing out a few of your key slides from your lesson to share with viewers, so they might also learn something about the topic. This will encourage them to look at the art in a new way, with a deeper understanding of what the students learned.

Ask questions.

Ask the viewer some open ended questions, to get them considering the important aspects of the project themselves. Engaging the viewer will make them stop and consider their own response to the prompt, while also looking at the student artwork in more detail.

What would you add to this list? What do you do to passively advocate for your visual art program at your school?

Guest Editor: Melissa Deletant