Implementation of ‘The power of voice and brush'(SOI-IT-33)
My name is Valentina Savietto I teach German as a Foreign Language in high school in Italy. I teach to students in 2nd year of high school (15 and 16 years old). At the end of this school year, I aimed to present to them a creative activity. Which was linked to Art History too, as this subject will be taught in this class starting from September 2019. For this reason, this kind of learning scenario aimed to be interactive. It also helps in setting an introduction to the new school year 2019-20.
Why this learning scenario?
The Learning Scenario The power of voice and brush seemed to be particularly interesting. Indeed, it combines research skills (through the Europeana collections), language competences, as well as some basic knowledge about the main streams of European Art. Furthermore, it allows students to implement ludic learning through digital resources (Kahoot, Wheel Decide, Flipgrid). In addition, this activity also represented for me an introduction to the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) method, which is usually adopted in Italian high schools with students of terminal classes.
Implementation
At the end of May 2019, I implemented Katarzyna Siwczak’s Learning Scenario focusing on Germany contemporary art. I dedicated one lesson to this activity, and then students had to deepen the new content at home (autonomous learning). Firstly, I asked my students to think about the most important art museums in Germany and Austria, and where they are situated (brainstorming). Secondly, I guided them to define what contemporary art is. Then I helped them showing some representative Italian museums, such as the MART (Rovereto, TN) and the MAXXI (Rome) (orientation stage).
In the second step, pupils had to search on the Europeana website examples of contemporary art linked to German-speaking contemporary painters or museums (active learning through ICT). In the last part of the lesson, students had to discuss in small groups about the pictures they had found, describing them and speculating about the setting. This task was led by some given questions: “What does the picture represent?”, “What might be the artist’s aim?”, “When should this piece of art have been created?”, “For which audience was it meant?” (language competence).
In the end, students had a task as homework, in order to increase their awareness about the heritage of contemporary art in their own country and in general in Europe (problem-solving). This task consisted in summarizing all specific aspects discovered in class about contemporary art and organizing them in a map; each map had to show some semantic fields: painting, sculpture, video installation, sound installation, experimental art (robotic art).
Final outcomes
This learning activity allowed my students to activate many competences at one time, starting with language skills and basic art knowledge or personal experiences and moving to digital skills and learning to learn. To sum up, pupils mastered a further key competence, which is the cultural awareness and expression, a fundamental one in the perspective of a united European identity.
Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario?
The power of voice and brush created by Katarzyna Siwczak
Did you find this story of implementation interesting? You might also like:
- ‘Take the Quiz: How much do you know about women who pioneered Europe?‘, implemented by Reyhan Gunes
- Implementation of ‘Using arts to reconstruct a volcanic eruption’ by Angela Colli
- ‘Vintage VR‘, implemented by Ryszard Markowicz
Do you want to discover more stories of implementation? Click here.
The featured image used to illustrate this article belongs to the public domain. Click here to find it.