Although this artwork is not a graphic illustration it does represent the student body I work with daily at the alternative high school. This visualization relates to my ecological pedagogy because I am seeking to devise a unit of study that will navigate various accommodations through material culture studies. Prior to design, I was thinking about case study models in relation to brain structures and the waves of intensities I encounter with special needs students during the day. Behaviors often fluctuate depending on mood and situation and particular students are often unmanageable. I chose to include a rough, gritty texture to create a interrelationship between subjects. The six forms in the painting represent students, floating and intangible to reach. My color choice was dependent upon gender; purple and pink to represent female students and blue for male. My research will contain no identifiable information as I am using pseudonyms which is why I wanted an abstract representation of the human form . I used wax and salt within the organic shapes to obscure the form and create textures. The gold spray paint incorporated was a very conscious decision in that I was thinking about the moral community as big part of this work. Often, the term disability implies labels. For fear of discrimination, my students choose not to discuss their disability due to the stigma attached. The gold paint represents my belief that “disability” does not imply a problem but a disadvantage. Gold stands for existing various talents just distributed in different ways. Students I am focusing on within my research are in fact very advanced artistically.
I currently am exploring the emotional dynamics of my students which is why my map is not very organized but rather chaotic. I have also been thinking about artists, Christo and Jean Claude who inspired this artwork. “ Surrounded Islands” for Biscayne Bay Miami, completed in 1982 was a project that resonated with me. I feel that “wrapping” alters the fragile, and temporary state of the object. Thus, the objects take on new identity. I want this visualization to speak about isolation within the institutional expectations of the IEP.
Brette,
This is interesting. I find the way you are writing about your students and the relationships among them. This process works well to theorize the complexity of differing learning abilities and how some students may feel in their learning environments. I’m curious if you could further develop a coding system to illuminate the types of learning abilities in relation to the medical diagnostics provided as labels and work to address the complexity of these 2 ways of knowing your students? I’m also curious if you had intentionality behind both the scale of each representation and relationship to each other? Are there 2 students that interact with each other more or is this more about commonality? Or was it happenstance that this was the compositional layout? If so work toward even more complex systems of representation that accounts for the visualization in its entirety. Also is there a system behind the color coding found in the gold, slate blue and the white in-between background?
Keep pushing these visualizations and I encourage further iterations to clarify some of these complex issues.
Kevin