Leah Beuchley’s talk on Art Craft and Technology

1. What does Leah Buechley mean by “epistemological pluralism” and how does it relate to your (prior) knowledge of art and art education?

My understanding of “epistemological pluralism” based on the video was about how the examples shown can not only be turned into larger computational systems, meaning things done on small scales can become the big picture. I think an important part of epistemological pluralism is how these projects also contain rich possibilities for learning.

1. How might you use each of the 3 techniques Buechley shows in your future art classroom? (Paper, sketching, folding)

As Leah Buechley talked about, the three techniques allow many possibilities to learn. I think a self-guided exploration would be a good way to introduce the paper and the sketching circuit. That worked out really well in class. I think the folding one might need to be a little bit more teacher led. I would like to try it myself though to see how complicated it might be to understand it. Buechley brought up how  these projects can bring in different people who may not be very interested in art. A big part of teaching is engaging students, which in my experience working with kids, that is hard to do when students have no tied interests to what they are working on. I think if I were to follow up with a project after introducing these, it would be fun to gather materials from outside and try to mesh that with circuit building. I feel like I have always separated the idea of nature and technology and would want to bring those two worlds together.