Last week was spring break. After the previous two weeks of this chaotic transition to remote teaching and learning, it was a welcome break for all of us I suspect.
I did give my studio class one small spring break assignment, however, which was to trade projects for a day with a peer, and work on one of their colleague’s design projects.
I have written about trading projects before on this blog. Typically I would do this as an in-class activity on the first class day after spring break (which would be today). The learning objectives usually center on the idea of seeing this studio project through someone else’s eyes. I want the student to see the challenges of their own creative work through a new lens, or frame of reference, by working on a project that is not their own. This year, the in-class project is obviously not possible. So I attempted to simulate this virtually over spring break.
The students had to communicate their peer critique through a series of drawings or a small model, and then call their peer partner to discuss their design critique.
I still want students to see this project through a different lens. I also want students to begin to identify in their peers work the following questions:
1) What is working?
2) What is not working? (or needs to be reconsidered?)
3) What still needs to be developed?
These questions are, intentionally, the same questions that each student needs to be asking themselves about their own work, as they develop their projects over the next five weeks of the semester.
This year, however, in the midst of this crazy social isolation experiment, I had a much more basic human centered goal for this exercise. I wanted my students to reach out and talk to each other. So part of this assignment was to call each other and talk about the projects they traded. Simply just talk to each other, about design, or anything else.
I tried to encourage the class to have human conversations, and be less socially isolated, because I am worried about my students. I think this move to studio ‘work from home’ has been difficult for them on multiple levels. (I will write another post about their challenges in the future.) So I had students work on someone else’s project, and I wanted them to then call each other and discuss their peer critique, and hopefully encourage some real human interactions with their studio peers. I mean, just a few weeks ago they were all hanging out in studio with each other all the time, and now this support group has been suddenly been disconnected. (And it happened so fast)
I hope this helped the class begin to adjust to this new normal of ‘remote’ studio.
Seeing the students interact with each other at least gives me hope. (Although not everyone participated, which is a concern)
The peer critiques so far look promising. I always find that our students are better at critiquing each other’s work than they are their own. It is hard to learn to be self-critical.
Here are some images from this year’s spring break virtual ‘trading projects’ experiment.
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