Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Friday, November 11, 2011

Interdisciplinary artist Alexandre Arrechea was born in Cuba, and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. He was a member of the art collective Los Carpinteros, until he left the group in 2003 to pursue his career as a solo artist. His work often deals with loss of privacy, fragility, memory, and the failure of control and power.

Arrechea has participated in numerous group exhibitions at such venues as the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Shanghai Art Museum, China; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany. He represents Cuba at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011, and has also exhibited at the Havana Biennial 2009 and 2000; the 2005 Braziers International, Oxfordshire, England; the Venice Biennale 2005; the Liverpool Biennial 2004; the Shanghai Biennial 2002; and the Sao Paulo Biennial 2002. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; and Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba, among others. Arrechea was recently selected to be the Spring 2013 public sculpture artist for the Park Avenue Mall Project. He lives and works in Spain.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful

"Keiko Fukuda is the highest ranking woman in the history of judo. She is the last living student who connects back to judo founder, Jigoro Kano. Fukuda will be 98 on April 12, 2011 and is an amazing inspiration to all."

Sensei Keiko Fukuda still teaches at the dojo she founded at the corner of Castro and 26th St in Noe Valley. Her motto: "Be gentle, kind, and beautiful, yet firm and strong, both mentally and physically."

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Benchy

One of the completed benches from SFAI

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Tree Wolf

On site milling from Berkeley's Tree Wolf . All of this wood is from one 30 year old Redwood that was cut down on SFAI's campus, and is being used by my new class "sustainable studio" to make benches for the school. The milling process is pretty insane, a jig is attached to a chainsaw that runs horizontal through the lumber. According to the wolf, the wood will take 2 years to dry.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

David Goldblatt

Photographer David Goldblatt, recipient of the Honorary Doctorate at yesterdays graduation commencement at SFAI.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

AG

Arthur Gonzalez at work during his demo in the studio today, pulling out a 30 minute head built directly in the Native American tradition with a Puki. More about Arthur HERE

Monday, March 28, 2011

How to Raise the Status of Teachers

Monday, January 31, 2011

New Beginning

The new recycled clay pile for students. We'll see....

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Work!

Tool room drawing at the student desk. Looks like someone needs something to do. See me for details.....

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

U.S. to Send Visual Artists as Cultural Ambassadors

By KATE TAYLOR

Published: October 25, 2010

New York Times

In recent years the State Department has relied on performing artists to act as cultural ambassadors, sending dancers and musicians around the world to show people that America is more than just Hollywood movies, McEverything and two drawn-out wars.

But under a new $1 million program being announced this week, the Obama administration is planning to expand its cultural diplomacy programs to include visual artists like painters and sculptors, who will be asked next year to create public art projects in 15 foreign countries.

“To me, visual artists are just as capable as other artists of capturing a dialogue with people,” said Maura M. Pally, a deputy assistant secretary of state who is overseeing this two-year pilot program.

The new program, known as smART Power, will be administered by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which was selected from a dozen institutions to choose the artists. They will be sent to places that include Pakistan, Egypt, Venezuela, China, Nigeria and a Somali refugee camp in Kenya.

The museum will put out an open call for proposals early next year; the 15 artists will be selected by a panel of experts put together by the museum. Holly Block, the museum’s director, said she had no preconceived notion of what projects the artists should undertake. But as an example of the kind of proposals she was anticipating, she mentioned a work by Pedro Reyes, a Mexican artist, in which he melted down guns turned in as part of an anti-violence campaign and turned the metal into gardening tools.

She called the program “a fantastic opportunity for people who are interested in pushing the boundaries of art making.”

Cultural diplomacy, once a staple of American foreign policy during the two decades after World War II, has experienced a resurgence since 2001. That year the State Department’s cultural diplomacy programs had a budget of $1.6 million; in 2010 the budget is $11.75 million. The budget increased 40 percent between 2009 and the current fiscal year. (It is not expected to increase next year.)

This year the department initiated a program that sent three American dance companies to do four-week tours in Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, and South America. Ms. Pally said that the program, which was administered by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was considered a success and would be repeated and expanded next year.

The Bronx Museum, with a total annual budget of less than $3 million, might not seem an obvious choice to run a national program. But the institution, which primarily collects Modern and contemporary work by artists of African, Asian and Latin American ancestry, has a strongly educational focus and substantial international connections for its size. The museum has an international artist-in-residence program and under Ms. Block it has established relationships with individuals or institutions in Cuba, Brazil, Senegal and Egypt, among other countries.

Asked in interviews what would constitute success for the smART Power program, Ms. Pally and Ms. Block offered slightly different answers. Ms. Pally at the State Department focused on whether local people’s perceptions of the United States changed, and Ms. Block of the museum more on whether the artists were able to complete their projects. The museum will hire an outside consultant to conduct a formal evaluation of the program.

Of course, as decades of culture wars show, art and Washington politics don’t always mix. Even in the heyday of cultural diplomacy, the 1950s, the government’s efforts to promote American art abroad occasionally ran into controversy at home. According to Michael L. Krenn, the author of “Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War,” the State Department canceled international tours of two exhibitions following charges that some of the artists were Communists or had Communist sympathies.

And sending artists, as opposed to just their work, abroad to represent the United States was considered particularly risky, Mr. Krenn said in an e-mail, because artists “were not easily controlled.”

“The very nature of their profession meant that they always felt absolutely free to express themselves,” he continued.

Perhaps with this in mind, the State Department is reserving final approval over both the artists and their projects.

“We just want to make sure that there aren’t any issues,” Ms. Pally said. Asked to elaborate, she declined to name any specific possibilities. “Oh, who knows?” she said. “You never know, but you always want to reserve the right to have a final overlook.”

One artist who Ms. Block said might put in a proposal is Judi Werthein. Born in Argentina and based in Brooklyn, Ms. Werthein received threats from anti-immigration groups after an art project she did in Mexico in 2005, in which she created special sneakers and distributed them to people in Tijuana who were planning to cross the border into the United States. Each pair was equipped with a compass, flashlight, painkillers and insoles printed with maps of the border area.

Ms. Werthein said she thought that smART Power sounded like a great idea.

“I think it’s very important for American artists to travel abroad, to get a different view of the world — it’s really essential,” she said.

But when asked if she thought that the program had the potential to change the image of the United States, she said no.

“American image in the world will change through policy and politics,” she said.

“Believing that we’re going to leave this image,” she continued, “and it’s going to make them happy, and we’ll look good, it’s underestimating their intellect.”

Another artist who has worked abroad, Paul Pfeiffer, said he thought the program had the potential to change people’s views of the United States, but only if the artists were given sufficient freedom.

The best projects aren’t “necessarily going to take the most obvious form that somebody in the State Department might imagine,” he said.

He noted that in his own experience working abroad, it was also important to be able to convince people that he spoke and acted for himself, not for the United States government. Particularly as a Fulbright fellow in the Philippines, he had to tell people over and over that he wasn’t “officially a diplomat of the U.S.,” he said, “just for people to be able to trust that a really straightforward and mutual conversation could happen.”

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: September 6, 2010

New York Times

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

The advantages of this approach to studying can be striking, in some topic areas. In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied.
A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.

“When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,” said Dr. Rohrer. “That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.” With mixed practice, he added, “each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.”

These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

“With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

That’s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle alters that property: “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.

But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

“Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”

Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people’s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,” is evident in daily life. The name of the actor who played Linc in “The Mod Squad”? Francie’s brother in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”? The name of the co-discoverer, with Newton, of calculus?

The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.

None of which is to suggest that these techniques — alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above — will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.

“In lab experiments, you’re able to control for all factors except the one you’re studying,” said Dr. Willingham. “Not true in the classroom, in real life. All of these things are interacting at the same time."But at the very least, the cognitive techniques give parents and students, young and old, something many did not have before: a study plan based on evidence, not schoolyard folk wisdom, or empty theorizing.