As much as I love teaching digital media, I also love getting my hands dirty. 

There can be no question that schools must incorporate digital media into their art curriculum.  Exposure to graphic design, digital photography, and video, exponentially widen a students’ opportunity for careers in the arts. 

However, fundamental to the arts are experiential activities.  Research has found that the creative centers of the brain are more active when we are creating in the real world, than when we are looking into a monitor and working in virtual space. 

The process of making art with our hands, the process of building something from nothing, is something that cannot be replicated with a computer.

In my foundations curriculum, students are introduced to a wide variety of media; painting, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture.  Here they find various ways to express themselves through art.  When these students enter the IB program, they are expected to develop their own connections for the social, cultural, and historical contexts of their work.

Sample Project: In the Popcorn Project, students take a cue from surrealist techniques like ‘bulletism’ and find images in abstract shapes: in this case, popcorn.

Students are free to respond to this stimulus in their choice of medium and technique.  Christina’s project (shown at right) remains abstracted.  It suggests inspiration from artists like Dali, Bacon, and Bosch, yet remains uniquely her own. 

To see another IB Art event, the 100 Kuai Project, please see the Getting Out page.

Sample Project: As part of a global collaborative project, students in the IB Year One Art class interpret and share their experience of their city with students around the world.  Our part of the project, Share Your City: Shanghai features all of our positive, negative, and unique  impressions of the city.