The Emergency Board- A Journey of Discovery

Intro: This blog post looks at one strategy the art department employed to help the S3 students with the process of completing their IGCSE coursework.

Context: The first part of the IGCSE course requires students to create eight A2 boards detailing the development of their art project, this is their coursework. Students have to choose their own theme for this project, develop their ideas, experiment with materials and then produce a final piece at the end of the project. They have approximately one year to complete this coursework. In S3, students can feel intimidated by the boards, how to lay them out and how to produce the work for them, this can result in them becoming perfectionists about their work and losing confidence, it can also result in them becoming less able to experiment with materials or take risks.

Here is an example of one out of the eight coursework boards from a current S4 student:

Strategy: In order to counter this ‘fear’ of the boards, Marita developed ‘The Emergency Board’, whereby S3 students are given quick fire tasks using a range of interesting and unusual materials along with cropping, collaborative drawing, using viewfinders and enlarging their images in order to quickly produce a board.

This process takes them out of their comfort zone, enables them to experiment quickly with different processes and materials, it also enables them to consider the background, foreground, scale, movement and composition of their pieces. (To encourage students to develop their work from the pencil drawing on white paper stage.)

Example of ‘Taking a line for a walk’ with black ink and large paper, then using viewfinders to capture elements of the piece to be taken to the next piece:

Example of students’ collaborative drawings, they each drew over the previous person’s drawing, encouraging students to be less ‘precious’ with their work, particularly observational drawing:

Outcome:

Reflection: This strategy was a good way to ‘break-up’ the IGCSE coursework, give the students confidence, work collaboratively and have some fun with the art-making process. It is always important to take a step back when delivering an extended project and not be afraid to do something different for a few lessons.