Week Five

Days of Demonstrations

The first few weeks of class are spent on demonstrating how to manipulate media in a variety of ways so students can then make choices on how they would like to apply those concepts in their own work. I find this time to be some of the most fun and also some of the most frustrating. 

It is fun for me to see students dive into media and work with tools in ways they may have not thought of before. It is frustrating for students to understand that these are experiential learning exercises and not meant to be final products or projects. Many are not used to experiential learning practices that ask for them to play around with ideas; they expect to be given direct instruction and have that outcome be counted as the application of learning. 

As I work with students more and more, they will begin to see that these exercises are an important tool for gaining understanding and that how they choose to apply the exercises learned in their own work will be the real demonstration of the learning happening in class. This gap is sometimes hard to get students to see past, but it is something we will be working towards closing as the semester continues.