Subject: What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects?

Posted by Sharon Villines on 6/7/2010
In Reply To:What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? Posted by Tony Phuah on 6/7/2010

Message:

On Jun 7, 2010, at 6:23 PM, tony phuah wrote:

> Your artist example let me come out another question - is teaching/
> learning modelling like teaching/learning arts (no orderly way to
> teach/learn, very depends on learner characteristic)?

To some extent, I think it is probably how modeling is taught. Some students need an intuitive sense of the whole before they can focus on details. Others need the details in order to understand the whole.

There are two ways that figure drawing has been taught, for example.
One stresses gesture drawing, observation, feeling the figure you see in your body. You draw standing up with a freely moving arm or sit on a drawing bench with the drawing pad propped up in front of you so you can move freely. Poised for action.

The other way teaches rules about figures. Proportions like the length of the nose in relation to the ears, the size of the forearm in relation to the hand. First you learn these ideal measurements from a book, then you modify them based on the unique characteristics of your subject. The emphasis is on careful pencil drawings and using the pencil to measure the distance between the nose and the upper lip.
This is often what you see in films where the artist is holding up a brush handle or a pencil like a ruler. This measurement is thought my some to be the most significant measurement to capture a likeness. Get that right and you can hardly go wrong.

The interesting thing for me is that I was taught that the first way, gesture and feeling, were the only honest way to draw. When I began teaching I discovered that some students can't learn that way. They can't understand the exercises, don't know what to observe or to feel, and have no sense of using charcoal or paint freely. Or drawing standing up.

My students were doing independent study so I had two books that I assigned with exercises and projects -- one based on gestural drawing and one based on classical drawing. If a student didn't understand one, they loved the other.

The same is true of three dimensional drawing and painting and the flat two dimensional drawings usually referred to as primitive. I had two students from South America who were literally unable to draw three dimensionally. One insisted on trying and it took her 6 months to finish a 10 by 12 still life. She said it was the hardest thing she had ever done and she would never do it again.

Until I recognized these two styles of approaching drawing and seeing space, I thought some students were just unable to draw.

Modeling is probably the same way. The problem in specialized schools is that one kind of student is attracted to them so one style becomes the only one recognized. Chicken and egg, of course, but not completely. I was teaching in a liberal arts and sciences college for adults so my students had already developed career paths and many preferences based on experience. They were formed. After many years, I was able to predict how a student would approach drawing, even approach stepping into my office, based on their major study or work experience.

Specialized, highly selective schools attract certain personalities.
No one in any art school or class I ever attended taught classical drawing. It was the academy of the 19th century, wiped out by the Impressionists. But the people who saw the world in classical terms were still out there, just not in art school.

That's what i fear might be happening to systems thinking and system dynamics -- one approach is emphasized to the exclusion of others.
Some people just won't learn it.

Sharon