I have to keep a journal for my Anchor Subject Internship for my teaching program and I thought it’d be a good idea to keep track of it here, since it is art-related (as well as education related). Feel free to leave me advice/comments. Also be warned—it is LONG.
Context-wise, my internship is really just my job. I work at an art centre where I teach an art class for 6-9 year old kids in French. It’s awesome. I love it. It’s a little tough at times, which is where the journalling comes in. It’s an opportunity to reflect on what I’ve done and get insight from my site supervisor and my internship advisor on how to improve.

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Coming into my first lesson of the term, I knew that I would have a range of students at various stages in their French language learning. The ages on my attendance sheet ranged from 6-9 years old, meaning some of them may have just started French at school three weeks prior to coming into my classroom and others have been having French instruction for the past three years. This is the main challenge I wanted to tackle in my time here. It’s a challenge that’s taken me five lessons to make significant progress on, and I still don’t think I’ve done all that I can to level the field for everyone.

Let me start with what didn’t work. My first instinct was to just translate as much as I could for the students that didn’t understand and have them repeat the French words back to me. This didn’t work AT ALL. In my first class, I tried my best to clearly explain the style of Norval Morriseau and how to simulate his bold lines and bright colours using oil pastels. As I learned in art camp in the past, I was better off chunking the material into small steps we could all do together. So after explaining the project as a whole, I explained the first step of drawing a rough draft. I’m fairly sure I lost at least 4 out of the 6 students at the word “croquis” (sketch).  Throughout the course of the lesson, I found myself saying full instructions in French, then immediately translating the words to English for the confused faces I saw around the room. I knew this wasn’t helping at all. The students learned very quickly that if they just waited for my French instructions to end, I would say it in English. They didn’t even need to understand the French.

Lesson two went a little better. I was now five weeks into my Inclusive Education course at school and I was learning all about second language learners. I knew now that associating the French word to an action or an object helps the student retain information a lot more than associating the French word to an English one. So this time I made sure to use a lot of gestures and I made a point of everyone coming to my front table and having their eyes on me while doing demonstrations. We talked about silhouettes and horizon lines that day and I feel like they went home with some great work and those two extra words in their vocabulary.

Something to note at this point was that some of the students (specifically the younger ones) didn’t know the vocabulary of the classroom. Questions like “May I go to the washroom?” or, “Where are the scissors?”  were being cut down to the one key word of “Salle de bain?” or “Scissors?” (in English!). They just haven’t learned how to ask questions yet or how to say the words scissors. I knew from Inclusive Ed that we can’t assume they’ve learned these things at school or at home, even more so in a second-language atmosphere. This is something I haven’t fully addressed yet. I’ve translated the words, but I haven’t taught anyone question structure. I think I may write questions on a large sheet of paper and keep it on the wall or something.

The big change in my approach happened in lesson 4. I had talked to my ‘critical friend’ in Inclusive Ed for the first time that week. This is a strategy that Professor Shields asked us to try out, where we brought our problems to our designated critical friend who would help analyse the problem and suggest some possible solutions. This is a friend that isn’t necessarily going to make you feel better, but they’re there to help you teach better. My critical friend suggested I take control of the seating arrangement in the classroom. I could seat the older kids with a younger kid, so there’d always be someone nearby who understood the instructions. If the older kids didn’t understand, then I clearly wasn’t explaining very well. He was also the one to point out that my students are probably very visual, but I didn’t make much use of visual aids in my classroom aside from my demonstrations and sample work. Up until this point, I hadn’t even thought about writing new words down for them, I just said them out loud and had them repeat it, but the visual aspect of it, actually seeing the word written, makes a huge difference.

So that’s what I did. I’ve started to seat the older kids next to students who have trouble with the new language. I also started to give a short vocabulary rundown at the beginning of each project. My favourite example is lesson 5, where we drew birds with chalk pastels and talked about creating distance on the picture plane. At the front of the room I drew a table that said near and far and we talked about the qualities of each. Things that are close are clear, detailed and larger. Things that are far are blurrier and smaller in size. This mini-vocabulary lesson is designed to give the students the vocabulary to talk about what they’re making, be it with their neighbour or to me. This also gives them the words to ask me for help. These two seemingly simple changes have been very successful for me. Taking the extra ten minutes at the beginning of class to do that has cut down on half of the instructions I gave (Just the English ones!) and I find myself with more time to walk around and actually help with their artwork. That’s what we’re here for, after all. Visual Arts Mississauga is first and foremost an art centre, where I am an art instructor—not a dictionary.