Last week placement and session evaluation
WC 4th Dec 09
Only the one day this week.
Attendance has been pretty slack for the last week or so and the Foundation degree students I was all set to assist with in the afternoon had made it pretty plain that they wanted to be left to get on with their projects and didn't want tutorials or sketchbook reviews. No issue there. They all work hard and can be trusted to get on by themselves so we left them to it.
In the morning I took on my second fully prepared and taught session at Barry, this time for WJEC foundation.
On this occasion as well I have to note how much time I put into prepping the session. The brief was to deliver a 90 min - 2 hour Adobe Illustrator workshop. Now I think that rather than just playing aimlessly with controls it's nice to show students how control work towards an established outcome, so to this end I spend most of Monday designing, preparing and testing a small illustration which I would have the students create along with me. I also prepared a small help website which I gave out the address to at the end of the session so that the students could reflect on what we had covered in their own time.
The website can be found here if anyone is interested : http://www.andrewgreendesign.co.uk/tutorials/Illustrator/02-illustratorFlys.html
The idea was to keep the subject matter fun and to keep the illustration simple enough that I could get a handful of students to complete it in 90 mins or so. The planning of this session was very much easier than previous ones as I've spent a lot of time with this group and know them and what they're interested in quite well. Even though attendance has been slack for a week, every one of the WJEC foundation students wanting to specialise in graphics and even one specialising in fine art all turned up for the session and we're keen to be involved (6 students in all). This was very gratifying!!
The session went very well. I tried to adopt the question and answer approach I'd used in the InDesign session and again it worked well. The students were engaged and interested. They all were able to follow along with only minimal help from myself. They all worked with some of Adobe Illustrator's fairly complex concepts and managed to keep up with the session really well. With only 6 students, it only took a moment to walk behind each (our graphics lab at Barry is very well spaced and it makes this kind of thing easy) and make sure they were where I wanted them to be at any point. At the end of the session each student had a completed illustration finished to a high standard and looking as it should (although, as with any type of drawing each was a little different from it's peers).The anticipated and desired outcomes of this session were:
- Develop an understanding of some of the things Adobe Illustrator can do.
- Appreciate some of the ways in which Illustrator differs from Photoshop and be able to recognise situations in which it represents a preferable option.
- Understand how vector images differ from rasterised or bitmap images.
The session achieved these objectives. The main objective, 3 was not something the students understood at the beginning of the session (I asked them) and was something they'd completely got to grips with by the end (again, simple Q and A
ascertained this). Again very gratifying!!
If I need to teach this session to students of this level and a group of this size again I'll not find much to change in how I planned and conducted this session. However it's pretty group specific as most workshops are. With more students, even 3-4 more, the session would have been so much more difficult to manage as much more time would have had to have been spent observing progress and helping students when they fell behind. Even with the most dedicated and engaged group this would mean the session would have to take much longer to teach to get to the desired point of having each student finish their illustration. The same workshop would work fine for the Foundation degree group as they are only slightly more advanced in their studies than WJEC Foundation and so this session could easily be used for them as well however BTEC groups are larger and less able. They would struggle with this session and although the general format and session aims would work okay, the illustration subject would have to be considerably simpler for them to generate a sense of achievement from the session.
When this session ended a number of the students thanked me for showing them around the programme, they said that they thought the session was very useful for them and that they would be trying out more work in Illustrator. Fantasically gratifying!!!
I really enjoyed this session.