by Shelley MacLaren
First, a proviso. My classes are not studio art classes. I do not pretend for even a minute to teach students to draw, and I do not assess their drawing skill or their improvement in drawing for any of my classes. Nonetheless, the assignment that I’m most excited about including in my syllabi is a sketchbook.
In his review of Susan Hrach’s Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning from late August’s The CraFT, Steve Raulston emphasized the power of sensory experience and surprise in learning.
The sketchbook assignment harnesses the benefits of both. It is also an assignment that requires students to slow down, and to make careful and specific observations. It gives them creative license and a personal means of engaging with the material. It underlines connections between class material and their own lived experience. It incorporates practice in both understanding visual information and communicating through visual means. As an almost incidental benefit, it provides thorough documentation of students’ ongoing engagement with the class.
The sketchbook runs through the entire semester. In response to prompts in the syllabus attached to particular class days, students complete a drawing, or set of drawings, or, when preferable, a creative written response, that connects to class material, approximately once per week. Alongside their drawing, they are asked to provide two or three reflective bullet point observations. What did they notice or understand differently as a result of the process of observation and representation?
I first used the sketchbook in my FYP class “Building Place,” where engagement with places and buildings in and around Sewanee made for an obvious fit, and parallel to the reflective writing used by many faculty members in FYRP. Since then I’ve used the sketchbook multiple times in ArtH365: Modern and Postmodern Architecture, assigning elevation drawings, rough floor plans, and details from buildings on campus and in the Village each week. In that class the sketchbooks encourage students to think about how they experience buildings, and how to understand representations of buildings. It is also intended to help them attend to echoes of the iconic but far flung examples studied in class in the built environment we inhabit every day – postmodern details in Gailor, the Brutalist massing of Cravens, the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Chapel of the Apostles, and the New Urbanist nostalgic branding of the peaked roofs and color palette of the Village.
ArtH323 students sketched All Saints’ Chapel as we considered cathedrals – pretty straightforward. They’ve mapped their own home towns to think about landmarks and associations, and drawn their city halls.When we read excerpts of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular), they described the slang they hear in other places, but not in Sewanee, and vice versa. The week we talked about foundation legends we visited the narthex of All Saints’ Chapel to unpack the “historical” windows. For their responses that week I invited proposals for interventions and new windows over the doors. The week we read Cennino Cennini’s Craftsmans’ Handbook, the prompt asked them to go outside and find a material with which to make marks and try it. To make the many personifications we’ve studied more vivid and meaningful, I asked them to think of a contemporary virtue and how they would represent it so that they could see it, understand it fully, and embody its characteristics in their own behavior, or a vice so hideous they would flee it, and avoid embodying its traits.
In all my classes I have found that the sketchbook accomplishes multiple purposes:
To draw something requires slowing down to look and play out the process of observation, and then to wrestle (for most) with translating that information into representation through the hand. They must not only slow down to attend to visual information, but are then responsible for communicating what they have observed in a visual representation. The bullet point reflections prompt analysis of the results of the process.
It’s an activity that is low stakes in terms of grades assigned to each sketchbook page or individual prompt, but that requires students to carve out some time and quiet attention each week. They must stop and be still, and to engage with a question or topic related to class creatively. It makes a space, in ways that I suspect most activities we ask of them do not. It is certainly very different from the exams and reading and seminar discussion I ask of them otherwise.
It is playful, and even joyful. The prompts, even the most straightforward of them, give students license to make creative and personal choices about what to draw, and where to place their efforts and attention. Twice each semester I ask them to share the sketch they consider to be their favorite or most insightful with their classmates in a quick exhibition. The class acts as a jury and votes to award a prize for the best drawing. Those exhibitions are fun, but also offer the students a chance to share their drawings with one another. The best examples serve as models for the rest, and the performance for their peers raises the stakes. Each time I have been impressed and surprised by most of the examples shared, and everyone in the class gets to be impressed and inspired too.
The sketchbook assignment underlines connections to be made between class material and students’ own experiences. This has been especially useful for a class focused on the art and architecture of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy. Creating meaningful prompts to which students can respond from their own lived experience has underlined and enforced the relevance of what can seem like esoteric material, and encouraged prolonged consideration of parallels and connections.
It documents their engagement with class material. I’ve never been particularly good at monitoring attendance, nor at carefully evaluating contributions to class discussion in the moment. With the pandemic I’ve also wanted sick students to feel free of any pressure to come to class just for the sake of an attendance or participation grade.
The sketchbook serves beautifully to document students’ engaged participation with class material week to week – whether or not they have not been present in class. It serves as an “engagement” grade, 15% of their grade overall, a number I used to divide between attendance and rather general impressions about their contributions to class discussion.
The sketchbooks are a joy to grade. It is very fast to look at drawings, and easy to assess their effort. What I look for is serious effort to respond to the prompt, and I grade them prompt by prompt. As with an exam answer or a short writing assignment, a solid effort earns a B, an especially thorough or insightful and creative answer earns an A, a cursory answer a C or lower.
Most students’ sketches offer at least conscientious, and more often above-and-beyond, effort.
The sketchbook assignment offers play and surprise, time to slow down and observe carefully, and space for students to engage with class material from a personal and creative perspective.