I am highly interested in continuing my research and resource development for the First Peoples’ Art and Artefacts For Learning website. The website suggests ideas for teachers to use art and artefacts to teach to make cross-curricular connections with Aboriginal culture. The framework for each lesson plan on the website is centered around visual literacy. Teaching children to be visually literate is becoming increasingly important because of the number of visual images children are exposed to everyday through technology, and it is important to teach children to be critical thinkers when visual images are presented to them. Each lesson plan is based on a three-step process of evaluating and becoming critical thinkers of visual information. The lesson plans follow Ann Watts Pailliotet’s ideas of ‘deep viewing’ which is a process that occurs in three phases:
1. Literal observation
2. Interpretation
3. Evaluation/application
This framework was chosen as it is an easy model for teachers to use to help learners move from explicit to implicit learning, which is reflective of their personal and critical connections to visual information. An article explaining Pailliotet’s model can be found here. An area that I would like to focus on this term is including lesson plans that connect Aboriginal artefacts with Mathematics. The website that I hope to continue to cultivate can be found here. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.