Creative approaches to creating strategies for online teaching and learning—rethinking content delivery to students, keeping a high level of creativity, discovery, curiosity, and engagement.
I teach Printmaking—the artistic process based on transferring images from a matrix onto another surface. It is in a variety of hands-on studio art classes where students learn numerous techniques (relief, intaglio, and lithography, and screenprinting) that use diverse materials, specialized tools, chemicals, and heavy equipment such as printing presses and exposure units. Our curriculum allows students to develop skills with a wide variety of experiences in a robust community environment. Community is the main ingredient to our pedagogy and our studio. We, printmakers, are masters of collaborations!
The challenges presented by COVID-19 were many: How can we recreate the studio experience in the safety of our homes? How to deliver content to students, keeping a high level of creativity, discovery, and curiosity? How to keep the engagement of our students? How to recreate community while in isolation?
Hand Printing: Turing the Kitchen Into a Studio
Summer 2020 was supposed to be very exciting for our students traveling to a study abroad to Brazil! With travel plans canceled and in pandemic lockdown, I faced the challenge of developing a new course—a printmaking course delivered to students at their homes and dorms.
To find the answer, I went back to a question our graduating students often ask—how can I make prints after graduation? With the pandemic and class format changes, I decided to embark on a creative answer to this question and developed Handprinting: Turning the Kitchen into a Studio. In the face of remote instruction, I asked students to bring the art studio into their homes—their kitchens, specifically. Using everyday kitchen materials and cooking analogies, I designed printmaking courses to teach students how to make prints in a low-tech, sustainable, and non-toxic rudimentary studio.
The motto is to help students find ways to make prints without being tied to a traditional printmaking studio’s equipment—but in their kitchen. Students examine less-common adaptations of conventional printmaking techniques, problem-solve, and adjust the methods to their creative needs in this course.
This course introduces critical thinking in a low-tech environment. It helps students understand how to use recycled and non-traditional materials to create prints that carry intentional messages with unusual markings.
To develop this course, as any good chef, I started from scratch! I deconstructed my curriculum and pedagogy and put it together as an online class. This was my first full-on online experience!
The interest in the class was enormous. I opened additional seats to the summer course, and due to its success, I am once more teaching this course during Spring 2021.
This online class is getting even better. During Fall 2020, I completed the Teaching Online Foundation Course, Track-A, and I am currently working with CIRT in developing this course for a Quality Matters (QM) review.
New Space, New Tools
Both students and I had no choice but to assess online the artworks created during the summer course. Students had to learn additional essential tools such as documenting artwork at home. While on campus, students used the copy stand and scanners in our Digital Lab. I created videos to instruct these various digital tools— and students learned to resize and upload images to Canvas and Media to Studio. I keep adding new videos as more tools and apps become available during the pandemic.
Due to canvas storage limitations, I taught students how to create blogs, a space where they journaled their processes and experiences. Students uploaded images on canvas with permalinks. Therefore, the actual photos and archives reside in the blogs.
Besides resolving the storage space issue, there are additional benefits to using a blog. Students can access their content in a chronologic format beyond the end of each semester when they lose access to their Canvas courses. They can also conveniently share with their community outside the academic setting and add content once the course is closed.
With the blog, students expanded their digital footprint and digital abilities. They routinely posted their work and processes in this space and shared it with their familial, social, and professional network.
As their peers and I visit students’ blogs, we get a holistic sense of each project—and the entirety of their work, critical thinking, problem-solving—and final product. The use of a blogging platform helped with the class’s flow tremendously and created a space outside Canvas where the students archive, network, and develop a sense of community.
From the blog, students uploaded images to a discussion board named Make and Share (shown below)— a space that mimics our studio working tables and our critique walls—a place where students share comments, questions, and tips.
Combination of Perspectives and Approaches
The physical changes—moving from our studio to the digital realm—was a ground-shaking experience for our students and ourselves. To make this transition seamless, I adopted a structured system with a repetitive pattern that could bring our students comfort and clarity. Each module in my courses repeated the same structured model, with the same predictable content and expected outcomes. Adopting this model was an excellent tool for our students’ better productivity, creativity, and emotional stability.
Structured Modules
New modules are always launched at midnight on Sunday. Assignments are always due at 11:59 PM on a specific Sunday. Each module contains seven items: 1. Course Overview, 2. Presentation, 3. Demos, 4. Artist Visit Video, 5. Collaborative Presentation, 6. Discussion Board Make and Share, and 7. Digital Portfolio—Time Capsule.
Course Overview
Each Course Overview page describes the module’s objectives, outcomes, and timeline. The course overview also lists the projects in detail and the module’s workflow. Each week, according to the class progress, the module’s workflow is updated. Making this information easily accessible helps students always to be prepared for class and to map their progress. Students always know where they are and the expectations in each class.
Presentations
My in-person classes meet twice a week for almost three hours. Each new module content is presented either on a screened presentation or around our worktables and presses.
I created slide and video presentations of tools, techniques, methods, and results for my remote instruction courses. Students have access to this material once the modules are launched, and I use class time to review this content, either individually, in breakout rooms, or as a collective experience. I ask students to post questions, comments, and insights directly to the videos and presentations—and together, we address all items until the group has a clear understanding of the material and projects.
Demos: Recorded and Live
I created a collection of video demonstrations of each technique, plate making, and printing methods addressed in each module, giving students all they need to develop hands-on projects.
During our class meetings, I also present a live demo to address additional perspectives, questions, and clarifications. Immediately after class, live videos are uploaded to the respective module. The access to these videos—recorded and live—guarantees that all learners will access the information at their own time and pace—and all collective questions and comments are documented and available.
Artists’ Visits
I often express to my students the importance of “Community” —not just as a group of people inhabiting a particular place; in artistic terms, it means so much more: Sharing, Cooperation, Creative Osmosis. In my online classes, I have the opportunity to bring the students to our community of artists, makers, and educators. Some artist visits live; artists present their work, and students can ask questions about techniques, subject matter, or professional matters. Some are video interviews, where I pre-record artists’ presentations and at the end interview the artists.
After watching the videos, students are prompted to a sketchbook assignment to reflect on the artist’s work, experience, and narrative. Students also create sketches based on the artist’s work—and additional sketches based on work they would like to make after being inspired by each artist.
At the end of my courses, students write an essay examining the diverse artists’ practices researched and explore cultural and historical aspects that influence the creative process.
Collaborative Presentation
Students often utilize library research to examine various artists and art-making practices within a technique or historical period in our hands-on studio courses. In the online classes, I flip the classroom and provide students with an opportunity to research together, bring a wider variety of voices and perspectives, and collaborate. I create a Google Slide presentation and produce prompts with rules for each research—and students select imagery related to each module’s topic.
Students understand that information creation is a process. After viewing practices and procedures, we discuss either in breakout rooms or collectively the importance of creating intentional artwork that carries a message and is delivered with creativity and originality. While generating their work, students recognize the creative process’s capabilities and constraints and understand that research and practice are the way to mastery.
This collaborative presentation method decolonizes the syllabus, brings the students interest, an inclusive perspective, and voice. It helps to dismantle the power structures that carry legacies of inequalities in knowledge production.
Make and Share
Printmaking is among those artistic endeavors that have the power to transcend boundaries and help us learn through transformative experiences. As I introduce students to printmaking, I illustrate the endless ways a print can be created. Students become engaged in printmaking as a tangible process that illuminates, through practice, the fact that, in life, nothing stays the same. We all learn that there is a dialectical process within printmaking where the order of elements can sometimes create different results.
Students recognize that in Printmaking Process makes Perfect, and the process gets better when everyone participates in its development. In our daily in-person studio, everyone watches each other’s projects’ progress—and joins in the problem-solving exercises that make the techniques I teach so exciting.
To substitute the studio’s working areas—including our critique wall—I created a virtual space: Make and Share—a discussion board, a digital space where students post their work in progress and comment on their peers’ work in process.
In this virtual space, students have an opportunity to check their peer’s development and progress, post comments, questions, and share tips! This discussion board mimics the interactivity we have in our studios and gives us all a sense of our dynamic community.
In my classes, either in-person or online—I gather an authentic, diverse Community of learners—artists in the making—and together, we create, share, collaborate, and create work that pushes art-making boundaries.
Time Capsule
Each module includes a presentation, demonstration, which prompts students to research and develop projects focused on specific techniques and methods. Students encapsulate the process and their practice in a digital portfolio at the end of each module, illuminating all they learned.
With each module, the digital portfolio—Time Capsules—grows with additional sketchbook exercises, projects, and reflections. All of this research and production is scaffolded, built brick-by-brick until the final capstone project. At the end of the semester, students have projects created in this class documented and ready to be shared with our academic and artistic community.
This experience helps our students to be prepared for the upper-level Senior Projects course, where students create their capstone work and digital portfolio. It is the combination of digital and material practice that students present in public venues—galleries, institutions, and community spaces. These digital portfolios also help our students seek exhibitions, sales, jobs, and graduate schools.
Diversity and Inclusion
In our hands-on studio classes, students work simultaneously on developing their visual work while creating narratives that explore the content and context of the work completed. The process of creating visual artworks and narratives requires students to exercise openness, honesty, vulnerability, truthfulness, and trust. In my courses, it is s essential that students establish connections with their peers and instructor from the beginning of each term; that sense of belonging allows for the development of each student’s visual work and creative voice.
To create a comfort level where students feel an environment of trust, support, and a sense of belonging, during our first Zoom session, I request students to add pronouns and name pronunciation (when needed) to their Zoom and Canvas profiles. With this simple act of embracing everyone’s identity, I create a safe space in the class recognizing everyone’s diversity and inclusion. On my course home page, I introduce myself, my practice, and research in a video—and display the Safe Space sticker—the same one I have on my office door.
Instructor Presence and Communication
How to recreate the physical presence and interactions in the digital realm? I start by creating an instructor presence video for each of my classes and detail what students can expect, goals and outcomes. I also detail our tools for communication and my turnaround for your response to emails and grades. In these introductory videos, I also address what is expected of my students to achieve the highest success level. In these detailed videos, I discuss materials, tools, and equipment we will use during the course. Usually, I launch these videos three weeks before class starts giving students ample time to purchase materials and communicate with me if any questions arise.
Communication is essential to me—so I make myself available during and outside class. I post comments to all graded assignments and respond to emails within a 48-hour turnaround. I post an individualized comment addressing student’s accomplishments and giving directions for future growth to each grade. To emphasize appreciation and close each module and experience on a positive note, I create a recorded comment at the end of each module to the class, expressing my gratitude for their time, commitment, hard work, contribution, and presence—and bring excitement to the upcoming module.
Also, I ask students to set up two one-on-one meetings during the semester. Students set up appointments on the Canvas calendar for drop-in conversations to address any issues about this class, their academic life, or anything else they find important to share with me.
Innovation in Research: Caster Printing
The move to online teaching brought a unique challenge to printmakers. In printmaking, the use of equipment, tools, and chemicals is essential. I use a low tech combined with a high tech approach to circumvent the material’s issue. Still, as we moved to remote instruction, printmakers worldwide struggled to find a substitute for the printing press—an expensive, heavy piece of equipment that we rely upon to make intaglio and litho prints.
In June 2020, during the pandemic crisis and the sudden move to online teaching, I developed a research to find low-tech, affordable, and accessible methods of printing and editioning intaglio, relief, and litho plates and blocks at home. To recreate and substitute the printing press, I used a 3″ polyurethane rigid caster and adapted printing methods to transfer imagery to substrates. I produced a video and shared it on YouTube. As a result, thousands of printmaking professors and students watched the video and reaped this innovative method’s benefits.
Since I published the research online, I have been invited to present this researchat several conferences, lectures, and panels. In these Zoom presentations, participants have an opportunity to experience a step-by-step demonstration and ask questions about this research.
Perspective: Blended Learning
It is exciting to recognize that in my classes, either in-person or online, I gather an authentic, diverse Community of curious learners—artists in the making. Together, we create work that pushes the boundaries of art-making! The production of excellent work did not stop even in the most primitive conditions, while our studio was reduced to a work table and laptop screen when our printshop.
We all tried and replicated the quality of our teaching. Still, there are so many aspects to working in person in our studio that we all miss! Some mystique comes from the physical space, the use of renaissance equipment, and tools. The presence of one and all students simply generates the other magic. Lots of experiences that belong to the sensory realm are not translatable online. We will all be happy to get to the place of magic and mystique.
Doubtless, much of the knowledge acquired during the pandemic will move back with me when we return to in-person classes. The deconstruction and reconstruction of my curriculum and pedagogy gave me many lenses and unimaginable perspectives, paraphrasing lessons from the kitchen—it concocted, fermented, distilled, and brewed—a renewed teaching style. Who knew there was so much that could be improved, done differently to embrace more efficiency and efficacy to my teaching? I have gained so much in times that so many lost so much more.
Moving Forward
There is no better group I would choose to go through a pandemic—but our students. They are resilient, gentle—caring survivors. During the worst of these trying times, I have asked them to print in their dorms, kitchen tables, or their parents’ garages and porches. They worked hard—and recognized that I work harder to bring our studio experience and community to their bedrooms and living rooms. I asked them to Make and Share, think about reciprocity and generosity—and act upon it. They routinely contributed to each other, sharing their experiences, images, tips, comments, and advice. These exchanges promote safety and community growth and help students achieve higher standards and remarkable work quality.
Teaching and learning during a pandemic is a challenging task. As we move forward and face new Beginnings and Endings, there is so much from this experience that I will bring back with me to our studio. After so much discovery and adaptation, I will never be the same educator. I learned much from using various technological approaches and advances—apps and tools. With all and all—the most remarkable deed I will bring back to our studio after the pandemic is Gratitude.
During this demanding time, I invited students to learn the processes of making prints, find meaning, and engage in important questions about our relationship with the world, nature, information, and one another. I invited students to be ready for wonder! And they astounded me in each chance, any turn, in every step!
I believe students and I emerged from these times with a better sense of our work and creative voice. The practices we collectively experienced changed us all—and moving forward, it will help us internalize our dreams, actualize our Gratitude, and make peace with the uncertain times we live.
