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Sallie Wolf's avatar

My comment relates to "thinking with children."I teach art workshops on drawing and watercolor and journal keeping. For years I taught these workshops in the local schools, mostly to second graders. When I first began teaching these workshops, I experienced them as a big interruption to my own creative endeavors. Then I had the breakthrough to incorporate my own art into the teaching process. I would show the students the beginnings of a painting. (They would ooh and ahh, but I would point out the places where I didn't feel satisfied or felt it was unfinished.) I'd bring the piece back the next week and show them what I had done to push the drawing forward. This accomplished a number of things. First, it transformed my relationship with the kids from being the teacher/expert to being a colleague, an equal. I was actually demonstrating the advice I was giving to the kids--work with what you have; you can't erase your "mistakes" but you can change them. Also, that while you don't know it from a finished piece, my drawings are never what I first envisioned when I'm about to start. There's the idea and a blank piece of paper. Then there are the first marks, and then you have to put aside your vision and work with what is on the page. And you only get one piece of paper. You can turn it over and start again if you think you've made a mistake, but that's the only sheet of paper I'm going to give you (we worked on artist-quality watercolor and drawing paper which would hold up with lots of reworking and was too expensive to waste.) My teaching workshops began to feed my own creative process rather than interrupt it and I learned to take my own advice in a deeper way. And I often found the student's art to be inspiring and innovative in ways that were unexpected. As I helped them see their own work, not in terms of what they had wanted to do, but in terms of what they had done, that was very exciting and interesting, I learned to see my own work in more objective terms. I certainly learned as much from the kids as they learned from me. I've taught the same workshops to adults, and I find that working with kids results in many ideas that adults don't generate, mostly because they already think they know what art should be, while kids are more open to the process itself.

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Ann Collins's avatar

I love mind maps. One thing that helps me even more is a *moveable* mind map. I write my central question or idea in the center of a large sheet of drawing paper. Then I’ll take small pieces of paper or Post-it notes and write individual concepts on those. I can arrange and rearrange the small pieces around the central idea, adding and subtracting, until my thinking becomes clearer. Something about using my hands to move the pieces around helps me think.

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