High School Critiques

Last tuesday was the final day of my internship at Rondout Valley High School. During this visit, my partner and I partook in a critique in the advanced ceramics class. The project which was being critiqued was a body art project where the students made a cast of their face and their two arms and then used underglazes to paint them in a way which expresses themselves. The format of this critique was the typical kind where the student talks about the piece and then classmates comment on the project. This type of critique was criticized in the former reading, Critiques in the k-12 Classroom, stating that students can feel pressured and anxious when they are put on the spot. My partner and I observed this happening. The assignment was to make the mask and arms as one piece, but one student's project was not visually coherent. The student painted one arm black with a rainbow on it, one arm speckle brown with a white fox on it, and the mask bluish green with a koi fish on it. The teacher asked the student how these pieces go together, and the student kept saying that they were all things that represented her. However, the student said that she does not know how they visually go together. The teacher kept trying to get the student to think of a way to connect all of the pieces visually, but the student kept saying that she didn't understand how they could. After class, the student ended up crying.