After years (and years) running literacy interventions and supporting GSCE Englishes, I have nothing to do with that now in my role (obvs literacy is everyone’s job but you know what I mean). I still like to read around and engage with English PD and pedagogy – something I’m increasingly aware feeds into how pupils work in art, particularly as our KS4 haven’t done English Lit this year and it turns out I reference literature analysis skills A LOT and they really can forget how to do it #BringBackPoetryAndShakespeare. Anyway, I often pick Englishy sessions at conferences and yesterday was no different as I was speaking at the Teaching and Learning Leeds conference held at The Grammar School at Leeds.
Chris Curtis used his #TLLeeds23 session to speak about the importance of inference in reading instruction and what his school have done to approach this. Lots of schools have launched into obsessions over vocabulary and are increasingly looking towards fluency, but Chris argued that for students to be genuinely engaging with what they read, we really need to be focussing on inference.
One of the problems he highlighted was that a lot of reading is about the exam – ‘here’s the question, read the text’ stuff – and this changes the way students read. Those getting grades 2 and 3 are merely skimming and scanning for easy answers, not actually reading the text. It struck me that it’s exactly the same for my grade 2/3 art pupils – they’re skimming and scanning when they see an artwork. What they need is to develop their inference skills for ‘reading’ art in the same way they need to for reading texts.
Chris was clear that he wasn’t just talking about reading in English, and offered ways to adapt the theory and approach in other subjects; but I’m not talking about reading text in art. Reading text does look different in Art and I’m interested in how to make this better, but inference in art doesn’t just come about from texts, it’s central to evaluating pieces of art themselves, and I wanted to think about using Chris’s ideas about approaching texts to support students with making inferences about artworks.
So let’s go through some of the stuff Chris talked about and where I think it could work with art engagement.
He used Anne Kopal’s 2008 work on Effective Teaching of Inference Skills for Reading (pdf) to give an outline of the different types of inference he would be talking about.
What is being connected?
Coherence inferences – within a sentence, like switching to using pronouns once someone has been named; they need to know who the pronoun refers to.
Elaborative inferences – drawing on their own experience or prior reading to make connections between sentences
In analysing art, coherent inferences could come from identifying different features of an artwork, describing individual elements. Elaborative inference would involve drawing on knowledge about an artist, when a piece was made, other works by the same artist perhaps.
Where in the text?
Local inferences – sentence or paragraph level inferences (coherence as above, connecting actions to causes etc).
Global inferences – looking at a text as a whole and using local inferences to identify overarching themes.
In art, this could be the difference between focussing on particular elements or techniques within a piece, and combining these to evaluate how these make up the work as a whole.
When in the reading process?
On-line inferences – drawn automatically as a student is reading, in the moment.
Off-line inferences – drawn after reading, through retrieval or when engaging with further information.
For art this might be about an initial ‘reading’ of an artwork and making connections to further artworks, or even themes in their subjects that add to their interpretations and understanding.
Approaching the text
Chris went through several examples of how to approach a text by activating students’ prior knowledge and scaffolding the process of reading a text to explicitly make inferences. He talked about tethering their knowledge to simple ideas such as whether something might be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing, based on what they already know – rather than try to overload them by pre-loading them with too much pre-teaching. He discussed his process of first summarising (local inference) before looking at the whole piece (global inference) when approaching fiction texts, and how they change this for non-fiction to identifying feelings (to force inferences) before thoughts (avoiding personal opinion).
His example from geography used an image as a stimulus and moved through a sequence of initial thoughts, to slowly revealing pairs of key vocabulary words to build knowledge (coherence and local inferences) before introducing supportive text-based material (elaborative inferences) and then asking pupils to elaborate and rationalise their conclusions (global inferences).
The use of an image as the stimulus was an obvious connection for me with art and offers a guide for how it might work in practice.
Let’s use something we’ve all seen before and consider how a student might approach it.
My grade 2/3 student would perhaps select it for a project on ‘time’ or ‘dreams’ or maybe something like ‘change’ if we’re getting more interesting. They’d see the clocks, try and copy them, do a print, take some photos of pocket watches… It’s OK but fairly formulaic and definitely ‘skimming and scanning’. Now let’s try and tease out some inference.
1. What can we see? (Local inferences into global inferences using elaboration)
- Several melted clocks with a branch and cliffs and water in the background, could be a beach.
- The clocks look like old fashioned ones so it could be an old painting.
- One clock on a bare tree. Bare trees are often dead.
- Fly on one clock and ants on another. Flies hatch on dead bodies, ants crawl over things looking for food.
- If it’s a beach, the white thing could be a beached whale. It looks like it has a large closed eye.
- Perhaps it’s about death and the clocks have stopped and life is fading into the distance.
2. Introducing vocabulary pairs to develop explanation.
- Cool – Warm
- Portrait – Landscape
- Foreground – Background
- Shadow – Light
- Distorted – Accurate
3. Introduce supporting (text?) information
- Movement: Surrealism – it’s not real, the things don’t necessarily belong together?
- Title of artwork: The Persistence of Memory – it’s in the mind, a dream, a memory?
- Year: 1931
4. Rationalising/ Elaboration
This is where they might move away from their more literal interpretations for their projects and start to open up some more sophisticated themes…
- Time – running out of time, memories, past, present, future
- Dreams – hopes and dreams paused through fears, nightmare, reaching for the light, landscape that is a portrait of someone’s mind, post WWI shifts in dreams
- Change – hard to soft, light to dark, life to death, hopes to fears
As a project moves on, the on-line inferences are used to develop off-line inferences and built into project themes. Maybe they’ll use this to make off-line references to something else.
Finally, we use (as Chris talked about) their deeper use of inference to promote complex thinking, hypotheses and supposition – eventually to the point where we promote macro-thinking and they can discuss flaws and contradictions within and between pieces.
It all seems pretty obvious, but it’s really hard to unpick a process that you find so automatic. Making your thinking visible is a crucial part of modelling, and I hope I’ve shown that the framework Chris and his colleagues have developed for doing this with text is adaptable for thinking about it in art. I’m certainly going to put some more consideration into how this can be supported, and I’ll certainly keep going to the Englishy conference sessions.
I’m still on the come-down from last week. I’m sure it’s not just us but everything always seems to speed up for the last few days before a holiday. I think I’m successfully avoiding the ‘funk‘ but I do find it difficult to turn off school-mode.
I don’t have any sort of work to do before next term and one of the only good things to come out of single status is I no longer have any guilt over the long holidays. I have however spent a fair amount of time so far reading about education, I know I’ll end up doing stuff on the school website in the next few weeks and at half eight yesterday morning I was reading the leaked assessment without levels report. Despite that I’m not really missing work.
The thing I am missing though is art. 2014 was a brilliant one for the work the pupils produced and the best results the school has ever seen (a bit about that here). This year has been just as good and even more ambitious, and I’m really hoping for the boys’ sake it’s just as successful.
We don’t tend to produce the sort of work that springs to mind when I think of GCSE Art. There’s no ‘torn up newspaper background’ or ‘bright watercolour dripping eye’. Nothing wrong with that of course, we just don’t seem to do it. The room is set up with pupils in their own space and all their work up on boards that we shift round for each lesson (pro of four kids max at a time). We pop on art documentaries if they’re getting on and this year ‘Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow‘ about Anselm Keifer and some brilliant clips of Bernard Aubertin burning stuff willy-nilly have gone down a storm.
Many use the art room as a sanctuary (even staff if I’m honest). The art they produce really does reflect their state of mind. Kev’s bottomless art knowledge means we can 
always chuck ideas at the boys to get them thinking and we can cater for different characters – the one that likes repetition and filling an IWB size piece of paper with thick, bold shapes; the one who likes detail and shuts himself in his own zone; the one obsessed with technology that distracts everyone in the room by never shutting up. We try to find something that fits. Last year the moderator seemed impressed at the massive scale of work produced and we really let them go for it this year (regretted it slightly when it came to displaying it all in our tiny room though).
Featured artists this year included Richard Serra, Tony Cragg, Basquiat, Rachel Whiteread, Kurt Schwitters, Mira Schendel, Gunther Uecker, Anselm Kiefer, David Nash, 
Jean Tinguley, Arman, Bridget Reiley and even Eric Carle. There’s loads more but I can’t remember them all just now. Before we broke up we trawled the used books on Amazon and bought a load for the art room. There’s some brilliant stuff there. Kev’s well into the Zero art movement at the moment so I expect we’ll get more things like Uecker and Arman next year.
Kev and I have developed a way of working that really works. From the set up of the room to the way we mark. This year we’ve put together an assessment scheme for KS3 using our GCSE mark scheme that aims to get the pupils working on mini projects and hopefully KS4 ready. I’ll have to ask at some point if I can share what 
we’ve done with the internet.
The argument for the place of creative subjects in the curriculum is played out regularly. I’m not going to bang on about it now. I do know that art has an important place in our school. Pupils who struggle to get a grade in core subjects are thriving in art and we will fight at every turn to give each of our pupils this opportunity. We’ve got a Richard Serra quote on the wall (heads up inspirational quote fans) ‘Work comes out of work’. All the kids know it, all the kids use it, and if you at any point decide to come and visit us, the chances are you’ll leave the room knowing it too.
I’ve been part of our school’s GCSE Art department* for a couple of years now and this year I’ve got all the Year 10 and 11 groups. Me and Kev (art tutor) have developed a good routine of lessons and marking, the kids get to experiment with a vast amount of techniques and processes – a hell of a lot more than when I was at school in the olden days, and they are producing some amazing work. I know they are producing amazing work because last summer we got our best ever GCSE results. Not only did we get the best results ever in Art (A, B, C, D), we got the school’s best ever results and the school’s first grade A GCSE in anything ever. We were unbelievably proud.
*it’s pretty much just the two of us
My own exposure to art has increased immensely – I’ve always had an interest and we trek round galleries with the best of them, but Kev’s knowledge and passion is infectious and I’m feeling it for the better. Every now and then I’ll dabble in some arty project or other and these are happily dotted round the house. At the moment I’m filling the house with rusty teabags.
There is a definite influence of old, rusty, textured stuff in the art at school. Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, and so many more, all work their way into the boys’ projects, and during a research trawl I came across the work of Jennifer Coyne Qudeen. I fell a bit in love with her rusty tea bags and decided to have an experiment. I don’t drink tea but this hasn’t stopped me – we didn’t have any rusty washers either but we do now. Anyway. Having told a few people about my teabags, I thought the easiest way to communicate my endeavours was a quick description.
I started by finding some rusty stuff. We’d got the odd nail and bits of old fence in the garden but for pressing it’s better to have something flat so I bought some washers. After a bit of a mooch online I decided to get zinc plated rather than galvanised ones. The plating is thinner and it’s easier to get the washers to rust. I scuffed the surfaces up a bit and put them in with some other wet, rusty stuff Howard had rescued from burning. It didn’t take too long to get some colour going and the more I’ve used them, the better this has got.
For tea bags, I started by using the few we have for visitors and the odd one I took from hotel rooms etc. I discovered that the best ones are Twinings as they don’t have a seam at the bottom and are easy to fold out into a full sheet. I’ve experimented with different flavours including some herbal teas and there are occasional differences in the reaction of tea and rust. If I could only go with one, it’s probably Assam at the moment, but there’s not a huge difference.
The paper I’ve used is Khadi Handmade Paper. I bought it because that’s what Jennifer Coyne Qudeen shows on her blog. I got a book and A5 sheets. I do like it – it soaks the colour well but the moisture doesn’t destroy the structure. It’s nice to rip, but only on one direction, so I may try different papers once I’ve run out.
My method is fairly simple. Once I’ve got a used tea bag, I open it out and layer it on paper with the washers and any other rusty material. With another sheet of paper on top, I weigh it down with whatever I can find. Mostly recipe books, but I’ve used all sorts as long as they’re heavy.
After at least 24 hours I separate the layers and leave it all to dry. The tea bags take a while to dry out, but when they’re ready I open them up and get rid of the tea (I’m sure at some point I’ll try using that too) and lo, I have lovely flat bits of fabric stained with tea and rust.
It’s taken me a while to decide what I’m going to do with all these tea bags and bits of paper. I’ve bought some thread that I think compliments the different shades of tea and the blue-black marks of the rust so I think I’ll try sewing some of them together. I’ve put together some bits into a couple of arrangements but I’m going to keep having a play with them – as long as Howard doesn’t mind the growing pile of tea bags, I can keep coming back to them and trying out new things. I’ll write a part two when I do!
Art isn’t up there with the biggies like English and Maths when it comes to targets, but it has an important place in what I do and in our school culture. Pupils who have never thought of themselves as ‘artists’ are achieving success and it’s really interesting to see how some of them use art as an outlet. In a school where all the pupils are boys with emotional and behavioural difficulties, a strong, macho element is ever-present. Art allows our pupils to be creative and explore cultural perspectives previously closed to them, alongside the football and the motor engineering. Our ‘A’ grade promised us before left school that he’d visit Venice one day and send us a postcard. We’re holding out hope.
Impression That I Get 