{"id":472,"date":"2019-10-16T16:05:38","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T16:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/?p=472"},"modified":"2019-10-16T16:05:38","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T16:05:38","slug":"the-art-of-the-draw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/uncategorized\/the-art-of-the-draw\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of the Draw"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Monday, the students in my Introduction to Native and Indigenous History course read Julianna Barr\u2019s William and Mary Quarterly<\/em> article<\/a> about mapping borders in the region currently known as the American southwest.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fantastic article, full of amazing detail about the ways in which Spaniards, the French, and Native people variously conceived of mapping, borders and territory, but it\u2019s a lot for intro-level students to process.<\/p>\n

So I had everyone draw their response<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Buffalo, red-tipped sticks (akin to visas), and lost Spaniards<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The students got into a pair groups, and I gave each group a large, poster-sized post-it and access to a host of markers.\u00a0 My instruction was to render what they\u2019d learned visually.\u00a0 I explicitly said that they could not simply write words on their piece of paper and call it a visual representation; they had to come up with a way to convey information without using words at all.\u00a0 I gave the class about 40 minutes to make their visual aid, and floated between groups nudging them to consider things that they perhaps hadn\u2019t on their own.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A fully populated southwest, with the French and Spanish at the very periphery of the Native world<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There were a lot of reasons I wanted to do this class activity.\u00a0 First, it\u2019s fun.\u00a0 Making posters \u2013 especially when it\u2019s clear that the point is not to be a great artist, but simply to communicate ideas \u2013 is just plain fun.\u00a0 Second, the activity prompted students to retrieve knowledge.\u00a0 While most groups did pause to look at their notes at some point during the process of making their poster, most of their work was done without looking back at the article.\u00a0 The practice of retrieving knowledge helps things to stick in our memory, and it has the added bonus of boosting self-esteem \u2013 students realized they do<\/em> know the most important points of what they read.\u00a0 Lastly, by applying their knowledge \u2013 taking it and transforming it into images \u2013 the information sticks.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
The world to Spanish eyes<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The posters were great!\u00a0 None were exceptional works of art, but they all conveyed the central points of Barr\u2019s thesis, and did so in inventive and different ways.\u00a0 But what was just as important was what the students struggled to convey \u2013 the fact that boundaries and borders existed in oral tradition for Native people; that Native people spoke those things into existence, and while they could draw a map for the Spanish if the Spanish needed it, they themselves did not.\u00a0 This tied back to a lot of conversations we\u2019ve had about what historians too often leave out of writing Native and Indigenous history, and to our discussions of space and time existing in ways western cultures don\u2019t often acknowledge.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Native people encounter Spanish explorers<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This sort of project crops up in all my classes at some point.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter what the text is \u2013 having to take the information from within it and apply it to a new task always helps my students to better comprehend the reading and analyze it more deeply.\u00a0 It works with primary sources as well as secondary, and you can make the process as extravagant or as stripped down as you want.\u00a0 (Students could draw on their own in a notebook; students could also get scissors and colored paper and glue and other materials to make a poster.)\u00a0 It\u2019s also a great way to do formative assessment \u2013 you can quickly see which points students have grasped and where they may have misapprehended something.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A reminder from one student team<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once the posters were finished, we gathered as a large group and processed what was challenging about the exercise and what came easily.\u00a0 Everyone got to see everyone else\u2019s work, and there was genuine interest in how people had interpreted the text.\u00a0 It made the 70 minutes fly by, and I\u2019m looking forward to today\u2019s crowd-sourced recap of Monday\u2019s activity (another act of retrieval).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Monday, the students in my Introduction to Native and Indigenous History course read Julianna Barr\u2019s William and Mary Quarterly article about mapping borders in the region currently known as the American southwest.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fantastic article, full of amazing detail about the ways in which Spaniards, the French, and Native people variously conceived of mapping, borders and territory, but it\u2019s a lot for intro-level students to process. So I had everyone draw their response The students got into a…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}