Well I have completed my first day on placement at Halesowen College in the Art and Design department and I have already got something out of it. I will be shadowing Jim (James) Griffin with his 3D Design groups and I will also be able to conduct fairly informal interviews with Jim for my professional modules to find out about how he got into teaching in post-compulsory education. He has taken over the leadership of the course after working there for around 7 or 8 years.
I was working with Level 2 students and the morning session involved making rings out of thick copper wire and so I helped with instructions and helping out after the demo. It was reassuring that I remembered quite a lot about the process from when I did a silver jewellery adult education course. The afternoon session was spent covering another member of staff and so we were with the same group but the project was illustration around the poem The Jabberwocky. The students were asked to create a Jabberwock using their imagination and starting with collaging images and text etc. from magazines. I actually took part in this activity after a short while as the students were not all engaged at first (as I would have been the same in their situation as the poem makes not sense whatsoever!). I don’t feel I have a very active imagination so I decided to create new face from old faces by collaging eyes and heads and hair etc. from different images. I am actually quite please with what I came up with.
I have also been asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on my journey through education to where I am today which is made much easier by the fact that I had one prepared for St Edmund’s School as well as my adapted and updated versions for my professional prep module so I will be doing that next week.