'Oject of inspiration' A Constructivist lesson

Brainstorning a design idea in 3D

This exercise was given to a year 10 Visual Design class who have been instructed through subjective and cultural exploration of the social conventions and various traditional practices of designing and wearing that ‘special garment’.
The focus for their “Object of Inspiration” is this year’s WAVE Production: “The Jade Paladin and the flying Garuda.” Students are invited to display inspirational ideas and investigate new technologies.
Through exercises like these students will develop a sense of being artists responding to the WAVE production criteria and establish their own expressive relationship to the work they will create.
The final aim of this lesson is have the students (in groups) create an entry for the WAVE production.
The instructions given to the class were in groups of 3 or 4 create in one lesson a costume on a mannequin in response to the Wave categories. They could use anything in the room as long as they didn’t break anything and remembered where it came from.
The focus was on silhouette.

The students thoroughly enjoyed this lesson it came after a few theory and static lesson so it was well timed. So far this term the students have created design inspiration collages on the different sections for the WAVE production and the directors of the show have given an overview of the ideas behind the show.
So they came to this exercise with reasonable background knowledge.
It was interesting to see how this group of 13 female students formed dynamic groups that all worked well together. The students had 1½ hour’s to create and pull down their creations.
After giving the instructions I pulled back and observed the students interacting in their groups, taking photos and encouraging when they started to slow down. If I did this lesson again I would have a bunch of interesting objects placed around the room and not let them just focus on fabric.

This was quite a constructivist lesson I had been reading a lot about constructivism so it was at the forefront of my mind.
This lesson was driven by the impulse to focus on discovery learning allowing learner centred experiences and activity through social interaction.
It provided the students with an opportunity to work in groups in a collaborative learning environment. Through this the students got an experience of how different people work with in a group. They focused on creative problem solving, nutting out their ideas in 3D form which gave them a greater scope to work with rather than being limited by pen and paper.

One of the sighted limitations of the constructivist approach is that it is time consuming for the teacher to create a well-scaffolded lesson. The importance of providing a sufficient scaffold should not be underestimated it is the make or break in facilitating constructivist learning.