From the memory spaces of the city to image: A project-based learning approach in visual art education

Abstract

In recent years, in visual arts education, there has been a tendency towards teaching methods that expand learning beyond the school's walls, based on real world experiences, and that enable the students to develop meaningful relationships with cultural, political, and social issues. Among these trends, the practices in which the problems are found and solved by the students themselves rather than trying to find the right answers to the questions posed by the teacher in the classroom, where the circumstances that are usually neglected in socio-cultural life have been revealed. This research focuses on improving the prospective visual arts teachers' urban awareness and identity via a teaching activity designed through Project based learning methods. The research has been designed as an action research. Participants of the research were 40 students enrolled in Anadolu University, Faculty of Education, Department of Art Teaching, and took "Special Teaching Methods II" course. The research data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted with the students, reflective daily reports, and the artworks the students created at the end of this process, and their reports written on these works during the 5 (five)-week implementation process. Content analysis method was used to analyze the data obtained from the research implementation process. In this research, the prospective teachers were encouraged to have a human-environment- and city-oriented mindset at each stage of this learning process, which began with analysis of urban perceptions and extended towards the artistic fiction in that space. The prospective teachers stated that the project-based learning approach has made a great contribution to their awareness for experiencing the real world and preserving what belongs to urban memory. The prospective teachers not only focused on the aspects that address to morphological aesthetics of their artworks, they also focused on their connection with the society and space, and even with the past.