Dale Torri-Safdie teaches visual art at Stone Memorial High School in Crossville, Tenn., as both a creative and an academic subject.
This video highlights the strategies Dale Torri-Safdie uses to teach her Art I students how to build clay animals.
Over the past two weeks, Torri-Safdie has been teaching her Art I students how to make clay animals. Students started by drawing the animals they wanted to sculpt and then breaking down their drawings into shapes. They learned how to use pinch pots, slabs and coils to build their animals and how to slip and score their pieces.
The biggest lesson of this project has been problem-solving. Torri-Safdie said, “It’s not just, ‘We’re all going to do this together, and you must follow the steps.’ They have to conceive of what their animal is and figure out what building technique will work for them to get the effects they want. So there’s more experimentation and problem-solving that they have to do.”
Torri-Safdie also incorporated geography, physics and mathematics into her art lesson. In her presentation to ready students for the project, she asked them to identify the location of an artist’s home country and to use the clay terms they had learned to speculate how artists prevented their works from being top-heavy. Just before students started to build their animals, she showed them a 25-pound block of clay and asked them to figure out how she should divide it to give each of them approximately three pounds.
Torri-Safdie said, “I always feel rewarded when I see them doing this because it’s really something to see a project that totally absorbs every student. Everyone – when they’re doing this – is pretty much on task and focused and just happy about the whole process.”
I am impressed with the skill the students have embraced with proper instruction and personal attention from the teacher. Encouragement is one of life’s best preparation for future success.
The problem solving aspect of art classes sometimes goes without recognition by people who do not understand that art forces you to think differently. I am sad that many attitudes toward art include “oh, that is just fun, and this is silly stuff” when really there’s a serious thinking skill that’s being learned. Thank you for being one of the people who “gets it”.