HOW WE FEEL - UNIT PLAN
Understanding Ourselves Through Printmaking
Throughout time and across cultures, artists have conveyed their emotions through art.
Kathe Kollwitz, The People (Das Folk), 1922
Emotions are only taught to elementary students. There, we learn the basics: happy, sad, hungry, tired, angry. As we grow and mature, so do our emotions. They become more complicated, harder to understand, and even harder to regulate. Adolescents experience a time of emotional upheaval and change. In studying their emotions, my students can develop awareness of their feelings and learn strategies to balance them. They will be able to express themselves through art. How artists react to the world around them, students can interpret the variety of ways emotions are conveyed and represented, and through How We Feel, a mood tracking app, the students can investigate it from a personal perspective.
Essential Questions:
Why should we interpret and understand our emotions?
How do emotions influence our day-to-day lives?
How do artists convey emotions?
Objectives:
Students will document and analyze their emotions to recognize behavioral patterns.
Students will understand how emotions influence their lives and can be used as subject matters for artmaking.
Students will understand and explain how artists have expressed emotions in their work.
LESSON 1: RECOGNIZE, UNDERSTAND, LABEL
Over the past 50 years, an unprecedented technological revolution has overtaken society. With newfound technology came newfound ways of communicating, and the spread of ideas and content. Adolescents go through emotional upheavals and change in their day-to-day lives, but with the rise of social media, they are often distracted and disconnected from their own body and feelings. This lesson is built with the hopes of teaching students how to think critically about their media consumption through the lens of emotional content. This lesson acts as an introduction to the How We Feel app to kickstart students with RULER, giving them an opportunity to recognize, understand, and label their emotions. Throughout the rest of the unit, the students will think critically about what they see in terms of emotional content and continue to log their emotions in the app. This lesson will be assessed through class discussions and asking students to reflect with a handout.
LESSON 2: EXPRESS
Adolescents experience a time of emotional upheaval and change. Highschoolers fall into an odd gap of being “kids” and “adults.” They have responsibilities and expectations put on them as if they are adults, but they have the social power of children. They are passionate about issues around them, but may have trouble interacting with those issues. In this lesson, the students will look at Kathe Kollwitz and Sue Coe, both artists who focus is on reacting to the world around them. The students will be tasked with researching a social concern and creating an art piece that expresses how they feel about ti. They will be introduced to linoleum printing and will have continued exposure to the How We Feel app. This lesson will be assessed through class discussions, critiques, and a self-reflection.
LESSON 3: REGULATE
Teenagers are not taught how to regulate their emotions, some shove their emotions to the side and hold out for an eruption, others can’t keep their emotions hidden at all. High school can be a place of stress, drama,and fear, and teenagers are not taught how to process or deal with those emotions. This lesson focuses on regulation, the culmination of the How We Feel app and the projects so far. The students will use monotypes as meditation and a regulation method, practicing Mindful Breathing. They will use their data from the How We Feel app to created a layered print with the monotype.
