Marketing Day 7th November 2013
Evaluation of Day & Success of Activity planned
On the 7th of November the Store held an activity day to introduce college students to the higher education courses that are on offer, each course had its own activities planned by the existing second year students. I assisted with my course’s activity plans, to advertise what things we do on the Contemporary Fine Art Practice course. Both full time students on this course and part time students assisted in the running of the activities we had chosen, we had a meeting the Tuesday before the activity to decide and plan what we were doing and what we’d need to prepare.
Our plan was originally for 7-11 students, hence we had gathered enough materials to create a large scale drawing and mark making piece for this size group, we were caught by surprise when 17 students arrived interested in the course. This was an unexpected but excellent development as the more students we get to the activity days the more we may get joining the course next year. When this happened myself and Karen led the students to the smart board to show them the power point presentation I had prepared, this gave our classmates time to set up another 2 canvas’s to accommodate our extra students. The power point presentation went well and using artist references within it presented the students with inspiration and ideas for their own pieces, I also included images of previous work my class had completed at the college to show them what we do, these were our examples that we had created for the activity.
After this we split the students into 3 groups and each began working on a canvas (large sheet of brown paper) we encouraged them to experiment with the various materials we had on offer such as chalk, charcoal, inks and paints. During this hour long activity we switched 2 of the groups around so that they worked on each others canvas’s, this encouraged them to be less precious about their work and to take inspiration from other peoples work. The third group were the students with special learning requirements and were more comfortable working on their own piece for the entire time allotted, this is how we included diversity in our lesson plan but allowing them to experiment freely but at their own pace.
Once the students were confident they were happy with their pieces we begun the next activity which was an individual task, we thought it was a good idea to show them how we can often work both in groups and individually on this course. We set up tables, chairs and paper and materials on desks infront of the pieces they had created, we then asked them to choose a section and enlarge it and do a 5 minute timed drawing of it. This encouraged them to work quickly and create more abstract forms, they created 3 of these timed drawings and then put them up on the wall together to view eachothers work. The activity so far had mixed reviews because some students had said they had done it before, but taking into account that we would have had to purchase the materials for a more expensive activity and the size of the group this activity was appropriate for the time frame and group size. The students with special educational needs very much enjoyed their activity and they produced a lovely large scale piece, it was a good experience to work with them and help them create something they are proud of. About 1/3 of the group were not very enthused throughout the activity but it is to be expected as it is hard to please everybody’s tastes, next time I would consider planning a larger selection of smaller activities to ensure that hopefully each student finds they enjoy something from the day. I think we worked well as a team to run this activity especially because we had a greater amount of students than expected, and we all worked together to clean the activity space up after the students have left which gave us time to discuss the activity and what we might change if we did it again. If I were to plan it again I would do shorter more varied activities rather than a longer activity, I would also hand out feedback sheets at the end to students because that would have been very helpful this time round to see what they thought of it. We photographed the activity day and overall I think it went well and some lovely work was produced, it was good to see them experimenting and we interacted with them during the activity answering their questions about the course and about student life and gave them ideas for their pieces.
At the end of the 2 hours (as we only had one large group rather than the 2 smaller groups we were expecting, we only ran the activity once) Mark showed them a presentation on drawing and mark making and lots of them were taking down notes on artists they found interesting, it was important to show them how we learn about artists and get inspiration ourselves.
Below are the images from the marketing day, overall it went well and I think we have a few prospective students already!
Megan Cox--- Contemporary Fine Art 