Workshop 4: Clay tiles (Outdoor Installation)

I was an observer for this week’s lesson. Caley had a project prepared that involved clay tiles. I haven’t read her lesson plan, but I believe the idea was to have the students create a 1’x1’ tile composed of fragmented clay pieces. Then later, all the students’ tiles would be put together to form an outdoor installation.

Caley started off by passing out bags of tangrams and having the students play but also brainstorm what they might what their clay design to look like. This went well and the students seemed to enjoy this introductory activity.   

When it came time to transition from the tangrams to the clay, however, it seemed like things started to go a bit awry.

A couple things I observed: first, the students didn’t confine their tangram designs to a square shape, so when it came time to transfer their design to the idea of a square clay slab, I think a few students struggled with this concept and how to translate. (Why can’t it look like a kitty? What do you mean by negative space all around?)

  Second, while many of the students proclaimed that they loved clay and had worked with it a lot before, many of them struggled with basic skills like using paper templates, cutting the clay with tools, and I even saw some students trying to fuse pieces together without stitching and slipping properly (which would have led to many cracks and breaks later). Also, many students seemed to misunderstand the basic process for how to fill up their 1x1’ square. More than one student tried to cover their 1x1’ board with mushed and finger flattened clay and then cut pieces from there, or got confused when they didn’t have enough clay to cover their board from the first run of the roller. It seemed like conceptualizing how to fill the board with fragmented pieces was a bit difficult to grasp at first.

Third, after everyone started to understand the fundamentals, the class was almost out of time. However, by the end, almost all the students had at least rolled out a slab and begun to cut pieces.

One student didn’t begin working with clay because her design was taking too much time, and another student became very frustrated with the conceptualizing and misunderstanding I spoke of earlier and began to cry. This student gave up on her project and was distraught enough to go home.

I feel like Caley had constructed a thoughtful lesson and had prepared the work space very well. I feel that one key thing might’ve helped with a lot of the difficulty experienced by these students: a demonstration with a pre-rolled slab of using templates, tracing, cutting, and reassembling their clay design on their board.