mondrian7

A webquest on Piet Mondrian

Teacher's page

Introduction

This webquest can be used in conjunction with an art appreciation course, as an activity for art history class, or a follow-up activity after a museum visit. The webquest started with four "fun with Mondrian" activities related to Piet Mondrian, his works and his influences. After the fun activities, the students will be led to start the virtual museum exhibition project on Mondrian. This project attempts to achieve two goals. First, to provide students a chance to work as a team, such as that happen in an art museum in preparing an exhibition. And second, to let students learn about a specific painter through an online research.

Learners

This webquest is designed for students in high school or college university. It can be used for students of art or non-art major. If it is used for the art major, the grading emphasis may be shifted slightly to the area of art history and criticism. The requirement for research should then be higher. If it is used in an art appreciation course for the non-art major, the grading emphasis should be placed instead on how the students synthetize the research materials and what they have achieved in the process of learning.

To participate in this webquest, the students are expected to know how to surf the web and find information from the World Wide Web. The teacher should not worry if a student is not skilfull in this aspect, because there will be many chances for practice and they will probably pick up quickly in the process.

Curriculum Standards

The students will learn something about Piet Mondrian going through the four activities before they start the project. In this case, they will be less nervous and more prepared on the subject matter. While they work as a team, they learn to express to each other their understanding of a subject matter, their suggestions and ideas. The students will also learn to coordinate with each other through the different roles they are assigned to play. Through the online research, they will probably learn about both the formal and the contextual aspects of Mondrian's works. The formal aspect refers to the work of art itself. For instance, how it is made, what is it made of, what elements (line, color, form/ shape) are used to create the composition. How are these elements being organized by Mondrian to achieve the effect produces by any specific painting. The contextual aspect refers to anything outside the work of art that have influenced the work to be created the way it was created. This may include Mondrian's living environment, his training in school, people around him who influenced how he paint, other stylistic period that may have influenced him at one time or another. For instance, he was influenced by impressionism and cubism for a while, before developing his "neo-plastic" composition.

Beside learning about the artist and his works, the students will probably learn also about the responsibilities of a curator, a researcher and designer by performing each of their role. The curator will probably learn about the difficulties or fun in selection of works. The researcher will have practice quite a bit of online research through this activity. And the designer will definitely know the skill of navigator composer well.

Process

First, divide the class into several groups of three. This can be easily done by having the whole class draw lots that contain "C," "R," and "D," which stands for curator, researcher, and designer respectively. Each group represents a museum. In this case, each museum consists of a curator, a researcher, and a designer. Next, each group should get together to decide on a theme for the exhibition. To do this, each museum group should browse as many sites with Mondrian works as possible, and read briefly on Mondrian's biography and artistic career. The teacher should provide some useful links in the "process" section of the webquest. On top of that, students are encouraged to search for other links to gather sufficient information and images of Mondrian's work. Even though the curator will have a final decision on the theme, every member in each group is encouraged to suggest any theme that come to mind while doing the browsing together. The students are encouraged to brainstorm each other with ideas. As different curators usually have different emphasis on different aspects of an artist, the selection of works is expected to vary from museum to museum. This will bring about a slightly different research content, as well as slightly different way of presenting the show. A minimum selection of ten works is required for each group.

In order to better guide the class in this project, any teacher who is not familiar with the role of a curator, researcher, or designer in a museum should read related materials in advance. Teachers may go to the resources provided below for references. Some teachers may feel that by assigning each one a specific role, the students are restricted to learning only from each of the specific area. In that case, you may want to try the project more than once, with different artists and each student playing a new role. There is a lot of flexibility to this project.

Resources needed

To carry out this webquest, a school is expected to have at least 6 to 10 computers, with at least 56K modem, with Netscape Communicator and Composer. The school library should have some books available on Piet Mondrian or twentieth century art, in case the students need to scan images that they cannot find online. A scanner is thus required for this purpose, and a Photoshop software should be installed, if such job is required. Teachers should familiarize themselves with the technique of scanning, in order to show students the right way to scan a picture, or image from a catalogue.

Evaluation

There are two parts to the evaluation process. First, the groups will grade each other's work and an average will be calculated from all gradings. Second, the teacher's grading. The students' and the teacher's grading each contribute 50% to the final grade of the project. An advantage of having the students evaluation each other's work is that they are able to compare and contrast the strong and weak points of one another and get into a conversation of analytical criticism. Both gradings will be based on the evaluation criteria and grading scale provided below. Art is subjective to certain extent, regardless any set criteria. By having the students evaluate each other's work and at the same time providing a grading scale, and evluation criteria, the result of evaluation is made more objective, while recognizing the fact that absolute objectivity is not entirely possible.

The grading scale is as below:
Excellent [1]; Very Good [2]; Good [3]; Satisfactory [4]

Further elaboration on evaluation criteria:

1. Consistency of theme with works selected.
If a group select a theme called "Piet Mondrian: evolution of his style," then the works selected by this group will expect to range from Mondrian's early realistic painting to his late abstract paintings. If the group chose only from his de stijl years, then they will be evaluation as being inconsistent.

2. Content/ research of information on Mondrian.

The content/ research should fulfill two requirements:
A. It should include the following information:
     1. The theme of the show
     2. A brief Mondrian's biography
     3. Stylistic development of Piet Mondrian
     4. Explanation of works in the show
     5. Caption for each work
     6. Mondrian's influences to art and environment
B. It should illuminate the theme and the works exhibited.

3. Clarity of language used for write-up.

There should be fluency and organization in the write up. And the write-up should guide a reader through the show.

4. Overall impression of the virtual gallery.

This has to do with the design of the virtual gallery. The design should not distract but draw a reader or viewer's attention to the theme of the show and the work exhibited. So that without much effort, a viewer is able to know what to look next, where to entrance and where to exit. The instruction buttons should be cleared yet do not dominate the virtual galleries.

5. Design (clarity, proximity, contrast, consistency)

Read the basic web design principle at http://esnlc.asn.au/esnlc/webdesign/homework/lesson4/design-principals.htm
and use it as a guide.

Conclusion

After completing the webquest on Mondrian, the students should acquire sufficient knowledge on the followings:
1. Mondrian in context of modern art history.
2. The stylistic development of Piet Mondrian.
3. The influences on Mondrian's art.
4. Mondrian's art and interior design.
5. The significant of specific Mondrian's works.

Extension

The following may be areas that the students still find hard to grasp:
1. The aesthetic principle of Mondrian's art.
2. How to assess a good Mondrian composition?
3. Has Mondrian found the essence of art?
These are some aspects of Mondrian's art that are much more conceptual. The teacher may design an extension project of this webquest that help students investigate the possibilities of the above questions by shifting their focus from the perceptual to the conceptual realm.

Resources for teachers

http://esnlc.asn.au/esnlc/webdesign/homework/lesson4/design-principals.htm

(on basic web design principles)

http://www.artifacts.gov.bc.ca/victoria/curator.htm(what is a museum curator?)

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/history/Occcurat.htm (good-definition of museum curator)

http://www.media.uio.no/internettiendring/publikasjoner/tekst/Pierroux/08Curators.html

(curator and the web)

http://yproductions.com/talks/curatingontheweb.html#virtual_museums(virtual museum)

http://yproductions.com/talks/curatingontheweb.html (curating the web)

http://www.agda.asn.au/dr/DesignResourcesMenu.html (designer resources)

http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/scarliner/id/museumsandwebdesign.htm(museum and web)

http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue4/mclaugh.html#Variation (how virtual gallery)

http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue4/mclaugh.html#References (why virtual gallery)