Joining Forces:
The Visual and Verbal Arts

The works reproduced in this book were spontaneous responses to a project' first conceived as a variation in the studio teaching of Dawson College Fine Art students. They were asked to both write and draw (or paint) about a subject of their own choice.

I did not expect the results to be so very different from the results obtained in traditional Fine Arts projects, those which are concerned more directly with the elements of painting - composition, colour, etc. - and in which still life and models are the more usual subject matter. I simply felt at the beginning of this research that I was presenting a project to vary the process, the class routine. The works cover a time span from the fall term of 1991 through the spring and fall terms of 1992 and were chosen from a variety of Fine Arts classes (those specializing in Fine Arts as well as those given as interest subjects).

The project was assigned to each of the student groups approximately half- way through the term when a relationship of understanding and trust had developed and when some of the fundamentals of class routine had been established. The first results convinced me to contact The Centre for Literacy to see if this interdisciplinary research could be extended to explore the pedagogical implications of joining these two art forms, the visual and verbal. After I was accepted into the Resource-teacher project in winter 1992, I continued to collect student work, kept more systematic records and brought samples to weekly discussions.

I followed the same procedure for collecting work in each class. The choice of subject-matter was left to the student. There were limits to size and length, imposed by the time factor of a three-hour studio class in which to complete both the written and visual parts of the project. Questions from the students at the beginning of the class were almost completely to reassure themselves of the freedom they were being given.

This freedom was increased by my saying that the results would not be marked. Rather than producing a laissez-faire attitude, this combination of personal decision about the approaches to subject-matter and the freedom from marking galvanized the Students into concentrated effort which lasted, with unusually few interruptions, throughout the class time.

During the class time, there was a consistency of concentration by all the groups. After the first flurry of questions, the students worked by themselves, quietly and engrossed. Most students took no break and worked until the end of the class. There was very little talk in a studio situation which is normally open to conversation relevant to the project. It may be that the absence of marking allowed them to focus more easily on personal expression.

In a few instances, students were allowed to take the project home because their reach had exceeded their grasp, but they were the ones to initiate the idea of completing the work at home. Furthermore, students who had been absent the day of the project almost all came to the next class with the project completed, saying they had heard about it, found it fascinating and decided to do it. Without the clout of marks to be gained, I find this attitude a rarity indeed! Whatever the reasons, it appeared that the students were intrigued by their search for a personal statement in the process of joining the visual and verbal art media. This was evident from the first and I came to wait eagerly to see the products.

The students clipped the visual and verbal sections of their project together, putting whichever they had done first on top, and labeling them A or B accordingly. The choice had been theirs but I was curious to know what those choices would be; the majority chose to do the drawing/painting first. Perhaps this can be accounted for by the fact that the project was presented in an art class. An extension of the research would see if the reverse would happen were the project to be presented in a language class. The students themselves insisted after the project that they did the drawing/painting first because that was the primary mode of expression - "We did that long before we learned how to write." Another finding was that more time was spent doing the visual part than the writing, perhaps because the greater fluency and speed achieved through years of practice with writing gave the students some assurance that it could be done in a shorter period of time. Spelling mistakes were numerous, not a surprising finding in a multi-language college.