Self-Portraits

My gallant attempt at a self-portrait in 2019. It was thrown away during spring cleaning either this year or the year before, but now it’ll be forever immortalized on this blog. 

This was the second unit I taught in my teacher apprenticeship semester. It was a pretty simple 2-3 day assignment; second graders were asked to draw themselves and include in the drawing something that was important to them. 

The earliest version of the project focused more on technique and less on personal relevancy, and while I’d still like to try it out some day, I’m very happy with what these second graders created. 

There were two inspirations for these portraits: Alejandra Chavez’s elementary self-portrait project and a reading from an art history class I took my senior year. Both focused on how self-portraits could be a means of self-expression; one in the context of primary school and the other in the context of the upper class in the Colonial America. I really wanted to give students a tool to share something about themselves they wanted people to know, and the unit was an excellent opportunity to get to know them.

Popular subject matter included toys, video games, pets, and family members.  

The first day of the unit isn’t something I would repeat, but it produced some pretty interesting drawings. I did large group guided practice on drawing facial features, taking the whole class through how I would draw eyes, noses, and mouths. When observing me teach that lesson, my professor (correctly) observed that, rather than teaching them how to draw their own faces, I was teaching them how to draw the same cartoon face— and that the variation I saw was more likely due to fine motor control than creativity. 

As intended, most students tried to follow my example. My professor called this “teaching schemas,” rather than teaching ways of seeing.