In November 2021, I had the opportunity to teach a plaster workshop at a historic palace in Morawa, Poland. I feel so grateful to have one of my first, foundational lessons to be in such a unique and inspiring environment. The almost week-long field trip was an arts and theatre cultural exchange with 15 middle school kids from Nelson Mandela School in Berlin and 15 kids from their small town in Poland. The arts portion of the week consisted of two groups of 15 kids each attending one 3-hour workshop and, 2 days later, one 2 hour workshop.
​My mentor teacher and I chose to work with plaster as our art medium because of the week’s theme: indoor/outdoor. The theme was chosen with the pandemic in mind: students were to examine what the dynamics in the last year have been within their homes and on the outside in their communities. With plasterwork, students were able to turn the inside of their mold into the outside of their sculpture. And, plaster is accommodating to the incorporation of found objects from the outside world. What does it mean to bring objects from outside into their studio/exhibition space inside?

Workshop Day 1:

10 minutes: Introduction to the workshop, each other, and the plaster project.
20 minutes: Presentation on plaster as an everyday medium as well as in art. Brief overview/video of contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread who works with cement, plaster, and moldmaking. Introduction to the theme of inside/outside, assignment of the project.
20 minutes: Demo of how to safely and effectively work with plaster, tour of the space, introduction to materials/workspace.
20 minutes: Time for students to go outside and collect found objects in nature/collaborate/ideate. Time for teachers to flip the room to get ready for artmaking.
10 minutes: Sketching, answering the prompted questions.
90 minutes: Work realisation.
10 minutes: Clean up.

Day 1 Reflections

After six hours of teaching and a long night of prepwork the day before, I was both filled with excitement and completely spent. Sometimes after a good lesson, I feel like I’m ten feet tall. I really feel like I’ve accomplished something and made an impact - or at least given students something to look back on and remember fondly.
I met with my mentor teacher who observed my lessons and she helped me process some reflections from the day and gave me good feedback. A summary of some reflections:
  • Plaster is a material that offers quick, tangible, and satisfying results for students that oftentimes yearn for work with 3D mediums. But what it gains in speed, it loses in practicality. Plaster cannot be worked with like clay because of its quick drying window. It also requires a room with good ventilation, a water source, a big rinsing bucket, and at least 90 minutes of work time.
  • Students must prepare their mold exactly and do copious prepwork/forethought. A project like this is nice for students to exercise drafting, sketching, and ideation before the actual art working.
  • My slides didn't include any text because I wanted to showcase the images. But on further thought, I would add more text to help the students pay attention and have something concrete to read if they have a hard time following spoken instructions.
  • As I've learned from the book Wicked Arts Assignments by Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer, an art assignment must be a good balance of freedom for creativity and boundaries to work within. On one hand, a strict assignment leads to similar results and boredom. On the other hand, too much freedom results in frustration/difficulty getting started and producing predictable results. In my lesson, students were able to make all kinds of plaster sculptures: additive, subtractive, moldmaking, and mosaic work with ceramic pieces. If I were to do this project again, I would limit the students to only one kind of plaster sculpture, especially if it was their first time using the medium.
Work After Day 1

Workshop Day 2:

20 minutes: Presentation and discussion of what a "finished" sculpture is. 
5 minutes: Demonstration of potential approaches to smoothing/finishing a plaster object.
10 minutes: Discussion about our exhibition, brainstorming names and expectations/jobs.
15 minutes: Reflection in table groups about their pieces from day 1 and discussion about how to finish their piece.
​60 minutes: Working on finishing sculptures. If time allowed, writing about their pieces, working on preparing the exhibition writing/space.
10 minutes: Clean up.

Day 2 Reflections

Day 2 was a great learning experience for me because it was less about practical work and more related to theory and didactics. I've spent countless hours in the studio producing plaster work, but have never put on an exhibition for school age children. I was very grateful for my mentor teacher's help in the preparation and execution of Day 2's workshop.
Some reflections from Day 2:
  • I was given feedback about how to get more reflection out of the students. During my presentation, I asked questions like “Do you think this piece is a finished piece?” And, when the students answered, I left it at that. I learned to probe them a bit more to get to the meat of the discussion and to not be satisfied with surface level answers. Student’s first thoughts are often only the peak of the iceberg and need more prompting.
  • I’ve learned about myself during this process. I’ve learned that I have a lot of practice being an artist myself, and less so being a teacher of art. To me, being a teacher is understanding what your students do not know, reflecting on what you yourself know, and bridging the gap between the two.
  • There is a vital importance to reflecting on what I’ve learned and how I’ve learned it (in university, or outside). Some of the worst teachers I’ve had were incredible artists. But they couldn’t get out of their own head and fill someone else’s.
  • Flexibility is key in teaching. Anything could happen where a teacher needs to work on the fly: students ask questions the teacher is not prepared for, the timing could be off, the material doesn't work the way it's supposed to, not every material is available, etc. 
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Exhibition Photos