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- Siobhán Leonard
The Art of Collaboration
To what extent can collaboration enhance students’ learning experiences inside and outside the art classroom?
The Art of Collaboration research’s aim was to discover whether collaboration through a visual art project is an effective method for learning within and outside the classroom and to consider the benefit and obstacles for each. Several collaborations took place with a fifth-year co-ed school, combining a field trip into nature as an extension of a personal Journal of Botanical Treasure onto further collaborations of a wall mural and a painted positive and negative botanical drawing montage.
Collaboration as compared to group work, is a reflective process, as well as leading to product outcome, compared to group work that tends to drive towards a focus on product outcome only. Collaboration requires more delegation and sharing of problems yet is individual in its assessment.
Through the collaboration’s students produced several paintings inspired from initial observational drawings inside and outside the classroom, producing a body of collaborative work as a class, unified by their response to the overarching theme of climate crisis.