POEM WRITING AND ILLUSTRATION
Intergenerational Listening: From Conversation to Poetic Image
Activity Introduction
In this assignment, students will engage in a brief but meaningful intergenerational conversation with an older adult (age 60+). The goal is not simply to collect information, but to practice relational listening with care, presence, and openness.
Students will conduct a 10–15-minute recorded conversation, transcribe the recording, and use the transcript as the primary source material for a creative response: a short poem and an accompanying illustration.
This project invites you to explore how memory, identity, and lived experience can be translated across generations through artistic interpretation. Rather than summarizing the interview, you will transform spoken words into poetic language and visual imagery.
Through this process, you will:
Practice ethical and attentive listening.
Reflect on intergenerational connection and difference
Explore how storytelling becomes visual and poetic forms
Consider how art can function as relational meaning-making
This assignment emphasizes process over product. The artwork should emerge from dialogue, not from preconceived design ideas.
Zine-Making Activity
Becoming a Teacher: Care & the Invisible Work of Teaching
Purpose
In this activity, you will explore what it means to become a teacher through both reflection and making. As pre-service teachers, you are already forming ideas about your role in the classroom, shaped by your own experiences, values, and expectations. This activity invites you to consider how these personal dimensions may influence your future teaching practice and your relationships with students.
Focus: Care and Invisible Work
This activity also encourages you to think about teaching beyond visible tasks such as instruction or classroom management. Teaching involves forms of care, attention, and emotional awareness that are often not immediately visible but are essential to creating a supportive learning
environment. You will reflect on how teachers respond to students, make decisions in the moment, and hold space for learning, and how these forms of invisible work shape the classroom experience.
Printmaking Practice
In this project, students will explore soft rubber block printmaking as a form of visual language and personal expression. Birds will be used as the main theme because they offer rich opportunities to study feathers, movement, texture, and light/dark relationships.
Try to combine:
- careful observation of a bird
- printmaking visual language (line, shape, texture, value)
- and your own ideas inspired by visual culture (logos, symbols, cartoons, graphic design).
- This project emphasizes process, experimentation, and translation of observation into design, rather than realistic copying.
- Project Goals
- By completing this project, students will:
- Understand printmaking as a visual language using line, shape, texture, and black/white/gray
- Practice observation and design through a nature-based theme
- Explore how personal ideas and visual culture can be integrated into an artwork
- Gain experience with safe carving, inking, and printing techniques
- Reflect on how this activity could be adapted for K–8 classrooms
- Students’ research and creating process examples
Visual journal
LEIWANG ARTPARK 