In both of my placements, I have learned that presenting to students involves using their interests and previous knowledge to get them engaged, to challenge them in order to give opportunity to learn and keep them interested, and be prepared to read their reaction in case of a need to change what is being presented, including things like taking out information that may be too advanced or take up too much time, or include more information that may be interesting to the students.
During my time at West Aurora High School, I presented several lessons that referenced prior student knowledge and included their interests. For example, my last lesson in my digital art class involved them creating pop art inspired self-portraits that included symbolic references to their visual and popular culture. This involved discussing their interests and we got to talk about their previous lessons in Photoshop by using the skills they had learned and building upon them. For this lesson I created a PowerPoint that referenced pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, whose artwork we compared to visual culture items they see every day, such as their phones and comic books. Although they were interested, as I was presenting I sensed that they were grasping the ideas I gave them quickly, and I was able to skip a video I had ready about Andy Warhol, allowing more time for them to work in class. Discussion was also an important component, as this also gave me an idea of what they know and what they are interested in to inform their art projects.
At Cowherd Middle School, we had less time to give complex presentations and the students are less patient and less interested in general, because of their age, the cultural and social dynamics of the school and the fact that there is less time to present in each class. This means shorter presentations or breaking them up more over time. Middle school students tend to remember less and not as a long as high schoolers too, so there is much repeating of ideas and techniques. Instead of presenting several artists in one presentation and leaving them to research or reflect on their own, I give them multiple chances to revisit the same artists but with different artworks. I also repeat and review techniques given in prior classes. The presentations still involve talking about student interests and involving their lives. For example, I introduced a lesson about recycled art, and asked the students to reflect on places in their own lives where they see items being wasted or not reused. I gave them a presentation on an artist that finds items on the beach by his home, and based on previous presentations and what I know about the kids, we discussed interesting facts and statistics about the artwork (for example, a photograph the artist took of all the flip flops he found left on the beach, and I let them guess how many were in one photo). That is something I would not normally include, but was able to add that in to my presentation as I know it would be interesting to the students and keep them engaged and thinking about the large impact that pollution and waste makes on our lives.
With both schools, I think that it is important to remember the individuals you are teaching and how the presentations not only connect to them at their age and skill level, but how they represent a piece of their lives that connects to the community they live in and how it both impacts them and how they can in turn create impact using the artwork they make.