Art as Activism continued

This past Saturday we finished up our project from the previous few weeks. Many students were still carving at the end of last week and a few hadn't even started carving until this past Saturday! Melissa started out the lesson by reviewing how to properly carve the blocks. She did this by asking Sultan to demonstrate it. She did this the previous 2 weeks as well and I think it makes the students feel good and pay attention since their peers are the ones in the spotlight. It also lets the students know that she finds them capable. Everyone got to work then, picking up where they left off. We were constantly rotating around the room, providing help when needed, and reminding students to carve away from themselves. Those students that work quickly were getting very creative when it came to printing. They had the time to try out different kinds of papers and mixing colors to find what affect it would have. Only one person wasn't able to finish in time. In fact, she didn't even start carving. However, we provided her with the tools and asked her to carve at home so that on the last day of class she could print at least 1 or 2 pictures. We also had 2 boys that hadn't begun carving because of absences, and they dismissed the images they previously printed out and decided to carve car brand symbols. This wasn't the purpose of the prints, as they were supposed to promote social activism, but at least they have the chance to work with an interesting art form. I do wonder though, if I was expected to give grades in a school classroom, how would I grade these students' works? After all, they either didn't finish their projects or didn't follow the assignment. It just brought these ideas to my attention and I'm beginning to see how difficult it will be to grade art in my future classroom. Now that we are finished this lesson, we will move on to painting next week. If any students didn't finish, though, they will be able to finish up on the last day of class, and if there's time they will even be able to distribute their artwork into the community. Even if there isn't time, we hope the students do on their own time. Using art as social activism can give these students a strong voice in world and we hope to have given them some tools to do so.