In May, one of the art galleries in Porter College decided to discard their collection of posters announcing various shows at the gallery. This huge pile of different posters all designed with a similar goal gave me the idea for another lecture or discussion in the course, comparing the different approaches for attracting people to an art show. I picked up about twenty-five different posters on Wednesday (25 May) to use in Friday's class.
I usually do not cover much poster design in the course (other than a slide lecture or two on poetry broadsides from the library's Special Collections, which I had already done that quarter), but a discussion on poster design was well within the range of things that are suitable for the class. Because these posters were a spur-of-the-moment addition to the course, I did not have time to do a careful analysis of them, nor to construct a coherent framework for discussing them.
The most common format for the lecture/discussions in the course this quarter has been for me to display one piece at a time to the class using slides, overhead transparencies, or, occasionally, the piece itself, then to use a Socratic dialog to elicit useful comments from the class. This approach had been fairly successful spring quarter, with most of the students who attended class participating in the discussion. However, as is usually the case with class discussions, two or three of the students generally contributed much more than the rest.
As an experiment, I decided to try a different format for the discussion-one that relied much less on me as a guide and that would allow everyone to participate more or less equally in the discussion.
I brought the stack of posters to class and spread them out on the table in front of the class, instructing each student to take a poster and to make notes about the poster for 5-10 minutes. The students were told to pick a poster they liked, one they disliked, or just one they thought they could say something about. We then arranged the seats in a circle and went around the room with each student having up to five minutes to present his or her observations about the poster. If the student presenting the poster had less to say, then the discussion was opened up for everyone else to add comments.