Teachers Brush Up Their Perspective

Photo above: Arts Consortium Facilitator Beth E. welcomes teachers to the first AC Professional Development workshop

Fourteen teachers attended the pilot workshop in the Art Wing of Lexington Catholic High School for the Diocese of Lexington's Arts Consortium Professional Development series. LCHS teachers Stephen Dorsett (art) and Anne Bradford (math) combined their expertise to present "The Perspectives of Mathematics."

Stephen started things off with a brief power point display that showed reproductions of paintings that do not use perspective and paintings that do use perspective, such as da Vinci's The Last Supper, a true masterpiece of the Renaissance perspective tradition.

After a discussion about some elements of perspective ("horizon line," "vanishing point," "two dimensional space," etc.) and some elements of geometry ("point," "parallel lines," "surface area," etc.), participants got right to work on creating their own one-point perspective street scene, using their nifty drawing kits.

Anne referred teachers to the activities/sequence guide in the lesson plan handout that suggested all sorts of math exercises for all ages of students - from identifying shapes and measuring the different angles seen in a perspective drawing to calculating the area of the buildings (and windows!) in the drawing. In the meantime, Stephen continued to whip up some good-looking skyscrapers (with lots of windows!).

Teachers then had some time to continue working on their drawings and get some pointers on other fun things to do with their artwork.

Thanks to all the attendees at this first workshop for making it such a big success. The Arts Consortium plans on offering PD workshops on a regular basis from now on. The AC invites teachers to share and present their ideas for workshops to help all our teachers use the arts more fully in service of all curriculum subjects!