Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am an Art History teacher in a fine arts high school. My teaching subjects include art history of  both Iran and the world. The problem I have always faced in my career is that my students do not  show much of interest and motivation toward the art history of Iran as much as they do for the  world's art history. They are really interested when we talk about western art but sadly when it  comes to Persian art, I have to take exams to make them keep going with the subject. with my  background of study in design and during the instructions of this course (Design thinking for  innovation) I decided to take an innovative approach in order to detect the exact causes and find  a solution for the problem.

Selection

As the teacher of 52 Art Students, I could gather great amount of information from my students.  So there was no lack of data. I just needed a tool to organize and translate all this raw data to  useful insights. So I decided to choose Mind Mapping, since there was so much information to be  processed and Mind Mapping is a tool for looking for pattern s and themes in our data. (according  to the last lecture of week 3) This tool will help the process of design to move forward by putting  each element under specific category and that will affect our understanding of the problem and  will show us the right issues to work on.

Application

First, I want to talk about the ways that helped me to gather the information I needed from my  students. Most of the data has been obtained during some written questions, in which, I asked  few questions from the students to know how do they feel about western and Persian art history.  also in my questions I wanted to know how do they think about those subjects (mostly about  their importance and necessity). Since my target audience are painters and illustrators, I ask them  to draw and paint about what they feel and think in the simplest way.

After my research, in one of my classes (22 students) I made three personas from the data that  my students had given me. also I told them to hang their drawings about the subjects. They had  40 minutes to look around, think and take notes. Then, at the next step, we choose to do the  classification from whole to component. We agreed on few theme, including feelings,  importance, being practical, the book, the class and others. After that, the students add their  notes written on sticky notes to the categories on the whiteboard. At the end of the class, there  were lots of sticky notes under every category.

Insights

As we moved further in the process, the school and I learnt a lot of things since that day. Some  notes are really fascinating. For instance, some students wrote that there is lots of foreigner  Instagram pages on the internet about western art history and museums that they follow. In that  pages you can find posts that increase your knowledge and interest about western and especially  modern art but there are only few Instagram pages that share about Persian art and they are not  posting every day. In this case, we had some discussion in school about being more active on  social medias and the website of the school. We will focus on online activities that shows  interesting facts about Persian arts.

Also, there were some notes about the poor quality of existing pictures of different form of  Persian arts in the book and also on the internet. That sounds right to me since the students of  arts are more likely to be visual learners and we are looking forward to provide them with better  picture and videos.

Approach

Mind Mapping tool was really a fun approach to the problem and still really eye-opening.  Especially because my students could stick their notes without their names, I think they were  more comfortable than if they had to talk about them (which will happen more in other tools).  So I think I will use this tool again in my teaching career and I am sure that still I can learn more  and more.

But the next time, I think I will combine it with visualization tool at the beginning. Since  visualization will give us the opportunity to convey our concepts and understanding of each  other’s concepts in the fastest way and it will accelerate the process.

