Ordered Concepts

[holland]

This thread will be used to break down and organize the concepts of art that generally need to be exercised and assessed. The focus is on single-focus concepts and how they build into more complex ones.

The end goal is to have a semi-ordered list that can 1) serve as a directory to the exercise section to find appropriate training material, and 2) be referenced when building lessons and standards.

However, these relationships are ultimately more complex than a list can describe, so I'm also working elsewhere on a database of the prerequisite tree that can be queried and checked against when lesson planning.

[holland]

Table of Contents

tba

[holland]

How is a sufficiently narrow concept chosen?

When a concept is thought of, it should be followed down to the prerequisite knowledge and skills required to execute or understand it, depending on the type pf concept.

For example, the abstract locomotive anatomy mannequin is purely intended to boost comprehension and doesn't require execution to train. These concepts are detached from drawing skills until they are applied to the practical study mannequin.

So you can, for example, teach someone that when their thumb is facing inwards, their arm bones are crossed. You can provide visuals to help remember that without checking. They don't need proportion perception or shading skills etc.

On the other hand, teaching someone how to draw and shade a figure with that movement on the practical study mannequin requires a ton of drawing prerequisites... in addition to understanding that previous theoretical idea of the bones crossing.

So concepts that seem similar at a glance may be totally different levels of complexity. You need to figure out how to build up to the more complex ones from simpler, more fundamental roots. Although it all needs to be addressed eventually.

[holland]

How are these concepts grouped together?

This is the tricky part.

For organizational reasons, I want to focus on chains of prerequisites within a specific context. Each topic may not be perfectly dependent on the other, but they form a logical progression of ideas that are related and should be stored in a similar place in the brain.

To use the example in the previous reply, the gradual progression of the features in the anatomy mannequin would be one prerequisite chain, while the application of features on the practice mannequin would be a different prerequisite chain.

Each of these chains will be its own post, so its order doesn't interfere with the others and they can be linked to in some logical way.

But how things are organized in the abstract is not necessarily reflective of how they should be organized in lessons and actually taught to students.

In this example, it makes the most sense to interleave these two chains, teaching a concept and then having the students learn to apply it.

So even though they are presented separately here as things that can be theoretically taught in isolation, they can be associated with one another and reordered in practice.

That's the preliminary idea, in any case.