Visual Timeline

MOLLY SOFRANKO

Cedar Rapids, Iowa BIG

__________

 

Mirror Nuerons, May 2017

Wood, Glass, Photos

 

This piece highlights a fraction of my learning and exploration while working towards Masters in Art Education. When asked to create a timeline of my path through grad school I started thinking about time, and how much I’ve learned through these online classes and from the enormous amount of resources I’ve inhaled. I started looking at nonlinear models of time, and one particularly beautiful model looked more like a network of neurons, like a rhizome. There is no one path of learning, no right way, everything is connected, intertwined. The wooden frame has an abstraction of one of the smaller pieces engraved in it, and is a symmetrical representation of neurons. As an experience, looking at each piece individually, they are incomplete snapshots of time. Events from my life, events from the lives of my students, issues that captivated me, artists that inspired me and documentation of the laborious IRB process and the final research paper.

 

The artifacts are as follows in more or less clockwise order.

1. Photo essay of a weeklong outdoor education trip with students at Metro Alternative High School

2. Blog post on my original research idea, which dealt with teaching resilience in the classroom

3. A magazine cover on identity and culturally responsive pedagogy, featuring Grayson Perry

4. The first page of my IRB form, proposing my research at Iowa BIG

5. A page from my field notes for my research paper

6. A comic about transdisciplinary education created during my last year at Metro.

7. A research paper poster on the artist Dread Scott

8. My abstract from my final research paper

9. The map of my art teacher influences and teaching jobs

10. Mirror Neurons, a picture of my son Ian and a quote by Carol S. Jeffers