Kenya Mathlin

What Makes A Shoe Great?

Lesson Plan:

Grade of students: 5 - 12

Materials needed: Paper, pens, markers, pencils, crayons, pencil crayons. (Any material students are able to access) 

Teacher Resource: Worksheet provided before the museum tour

Bata Shoe Museum Programming

The concept for the interpretive planning project is engaging with older students in art classes from grade 5 to about early high school age grade 12. The plan would be to book a group tour of the Bata Museum and students would take note of all their favourite shoes. Using the worksheet created they would mark down a new shoe from the Future Now exhibition, an older shoe from the Great Divide, and any shoe that they like that has a quality they like about it like an example, ‘The shape of the Cartonnage Shoe, Egypt’.

Afterwards, the students take all the information they learned and recorded on the worksheet and create their own shoe that displays all their favourite attributes they have collected on the worksheet to throughout the museum.

For ex. inspiration from  ____ shoe.

The plan would be to walk around the museum through a guided tour and then list all their favourite attributes from specific shoes. Then create a drawing or sculpture with those attributes of the shoes combining it with their own idea. I will create a worksheet for when walking around the museum 

Any challenges that I may face would be to keep the high students engaged. In the worksheet I can put a few sections: What features do you like on which shoe? What shoe is your favourite? What is your favourite shoe out of the museum? What shoes would you like to see in the museum and why? 

Those are a few examples of what will be on the worksheet. The whole point would be to create an open dialogue about what makes a shoe and why are whose shoes being displayed in

the museum.

Summary/Learning Resource:

My intention for creating this exercise was to get grades 5 to grade 10 art class students to think about what they are observing, emulate and create a new design. Students will learn about all the shoes at the Bata Shoe Museum and learn to create something from scratch using some of the designs seen at the Museum. This would be an in-person exercise but can easily be shifted to an online setting. My hope is that the students learn about the shoes and also learn to pull inspiration from the shoes they have seen. 

I think this would work for a wide variety of people including school, community cultures, and adults. I wanted focus on older students enrolled in art classes because that would be the group of students I would teach if I were an educator. I would most likely be an art teacher thus I wanted to focus on art students in mind that they are already interested in learning about design.

I choose the age group grade 5 - 12 because they would have the drive to learn about design and the students can get very creative and detailed as a older middle school to high school age student. I hope as a facilitator we can focus on decolonization and really focus on the history of the shoes.