C-Team

Creating a Social Justice Art Lesson Plan with ChatGPT

What is ChatGPT?

The acronym “GPT” in ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” indicating that ChatGPT has undergone training with deep learning algorithms to perform natural language processing tasks and generate coherent text or other data sequences in response. Educators across various disciplines have recognized the potential of Generative AI tools like ChatGPT in educational planning and course design (e.g. Atlas, 2023; Okulu & Muslu, 2024; Tupper et al., 2024). Researchers argue that the integration of Generative AI has shifted the educational focus from imparting factual knowledge to fostering critical reasoning and thinking skills, as well as enhancing digital information literacy (Chiu, 2023; Tlili et al., 2023).

Steps to create a lesson plan with ChatGPT

Step 1:

Create a ChatGPT account at http://chatgpt.com with your email address. Alternatively, you may use your existing Google account or Apple ID to access ChatGPT. A regular account is free of charge and can be created instantly.

Step 2:

Use a backward design approach to develop lesson plans with the assistance of ChatGPT. Start by providing a set of desired learning outcomes and objectives. Then, formulate prompts to ask ChatGPT to design instructional activities and assessments that align with those goals. Continue refining your prompts, asking ChatGPT to enhance or add to her responses by specifying what you expect to see in the lesson plan.

Examples:

  1. A lesson plan that integrates the ideas and concepts of The Fluidity of Gender using the first paragraph on The Fluidity of Gender

    • Prompt: Please design a lesson plan for high school students with The Fluidity of Gender: Sculpture by Linda Stein (FoG) with an art-making activity. The FoG exhibition explores the continuum between the binaries of masculinity and femininity, while inspiring the compassion, empathy and bravery it takes to become an upstander rather than a bystander. Have Art Will Travel! (HAWT) asks people to re-invent and visualize bravery for themselves, to look at the armor they wear, the safety they seek. The artist says, “with my androgynous forms, I invite the viewer to seek out diversity in unpredictable ways, to ‘try on’ new personal avatars and self-definitions, knowing that every new experience changes the brain’s structure, and inspires each of us to a more authentic self.”
    • Second query to see how the lesson plan design aligns with a particular set of standards: How is this lesson plan align with California Arts Standards?
    • Third query to ask to develop a sculpting project: Can you do a lesson plan with the same focus on Linda Stein’s The Fluidity of Gender: Sculpture but with a sculpting project?
    • Fourth query to request a collaborative aspect in the lesson plan: Can you revise it into a collaborative sculpting project?
    • See ChatGPT’s responses:  https://chat.openai.com/share/e2b470e9-24ae-4196-bcc5-2c06b92ad344

  1. Agency lesson plan with interactive story game based on the content on Agency: Creating Interactive Stories on Becoming a Brave Upstander

Here I borrowed the entire paragraph on the Agency page to give ChatGPT a clear context of what the lesson plan is about. The part that was copied from the page is italicized.

    • Prompt: Please help me create a lesson plan for middle school students that focuses on the theme of agency and the following information: Agency is a foundational concept of interactivity and the currency of game design. Create an interactive story game of the 4 Bs with the possibility of becoming a brave upstander. Making choices in the story reveals how there is never a single story about any place or people. Create an interactive story game using Twine or Inklewriter, or other open-source apps for creating and sharing nonlinear stories. The stories should include possibilities for becoming a brave upstander. Definitions of the 4 Bs: (4Bs coined by Linda Stein. Learn more about the 4Bs from Stein’s Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females Film, 2015) Bully: A person who targets another, often supported by a group, to intimidate (such as with hurtful rumors using social media) or act aggressively toward another with threats or violent actions. Bullied: A person who is the victim of bullying and may suffer depression, social withdrawal, physical injury, addiction, self-harm, and even suicide. Bystander: A person who is knowledgeable about unjust acts, such as bullying, and does nothing to prevent the injustice. Brave Upstander: A brave upstander joins with others, or stands alone, to protect others from violent circumstances in everyday experiences, such as bullying, or actively engages in promoting the wellbeing of others to balance inequalities or oppression.
    • See the lesson plan created by ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/share/daa7759d-ce7f-488e-bca7-9bf91fba559e

  1. Upstander lesson plan with H2F2 based on Upstander Encounters with H2F2

    • Prompt: Can you create a lesson plan that engages the encounters with artist Linda Stein’s Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females series as catalysts for awareness of and intended behavior to be an upstander?
    • Second query: Can you revise this lesson plan to be targeting fifth graders including an art-making component?
    • Third query: Please create the pre, formative, and summative assessment plans for the above lesson plan.
    • Fourth query: Please create a grading rubric for this lesson plan.
    • Query to revise the lesson plan to have different art making component: Can you do a lesson plan similar to the above but with a video creation component?
    • See ChatGPT’s responses: https://chat.openai.com/share/0e761ca8-45c2-48be-bc61-647ca5614bc9

References:

  • Atlas, S. (2023). ChatGPT for higher education and professional development: A guide to conversational AI. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cba_facpubs/548
  • Chiu, T. K. F. (2023). The impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on practices, policies and research direction in education: A case of ChatGPT and Midjourney. Interactive Learning Environments, 0(0), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2023.2253861
  • Okulu, H. Z., & Muslu, N. (2024). Designing a course for pre-service science teachers using ChatGPT: What ChatGPT brings to the table. Interactive Learning Environments, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2024.2322462
  • Tlili, A., Shehata, B., Adarkwah, M. A., Bozkurt, A., Hickey, D. T., Huang, R., & Agyemang, B. (2023). What if the devil is my guardian angel: ChatGPT as a case study of using chatbots in education. Smart Learning Environments, 10(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-023-00237-x
  • Tupper, M., Hendy, I. W., & Shipway, J. R. (2024). Field courses for dummies: To what extent can ChatGPT design a higher education field course? Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 0(0), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2024.2316716

Blades

During an interview with Elie Wiesel, he was asked: “What do you think is the real purpose for us being on this planet?” His answer: “ You are here because you have to fight certain battles....” Pondering the phrase “to fight certain battles” I think of my art and why, over the last decade (mostly in the 1990s), I have been using the Machete Blade as metaphor and symbol.

There are many personal reasons, but the cultural ones keep attracting my attention. The violence that we see daily on our own “civilized” soil (most recently the Amadou Diallo murder, the Columbine massacre, the stock trader Mark O. Barton’s shooting rampage in Atlanta) presses on our individual psyches and presents a conundrum with no easy solution. I find that as an artist, I must give form to this puzzle.

In my battle with the Machete Blade, I confront its hard, cold, sharp steel and dull it, curve it, bend it to my will. I demand that it become accessible, intimate, knowable. My artistic process is arduous but I am determined: I tame the Blade. I make it harmless. I control it. I deprive it of its destructive potential and turn it into something soft and pliable, residing in a tactile, even playful environment.

I see the Machete Blade as an icon for our age of aggression. Ignore it at our peril. Instead of being repelled by it and denying its presence, we must address it: politically, socially, economically and, yes, artistically.

By incorporating the Blade into art, I give visual voice to its symbolic threat in our daily lives. By accepting it into a sculptural world of metal, bone, wood, stone and fiber, I deconstruct my own fears, and potentially those of my viewer, and psychically address the intensity of violence in our times.

And, mysteriously, on a psychic level deep within, my battle with Blade gives me strength and hope for a less violent future.

––Linda Stein, 2003

 

Click here to see the art in this series

Profiles (Below the Eyes)

In the 1970s when an androgynous facial profile (starting below the eyes) became my passion, I would see this profile everywhere: in contours of trees, clouds, buildings, landscapes and beyond.

In my art, I could not stop creating this profile in every media, on every surface imaginable, with every art tool available to me.

These myriad experiments formed different categories for my series called Profiles which you can see here.

What prompted this investigation? Why below the eyes? Did I not want to be seen? My struggle at this time (I was in my late 20s) was with my sexuality and my womanhood.

© Linda Stein, 2019

ENCOUNTERS with Profiles

Vulnerability

View Stein's Profile series, and start a sketchbook in which you draw an image about something that has impacted how you perceive yourself. Identify elements in the drawing that become your rules or criteria for redrawing the image. Redraw the image many times, in different styles and media. Reflect on how your series of drawings make you feel in looking at them together. Return to looking at Stein's series and watching the videos in which Linda Stein discusses her Profile (Below the Eyes) series.

Extinguish Gaslighting

Gaslighting is an abusive process of psychological manipulating a person into doubting self-worth, sensory knowing, and perceptions (Jackson, 2011). Once aware of gaslighting, you can extinguish its harmful psychological impact, although it is much more difficult to change the gaslighter. Artists, such as Linda Stein, in her sexism series, help us recognize gaslighting. Once recognized there are steps to extinguish. Begin by looking for gaslighting phrases in the tapestries of Stein’s sexism series.

Since the 1944 film Gas Light, based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, the term and awareness of gaslighting entered popular culture (Tripney, 2019), such as the Dixie Chicks’s 2020 song “Gaslighter.” While the phrase gaslighting is not always used, once you know how to recognize gaslighting you will see how it is used in tweets that belittle, and explored in films and literature, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 long-standing popular short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

References

Dixie Chicks (2020). Gaslighter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbVPcPL30xc

Jackson, T. A. (2011). Which interests are served by the principle of interest convergence? Whiteness, collective trauma, and the case for anti-racism. Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(4), 435–459.

Perkins Gilman, C. (1892). The yellow wallpaper. The New England Magazine. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf

Tripney, N. (2019, October 8). Gaslight: the return of the play that defined toxic masculinity. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/oct/08/victorian-melodrama-gaslight-love-island-psychological-abuse-patrick-hamilton-play-buzzword

Tango

Tango is “an exchange of movement and touch, about a transnational negotiation of desire, of gender roles and communication” (Manning, 2006, p. x). As Horacio Ferrer writes, “before being an artistic expression, before tango came to light as such . . . tango was a certain attitude, a way of life adopted by those of diverse cultures” (1995, p. 11). Linda Stein asks: “In dancing tango does a women give and a man get?” Watch the 9-minute video of Stein discussing her tapestry in the sexism series titled “Loreen Arbus Says Tango is Egalitarian 974.”

“The history of the tango is a story of encounters between those who should never have met or between those who, having met, will remain forever disencountered … This political moment of (dis)encounter is initiated through an embrace that rarely lasts beyond the duration of the tango itself. This encounter, relentless and short-lived, proposes a violation of critical distances, inviting at once intimacy, tension, and conflict.” (Savigliano, 1995, p. xv).

“Tango is everything from a dance of solitudes to a nomadic movement of cultural displacement to a fierce locator of national identity. It is a dance of encounter and disencounter, a voyeuristic embrace of repressed sensuality and a complex network of (mis)understood directions. …

Tango as I encounter it is a peripheral engagement with the world that introduces us to a different way of living with an other. It is a movement that offers the possibility of improvising our encounters. It is a dance that turns us toward an other to whom we might otherwise not speak. …

A product of cultural exchange, tango has never ceased to transform itself through contact with new cultures. …

Tango is the dance of the impromptu rethinking of the politics of communication.” (Manning, 2006, pp. x).

References

Ferrer, H. (1995).

Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota.

Savigliano, (1995).

Data Visualization Art

Zoom in on Linda Stein’s tapestry in the Sexism series titled, November 6, 2015, New York Times 865

What is the data? How is it presented in the tapestry? What is conveyed? When you look at the art section of the NYTimes, do you find artists promoted who share similar life experiences to you? What genders can you guess (from the names of the artists) in these ads? What do you think is conveyed by the artist’s captions and text in the tapestry?

Data visualization art, documentation, methodology, and activism protect individuals from harassment while producing evidence of the massive scale of a problem such as is revealed in the hashtag movements of TimesUp, and MeToo, and the collection of signatures such as with the Not Surprised letter. Feminist theories and practices that have moved away from monolithic notions of women, engage difference by focusing on context-specific positionings of women in relation to other identities. Digital dust (Bernardi, 2018), webscraping, and reverse-engineer strategies can be used to gather data about issues important to you. 

Discuss feminist data visualization art, strategies, manifestos and movements, which could include: glitch feminism manifesto, First Cyberfeminist International manifesto, Post-Cyber Feminist International, feminist data visualization (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2016, 2018; Gallagher, 2017) strategies such as mapping (Alexander & Mohanty, 2010), One Billion Rising, Technofeminism, and FemTechNet.

Return to study of Linda Stein’s tapestry in the Sexism series titled, November 6, 2015, New York Times 865 and discuss this work as feminist data visualization art.

Create an artwork that uses data visualization strategies to bring awareness to sexism. Refer to strategies, resources, and examples at http://cyberhouse.emitto.net/dataViz/.

References

Alexander, J. M., & Mohanty, C. T. (2010). Cartographies of knowledge and power: Transnational feminism as radical praxis. In A. L. Swarr & R. Nagar (Eds.), Critical transnational feminist praxis (pp. 23-45). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bernardi, C. (2018). Digital dust and visual narratives of feminicidios. Visual Culture & Gender, 13, 6-16.

D’Ignazio, C. (a.k.a. kanarinka), & Klein, L. F. (2016). Feminist data visualization.

Friesinger, G., & Herwig, J. (Eds.). (2012). The art of reverse engineering: Open-Dissect-Rebuild. Vienna, Austria.

Gallagher, E. (2017). Data visualization of #MeToo tweets — October 16 to October 18, 2017

Walsh, C. (2020). MeToo founder discusses where do we go from here. The Harvard Gazette.