Marking Collage Faster Without Losing Quality (Women's History Month)

Collage is the most enjoyable unit in a high school art course and the slowest to assess. Every outcome is different, the criteria feel subjective, and teachers end up writing paragraphs of encouragement that change nothing. The fix is not to mark less carefully. It is to mark the decisions rather than the artwork, and to move most of the response to the whole class before the final piece exists.

Mark the decision, not the surface

A collage is a sequence of choices: what was cut, what was kept whole, what was placed against what, what the surface is made of, and where the eye is sent. Those are assessable. "Nice composition" is not. Write four criteria and use only those: selection (why these sources), juxtaposition (what the pairing does), material and process (why torn, why cut, why layered), and intent (what the work argues and whether the making supports it).

The immediate effect is that you can mark a sketchbook page as substantively as a finished piece, which is where most of the learning is anyway. It also ends the awkward marking of a technically clean piece with nothing behind it, because intent is a criterion rather than an afterthought.

A five-code margin system

1. S — source unexamined. Material used because it was available, not chosen. Student annotates why this image and not another.
2. J — juxtaposition unresolved. Two elements placed together with no relationship generated. Student writes one sentence on what the pairing should do, then adjusts.
3. M — material unjustified. Torn where cut was meant, or a surface chosen by default. Student names the alternative they rejected.
4. V — vocabulary imprecise. Written annotation using interesting, eye-catching, or flows well. Student replaces with terms that describe what is actually happening.
5. R — resolution. The piece stops rather than finishes. Student identifies the single edit that would resolve it.

Codes go in the margin, nothing else. Then build one whole-class feedback sheet with three photographed examples, the two dominant codes, and a ten-minute response task at the start of the next session. A class set drops from two hours to about forty minutes, and the codes teach vocabulary as a side effect.

The artists that make the criteria teachable

Collage taught as a technique produces decorative work. Taught through its history it produces argument, and that history is full of women who were doing the most radical work in the medium and were credited last. Hannah Höch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany from 1919 is the founding photomontage of political collage, made by the one woman Berlin Dada kept at its margins. Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in 1972 shows selection as the whole argument. Martha Rosler's House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home uses juxtaposition and nothing else. Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, Linder Sterling and Lorna Simpson each give students a different answer to what a cut edge means. Jeanne-Claude's work with Christo was retroactively co-credited only from 1994, which is a case worth twenty minutes on its own.

For the founding case, Hannah Höch – Dada Collage gives you the analysis material and tasks on differentiated levels, so students can work on the montage's construction rather than only its shock.

Building the vocabulary that speeds the marking

The V code only works if students have somewhere to get better words. Analysing a Painting – Method, Vocabulary and Exam Training is written for painting, and its method and vocabulary sections transfer directly to collage annotation, which is what turns a code in the margin into a rewrite the student can actually do. For the identity strand, where selection and staging become the same decision, Cindy Sherman – Staged Photography and Identity gives students a body of work built entirely on constructed images, which sharpens what they think a found image is.

Keep this out of March only. A women's history unit bolted on in one month tells students something you did not mean to say. Put Höch in the Dada lesson because she belongs there, and Saar in the assemblage lesson for the same reason. When the marking system settles, you hand back a class set in one sitting and the next set arrives with annotations that argue instead of apologize.

Related reading from the Teacher Hub

• Cross-Curricular Links for Analysing a Painting (Women's History Month)
• What Students Get Wrong in Perspective Drawing Exam Questions (Women's History Month)
• Building Student Independence in Sculpture (Women's History Month)