Ten (updated) things that I will consider when I teach art:
Learn from your failures and your students’ failures. Lead by example. Show your students that you are not afraid to try new teaching methods, unfamiliar art techniques, and that you learn from failure and them.
Listen to your students. They are creative problem solvers and when they solve something praise them for it. It will encourage them.
Meet each student where they are in life. We all have our personal hardships, and you don’t want to punish a student for them.
Give each student the time they need. A choice-based classroom complements this perfectly. Individual students work at different paces and need as much time as they need to nurture and develop their art skills.
Each student is important and brings unique viewpoints based on life experiences to the classroom. Nurture them and see what grows.
An inclusive environment is vital for every student to feel safe and comfortable enough to learn. Accommodate students’ needs and your class will be better for it.
Be flexible. This semester has taught me that flexibility is vital to being an art educator. Throw away your expectations and let things happen organically.
Don't be afraid to get messy. Being open and unafraid will lead to many smiles and wonderful works of art.
Humor always helps. Try your best to inject humor into every classroom situation. It helps to break down barriers gives you a human quality that students can connect with.
Problem solving is a vital quality that you can pass down to your students and can only help your students going forward in life.
Throughout this semester I have learned new philosophies about teaching and further developed others. Many of my previously stated considerations such as learning from failure, learning from my students, each student brings a valuable and unique perspective, explore, meet students where they are in life, humor always helps, be a problem solver (there is always a way), get messy, and be inclusive were derived over a twenty plus year teaching career. This art education studio class with Claire has given me the time to step back and further evaluate and improve upon these ideas. I’ve learned that it is good to go out of my comfort zone and learn new art making skills and I should expect the same from my future students. I also learned how a choice-based classroom can make for a better learning environment and a deeper student connection to their skill and artwork. I went back over my first journal entry list and elaborated on those original big ideas. I didn’t feel comfortable removing any of the specific ideas because they all came from my experiences as an educator.
Over the past four months I have had several experiences that caused me to pause and reflect on how I looked at teaching in the past and how I look at it currently. My past experiences have overwhelmingly been with college aged students, and they learn and act much differently than K-12 students. BRAINY, the classes at Beattie Elementary, family day, my time volunteering at Wellington Middle High School, peer teaching, creating and updating my own blog, and creating lesson plans have all had a profound influence on my teaching philosophies going forward. I knew going in that teaching K-12 was going to be a challenge, but these experiences have made me fully aware of the workload, stamina, and creativity that I will need to bring to the job.
My art piece this week reflects on my past journal entrees and adds additional depth and meaning. I carefully handpicked twelve glass containers to represent each photographic blog post I’ve created over the semester. I’ve been looking deeper at the newly added orbs of light from blog 9 and reflecting on further possible meanings. While searching for glass containers at an antique store this past week I serendipitously stumbled upon a book that I loved as a child, “Sam and the Firefly.” It instantly transported me back to my childhood. The act of catching fireflies and how much joy it brought me on humid summer nights, chasing them through the trees at dusk, placing them in glass bottles, and watching their light pulsate on and off before releasing them back into our yard. These orbs have adopted additional metaphors for childhood magic, learning from exploring and playing, and new ideas, like a lightbulb glowing above my head. The small glass bottles tie into the idea of capturing that magic, lightning in a bottle, message in a bottle, and finally child me placing the fireflies into my bottles. I have painstakingly placed each week’s art into each of the unique bottles. This represents me capturing the magic of each lesson learned in this class and carefully safeguarding each one of them individually for future guidance as an art educator.
This past week has greatly impacted my path of becoming an art educator. I volunteered at Wellington Middle High School and met some amazing educators. I’ve been asked to give a photography lecture before the end of the school year and possibly do my student teaching there next year. In addition to this I was also able to share my knowledge with my class about why it is important to hang every student’s artwork and my past gallery experiences with my former students. I’m extremely excited to see my path as an art educator come into focus.
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