This year started a new and unknown chapter in my life. I left a teaching job that I have known for the entirety of my adult life, left a house that my family and I rebuilt with our hands and hearts, and left many friends that I cared deeply about. My family and I came to Colorado for a new start, new hopes, and a new life. It was difficult at first. I missed everything that I had left behind and did not feel connected to life here. I felt isolated, alone, and honestly unwelcome. My Colorado life changed when I joined the Colorado State University family and it started in Dr. Claire Chien's Art Education classroom.
Being a student after having been an educator for the past twenty-four years was both refreshing and terrifying. At the beginning I was timid, afraid to make mistakes, afraid of what my new peers would think of my artistic ability and was not exactly sure what I wanted to say with my art or my teaching. Throughout the semester I grew more comfortable and confident on what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. The readings, our art journal posts, BRAINY, peer teaching, my peers, and my teacher helped develop my latent teaching abilities. By the time I posted my fifth journal I finally felt like I had my voice, I was ready to share it, and build upon it.
Most of my past teaching perspectives continue to ring true as we near the end of this class but have come out with a different pitch or tune. For example, I started my artistic representations of my learning growth in this class by simply looking east towards the home I had grown up in followed by looking up at the sun and questioning myself as to where I should go from here? Where will this light take me? Little did I know that light would be the big idea or running theme throughout my art making this semester. Each week my art changed based on experiences and environments, but almost always kept with my theme of light.
I started teaching at age twenty-five with no formal instruction on how to be an educator. Everything I learned about teaching was simply from me watching my teachers throughout my life. Now that I have been an educator for so long, I find it extremely helpful to be back in the classroom, returning to my role as student and observer.
I plan on displaying my journal entries as a three-dimensional piece. I painstakingly placed each tiny photograph into small glass bottles below my final art piece. Visually this should conjure ideas of a teacher leading students. The photographs will go in order as they appeared in my journals, from one to eleven. My twelfth journal was the curation and photographs of the eleven glass bottles, so they will be representing themselves within the art piece. Each bottle represents a metaphorical transparent folder with lessons tucked away for safe keeping. Two of the bottles are colored and strategically placed to bookend the start and end dates of my groups peer teaching lesson. The blue and green colors tie into the color that I ideated during our lesson.
My overall idea is portrayed by light and the capturing and storing of it. I felt it appropriate to use photography, which means drawing with light, to represent my overall concepts. The light orbs and bubbles in my photographs represent my peers, my teacher, the many people I learned from this semester, my students, knowledge, as well as my distant and unknown future as an educator. My central photographic piece will be printed on glass, so it has a unique inner glowing quality to it.
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