8-30-09

My own practices as an artist will help me in the classroom by enabling me to maintain an attitude of exploration while teaching. Continuing to create while teaching will increase my awareness on the job, give me creative approaches to relating with students and make me more receptive to my students' art as I grow. There is also the need for me to stay connected with the art world, learn about and react to what contemporary artists are doing, and

Skills that artists develop that also work toward success as a teacher include increased visual, symbolic, and maybe even social awareness, as I've talked about before. There is also receptiveness to expression, and being able to see the students not only as a collective body, but also as individuals with their own potentials to aspire to at the same time.

I will incorporate my art into my teaching by bringing ideas into the classroom that I am currently struggling with, so that be wrestling with tough concepts or certain roadblocks early, my students would have the opportunity to advance further than me in the span of their careers. There are also ideas I'm just thinking about now, such as allowing students to preview/critique some of my work, but I still need to work out details before I decide if physically bringing my artwork into the classroom at times is a good idea.

I will continue to make art while I teach primarily by utilizing my summers to be productive in my own artwork. When teaching higher grades levels, it's possible that I may find ways to work alongside the students, after putting thought into strategies for working in the same studio space with them, without my artwork, techniques, and ideas having too much influence on theirs. After doing it for a while with each group and learning about their characteristics, there may be a balance found where the teacher and students can inspire each other as the teacher facilitates creative practices.

Even though there seems to be a decreased interest in it within the current community of upcoming artists and art teachers, I am a very firm believer in the importance of technical skill in art, simply because of the freedom it provides. Part of creating art that is meaningful to oneself is having command over medium, and not being limited with what you can say through your work by not having the technical vocabulary. It will be important as I design all of my lessons to include new techniques/practice with known skills, the ability to create without being bound to set elements and principals, larger ideas that effect the community represented in the classroom, and ideas that will manifest themselves as personal expression in each artists' own work. Often, the students will need to make generic techniques their own, cutting edge solutions to whatever they encounter in their artwork.

Introductions

I graduated from a 6th through 12th grade visual and performing arts high school, where I was, of course, an art major. My school was located in an "inner-city" area, and yet was quite a unique place to its own. Although my city had four other high schools which suffered from varying degrees of apathy, disrespect for authority, violence, and other such issues, my school only have 500 students, and was a fairly close-knit environment.
Though the numbers influenced the higher achievements and decreased discipline problems there, I also believe that the focus on the arts--rather visual, dance, vocal, band, orchestral, or drama--deeply effected the way students approached their education. The same things seemed to occur, on a smaller scale, within the school itself. This leads me to believe that cultivating the students' talents will give them a sense of individuality, direction, and motivation in their education.

As an art major, I was a nerd even within the "uncool" school to attend. It was one of the smallest majors at the school, and some of the students went out of their way to be accepted by other majors' cliques. I was definitely not one of the "cool kids", but still well known and liked as an individual. The reputation I acquired helped me to focus on my own goals.
Academically, to be honest, I hated all the subjects except art (and parts of English). I was focused, but limited in what I could do outside of my area of expertise.

My biggest fear related to working with high school students is the students' apathy, or an unwillingness to take art seriously, but I am most excited about inspiring those students who, perhaps, have no area of interest. I'm not sure exactly what I will learned (or I would have studied it already...), but I intend to keep my eyes open for all things.