Sunday, August 30, 2009

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.

1 comment:

  1. I like the part about critiquing a piece of your art in the classroom. Not only does this give students an opportunity to share and discuss, but they may not be so afraid to say what they want to because it is not one of their peers own art. When we did critiques, I was always afraid of offending somebody. I might not even tell the students that it is your own art until the end so that way the students can analyze it without knowing who or where it came from.

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