My work as an art teacher and as an artist is all about being on a creative spree; constantly running wild with expression through making art and crafts. My mind and heart are wrapped up in "making stuff".
Over the past ten years of I have taught art in various settings to children of all ages. For the past five years, I've worked as a full time middle school art teacher. Additionally I give private lessons. I am so fortunate to have wonderful students who are as excited by visual art as I am.
"What I do as an art educator
is not really any different than what other teachers do, which is to
help my students to make sense of their experiences and themselves, to
facilitate critical inquiry and creative problem solving and to support
the creation of meaningful interactions and interconnections between
and within the world(s) around them."
- David Darts
Ten Lessons the Arts Teach by Elliot Eisner
1.
The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative
relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers
and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that
prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3.
The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons
is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4.
The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving,
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and
opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a
willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work
as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither
words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The
limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
7.
The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All
art forms employ some means though which images become real.
8.
The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children
are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must
reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the
job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from
no other source and through such experience to discover the range and
variety of that we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
Source:
Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the creation of Mind, Chapter 4 What
the Arts Teach and How it Shows, pp.70-92. Yale university Press.
Available from NAEA Publications.
