Art Educator
Philosophy of Education
References
My Path to Teaching
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I began my career as an art educator when I earned my BFA in painting from the University of Oregon. While studying art, I also worked at a feminist non-profit and minored in Art History and Women’s and Gender Studies. My personal art practice was driven by social justice issues, which also drove me to teaching.
After completing my BFA, I began teaching early elementary grades, continuing for six years in public/open-admission schools in Kansas City and New Orleans while earning a Master’s in Early Childhood Education from the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
When I began teaching, I largely separated my art practice from my classroom. However, issues that interested me in art, such as identity and power, were always in the back of my mind in the classroom. I’ve grappled with my role as a teacher and constantly strove to empower my students. bell hooks (1994) cautions educators from assuming an authoritarian role, and instead demands that we validate student experience by “bringing into the classroom pedagogical strategies that affirm [the students’] experience” (p. 84). Empowering my students to learn from each other and be active in their own education is at the core of my practice.
In this statement, I discuss three primary ways I create a student-centered classroom : teaching productive dialogue structures to support democratic decision-making and building class culture, valuing the many ways students express understanding, and facilitating experiences that require students to synthesize and connect their thinking across disciplines.
Dewey, J. (1958) Art as Experience. New York : Capricorn Books (Original work published 1934).
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Rinaldi, C. (2001). The Pedagogy of listening: the listening perspective from Reggio Emilia. Innovations in Early Education : the international reggio exchange, (8)4.
Semetsky, I. (2008). On the Creative Logic of Education, or: Re-reading Dewey through the lens of complexity science. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 40(1),
Classroom Dialogue
In the classroom, I establish conversation structures driven by student leadership and peer-to-peer learning. I believe that building units around big ideas encourage inquiry from multiple perspectives and invite students to connect content with their lived experiences; but before such a unit can be successful one has to create a culture of questioning and listening. “Listening is not easy. It requires a deep awareness and a suspension of our judgements and prejudices” (Rinaldi, 2001, p. 3). Conversation structures that center student voices such as VTS and Socratic Circles promote meaningful dialogue, leading to deeper collaborative meaning-making.
Students notice when educators listen to them, and while it may be a slow process to involve students in planning, it is a rewarding one. Ultimately, education is about the students, a fact that policy-makers, administrators, even teachers often forget. Our invisible curriculum is felt and internalized by students. Representation, honest discussion, productive debate create a multivocal classroom that celebrates learning through many paths. When problems arise in the classroom, I invite students to participate in generating solutions. Maxine Greene (1995) explains the power of open dialogue : “Once [individuals] are open, once they are informed, once they are engaged in speech and action from their many vantage points, they may be able to identify a better state of things— and go on to transform” (p. 59). I believe that establishing a culture of communication and inquiry, and supporting that structure with efficient and meaningful classroom systems, leads to an invigorating and joyful classroom.
In my third grade classrooms, I established conversation structures such as Socratic Circles that were driven by student leadership and promoted meaningful dialogue. I believe that building units around big ideas encourage inquiry from multiple perspectives and invite students to connect content with their lived experiences. This experience equips me to establish a student-centered art classroom where students can grapple with content from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Multimodal Expression
Too often our classrooms demand that students internalize knowledge and demonstrate mastery through predetermined and restrictive tools of measurement. It is too easy to dismiss creative, experimental, and experiential learning in the classroom in favor of mirroring standardized tests. However, mastering Common Core State Standards requires that students are not only effective at analyzing a literary text or evaluating the accuracy of a science experiment, but that they are able to create their own original works in their field of study. Art practices hone this creative potential, and require students to reflect and engage in conversation in which there is no right answer, only possibility. These are much higher levels of thinking than we are asking our students to do on a regular basis. I’m determined to bring this quality of education to my students.
I developed my leadership skills working as a Graduate Assistant, becoming a peer mentor, delivering professional development presentations, and conducting action-research in an elementary student teaching program emphasizing arts integration and language diversity. My research explored the possibilities of utilizing student journals as a connective tool in inquiry-driven elementary curriculum. Students recorded their thinking across disciplinary subjects to develop personal understandings of big ideas. This was made possible by the many ways students chose to express themselves - through collage, dance, mark-making, song, and bilingual writing.
Complex Relationships and Experiences
I hope to establish a classroom in which students can become themselves, ask critical questions, and figure out how they’d like to impact their communities. As an art educator, I have the opportunity to interact with the aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic landscapes of diverse groups of students. These landscapes are constantly changing, sometimes include contradictions, and sometimes rub up against pre-set curricular expectations. The art classroom must be a space where these internal landscapes can exist simultaneously; not necessarily in harmony, but in productive and respectful tension. I have drawn heavily from John Dewey’s work emphasizing the importance of experience in learning; a contemporary scholar, Inna Semetsky (2008), leverages Dewey to express a concise description of what it means to learn that has stuck with me throughout my own education :
“Interactions are established between, as Dewey said, what is done and what is undergone, and it is by means of apprehending these connections and interrelations that ‘an organism increases in complexity’ (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 23); in other words, it learns” (p. 86).
I love the idea that learning is an increase in complexity. By creating collaborative learning structures, building inquiry-driven units, and validating many ways of knowing and expressing, the classroom becomes a complex system. Such complexity is possible because of powerful relationships built within it; in the classroom this means relationships between myself and students, between students, between students and materials, students and content, the list goes on. By framing learning as an increase in complexity, Semetsky also suggests that it is not something that one can complete. I am continually learning, researching, and reflecting on my practice in the classroom and I am thankful to be able to collaborate with students, families and colleagues along the way.
In my second grade classrooms, I partnered with a community center to bring an interdisciplinary nutrition and gardening program to my classroom, co-created an after-school tutoring program, and developed classroom structures that supported a one-to-one technology pilot program. These experiences have equipped me with the organizational skills necessary to collaborate to deliver integrative experiences in the art classroom.