Week 1 in Review

What values do you want to pass on to your students in their exploration and learning of art?

Art is one of the ideal school settings in which students should feel free to make mistakes. I draw this concept from that old saying often floating in inspirational memes around the Internet:

That making mistakes is essential to learning and an action to be encouraged is barely spoken of in educational environments. Art consists of editing, and sometimes what one artist originally considered an error could become one of their proudest accomplishments.

Art should draw from life, and through the exploration the subjects we learn. As the NMC Horizon report detailed, there is currently a shift in students acting as mere consumers of information to becoming creators. They cite the “Minecraft Edu” game as a digital opportunity for creative development, wherein users must mine minerals to build  their worlds. I believe applications like this can be used in conjunction with artistic actions, such as mixing powder to form clay that can be modeled and developed in the classroom to bring alternate realities to life. Art imitates life, so why shouldn’t lifelong art practices mingle between the digital and physical world?

How does technology and living in a digital society impact your values?

I value honesty in my daily life, but my posts on social media are in a way an untruth because they are pictures and quotes of my “best” self. I don’t post about hot-button topics, like religion or politics; mostly I share news articles or pictures of my dog.

It will be important to help students navigate the realm of digital presence in ways that are both smart and safe. That might sound like an "after-school special" kind of message, but, as a blog writer on the old Xanga website, I learned the hard way in high school that what we put on the Internet is not private. Posts can be shared, and there are people who can get hurt by what we write. The Internet is the ultimate version of a potentially damaging “permanent record.”

Is there anything in these talks that support or alter your view, or are there areas of concern or challenges that are not taken into account for your future teaching?

Cindy Foley’s TEDTalk, Teaching art or teaching to think like an artist?, was for me the most striking “text” we encountered this week. I agree with her mentioning that art education is currently on the defensive, trying to adapt to standards and concrete expectations foreign to the nature of art-making practices, whereas the field should instead be focusing on developing learners that think like artists. By that, Foley explained that art education should be about “embodying artists’ habits:” Finding comfort with ambiguity; Generating ideas; and Transdisciplinary research.

In all honesty, transdisciplinary research is my jam. The idea of one subject inspiring another subject, that leads to another idea, that takes students on a seemingly disjointed path and ends with a well-rounded, multi-dimensional product is how I work, and how I would ideally like to inspire students to work, as well. Last week in class I shared the Brainpickings blog, which is one such tool for other transdisciplinary thinkers to follow the rabbit hole of inquiry. There’s another great Ted Talk, led by Rives – called “the first 2.0 poet” – that expands this concept by reinventing the encyclopedia game where players search Wikipedia, rather than hard copy books. The game involves reading an article until you find something on the page you didn’t know about before, and clicking links that lead to other previously unknown topics. It makes me wonder, will the model of American education ever become self-driven in this vein? What has been stopping us from using this model until now, considering technology makes more information available at our fingertips than ever before? Is it merely the lack of measurable standards? A fear to let students drive their learning environment? Or perhaps educators are torn between a concern that they might know less about the emerging technologies from which to draw information than their students, or the desire to ensure factual accuracy by choosing material with proper citations – which some online sources lack? 

This mode of research-driven inquiry also leads into my history with the study of dramaturgy, which I was introduced to during undergrad. Essentially, dramaturgy is a research field that encourages the cross-examination of art forms to enrich play writing and production. It was my dream job, but unfortunately it’s not a job that many theaters hire for or pay people to practice, and so while I was originally distraught that this dream career was not to be mine, it ultimately inspired me to reconsider my fondness for teaching. What better discipline could there be for drawing connections between various topics that stem from students’ own interests?

What forms do you imagine it will take in your teaching? In your own learning?  

Though I’m in school for a K-12 art certification, I would like to draw from what Sean T. Buffington wrote in his article on collegiate educational systems, Art Teaching for a New Age: “We may have to imagine our curricula, recast the BFA degree as a generalist, not professional degree.” I want to provide a well-rounded curriculum in which students of any grade level can bring other school subjects into, or draw upon personal experience. Art should be transdisciplinary, where artists play with different techniques and information.

I would also LOVE to incorporate The Lego Movie’s “Master Builder” concept, which as Cindy Foley’s explained, was the person who has the courage to be creative and have ideas. Like Foley, it would be incredible to have a classroom full of master builders at play who feel free to have ideas bounce off one another. Not yet having a classroom of my own, however, I worry how it would work to have multiple “leaders” in classroom guiding lesson topics simultaneously?