Teaching Philosophy

Teaching Philosophy

Art education has evolved mightily since its conception, even if we only look back 10 years, a large portion of art education was taught through a historical lens with a plethora of guidelines that restricted what art education could actually do for our students. If we teach through contemporary art examples and contemporary societal topics we can connect the content to the students’ personal experiences. Art education is invaluable and an extremely important resource in a student's education journey because of the real life skills that a quality art education program teaches. A quality art education provides students with the tools to solve real life problems, not just in the context of an artist. These students should be taught how to critically view our society, and objectively respond. These students are the ones that will be able to communicate their ideas impactfully, critically, and most of the time, in a more immediate way than traditional avenues for creating change (digital connections, shocking reactions, targeted audiences, and via conversations fostered through artwork).

Personally, my approaches to teaching heavily encompass student-choice and an inquiry-based education. These approaches help me as an educator grow and learn alongside my students. This approach fosters life skills  such as creativity, communication, problem solving skills, observation, reflection, and persistence, among many others. Learning to create meaningful artwork that responds to societal, cultural, and personal themes is a large goal of this approach to teaching. Teaching through these approaches requires the use of themes and big ideas that drive investigations, and a plethora of contemporary artist examples to spark student creativity. The students who go through these enriching art courses will be the ones to dictate the visual culture in our society, this can happen with students at a very young age in local communities as well. All it takes is a motivated and dedicated teacher to make it happen for the students.

With this approach to teaching, the student is largely responsible for which direction their investigations go. The role of the student is to be a researcher, a collaborator, and an artist. Whereas, my role as the teacher is to guide them in their learning by getting them curious and motivated to respond to ideas and issues around them currently. As they embark on their own artistic endeavors I will be there to learn with them; together we can critically observe and reflect on society around us. Contemporary artists, visual culture, and digital technology will all be staples in their learning, as these are three components that will help students further understand the world around us. As their guide it is also my responsibility to help students push past initial reactions, through surface level ideas, and help them learn through the process that will best set them up for success.

Within the context of contemporary art education, there are also issues that we younger educators must address in order to progress art education programs further. Issues that have impacted my teaching philosophy are the impact of contemporary art, biases in art and art history, as well as visual culture. Contemporary art and biases go hand-in-hand since a lot of biases occur when educators shy away from showing contemporary art or refer to outdated and unrelated artists to our contemporary society today. Contemporary artists use ideas, methods, and processes that are relevant to us today, not 400 years ago. Teaching through a contemporary lens allows me to cut out any of my personal biases in art as well as historical biases that may have become present if taught any other way. The historical art in my teaching will consider where it came from and how we got here. I will likely not teach students to create as artists did so long ago, but there are uses for learning the technical skills somewhere along the road.

Finally, visual culture is something that has helped me develop my philosophy of teaching because visual culture goes in conjunction with contemporary art – what is popular, what is being talked about, what our environment looks like. I find that teaching about visual culture and how to critically observe our surroundings (art included) helps students gain autonomy over their own opinions and ideas about what is happening around them. As opposed toaccepting things the way they are or being deceived by what agenda is trying to be pushed. This is an extremely important skill for people to have, especially considering the sheer amount of content that is pushed at us through the thousands of images and articles; a discerning eye is vital.