Student Choice
Independence
Community
Student choice is something that I have come to really have an appreciation for. While I was in my senior year of high school we had a new art teacher come in. Right off the bat he was much different from the previous teacher. He gave us a choice in the things that we learned and what we talked about. He gave us a few different topics to choose from and let us give him suggestions for things that we were interested in learning about. I felt like I had a say in my education and what I was learning about. Through this practice I found that I was connecting to my teacher much easier and felt like he was making the effort to connect with us at students. This also gave him a new and fresh way to teach about old traditional art concepts. The environment and spirit of the class was a much more comfortable space.
Independence is something that I find to be very important for the classroom. Of course I love to help students work through their projects, but having a line of students is not very productive. To be able to give them the tools, and having the supports around the classroom to work as independently as possible for them is the goal. Giving them the space to be comfortable to try and fail, being conducive to students assisting each other is also a goal; that comes with having a strong community as well.
A sense of community is something that I feel is very important to have in an art class. Having a place where students feel comfortable enough to share their work with each other I think is a key aspect of the art classroom. When you have a space where people can share their ideas and work and get feedback is where great practices exist. You can learn so much just from talking to others, having a community that fosters this type of learning is important to me. I think that by encouraging group conversations and having collaborative projects will help to infuse this into the class room.
_edited.jpg)
Students are shown choosing and working through different graffiti and lettering styles they learned to use for the project.