Consider your learning in the past: What events/moments/personal experiences change or refine my past perspective to look at art teaching and learning now?
I love science, for the longest time I thought I'd become a zoologist because of my love for animals and science. Despite my clear natural talent and love for art making, I think without middle school art I probably would have gone a much different route in my life. My art teacher was always very supportive and encouraged me to push myself. My middle school only had 6th grade and 8th grade art, so I actually ended up taking 8th grade art twice, which one would assume would be kind of repetitive or boring as a student to take the same class twice. However, my teacher made sure to use me as a helper and to push myself to try the same projects but with more challenging techniques or materials. For example, for our grid-based portrait we originally used graphite and focused on proportions, but my second time around I was challenged to attempt colored pencil and to never use the color black. Or a couple times she would demo one technique and then I would demo another. I think because of her, I got to get a feel for what teaching art feels like.
This was my first introduction to many of my teaching philosophies of mine that have adapted and evolved over time. This way that she challenged me with projects that I have done before was my first experience of the benefit of differentiation. I might've started to get bored and not like art otherwise, and I know that I never want to be the reason that my students do not like art.
The way that she allowed my peers and I to demo and help our peers, was a great example of a little bit of student-centered learning as well as the model of teaching called Social Interaction. I can personally speak on how letting students take the reigns sometimes increases engagement and excitement in the class and about the project. The same goes for "Social Interaction", students are excited to be social especially at the middle school age an they can benefit so much from learning from their peers at different levels.
The piece that I created for this entry represents my change and philosophy of student-centered classrooms. I choose to emulate a crayola colored pencil case and made a couple changes to better represent my beliefs and reflection. I chose a crayola box because they have the smile that reveals the colored pencils and I think that perfectly represents how my students well-being and creativity is the most important to me. Instead of writing "crayola" for the brand, I chose to write "make art to better represent that making art is a big focus of mine. On all crayola boxes it says "preferred by teachers" and I chose to cross out teachers and write "students" to push my student interaction and centeredness even further.
My current beliefs and experiences of art and teaching art will stick with me throughout my preservice teaching and into teaching my own classroom. However, I think it is important to always self-reflect and make necessary changes and additions to these philosophies.
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