From the time I could hold a paintbrush or pencil, I have always been drawn to creating and making art. However, I haven't had the best access to art in the classroom. My elementary school didn't even offer art, this didn't stop me though. I remember I practically lived at the crafts table at my after school daycare at the YMCA. No one, no teacher, ever challenged my art making skills or really tried to teach me how to create art, rather if anything I would have time to explore painting, drawing, and cutting paper. I feel that I would have been better set up for success in the art classroom if I had classes to learn and grow from. When finally I attended my first art class in 6th grade, I would've been more likely to explore more to push my artistic ability and grow as an artist even more. I noticed that I held myself back very often in fear of failure, whereas, some of my peers that had art in elementary school and had the natural love for art that I did seemed to not struggle with this as much.
Even now when I have assignments for any of my art courses I find that my peers often come up with interpretations of the project I would never have. From what I have learned about learning and teaching, this is probably due to my lack of opportunity. With this fear of failure comes a fear of making mistakes which I have learned that is something we should actively promote as art teachers. Mistakes are good and teach us valuable lesson in our artwork and also prevents our students from beating themselves up.
From my experience in the past and from what I have learned now, I want to be an advocate for the arts in all schools from K-12. Also, I want to make sure that in my classroom that mistakes and failures are celebrated and thought of as an opportunity to go in a direction with our art that we otherwise, may have not.
My art piece represents this open mindedness I want in my classroom. From open-mindedness of having the arts in schools, also to open-mindedness for mistakes and using them as creative opportunities. I also made this in the form of a sketch to represent the art making process and planning, but more importantly not using an eraser. Typically and eraser is indicative of trying to "fix" mistakes and mistakes shouldn't be something to view as failure or to "fix".
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