A Blog For Non-Artists Who Teach Art

Arts Education is both a national and community based topic these days. Collectively, people are beginning to show the signs of realizing the value of arts education by giving some shape and definition to it, advocating for it, developing and refining instructional strategies , and formalizing it through the establishment of learning standards. As a practicing visual artist, my bias is to support artists in education by professionalizing the field of teaching artists, and by creating as many diverse opportunities as possible for artists to directly design and implement programs in all the arts with every imaginable population. There IS NO SUBSTITUTE for an artist when it comes to teaching art. Having disclosed my bias, I realize that there is a push for classroom teachers and others in extra-curricular settings to provide art education and art experiences for children, youth and adults. As an artist who has worked in all types of settings doing many different types of things for over 15 years, I decided to write a blog to encourage non-artists who are timid about the demands made upon them to provide art experiences to jump into the chaos, get a little messy and go for it! Teaching art is such a big topic that I didn't know where to begin to blog about it. Finally, I decided that since there is so much excellent material published on all aspects of art, art strategies, what is art, the fear of art, the benefits of art, advocating for art, art in the classroom etc., etc., etc., that possibly the only useful contribution I could make to the discussion would be to blog about art episodes in my microcosm, and that my descriptions and reflections about the episodes would help non-artists develop their own framework for processing their art teaching experiences.