Creating A Classroom Climate Condusive To Art

What makes an artist? Who are artists? Does everyone have "an inner artist" waiting to be discovered? I don't think these questions matter in the context of art education. I look upon art education as I do any other subject. Throughout grade school and high school I had to take required physical education courses. Never in my school experience did a PE teacher say, "well, only one of you students is potential Olympic material". A child did not have to be an athlete to meet the requirements of PE and health classes. Not to mention, I remember substitute PE teachers who were less than athletic themselves, following the lesson plan to instruct us to run around the gym and do various exercises. No harm was done, and benefit was gained. However, I have observed students with natural artistic ability being separated from their classmates with comments like, "he can draw", "she has a natural color sense", etc., etc., etc., I think that these types of comments place a barrier in the less naturally gifted art students to hearing what the art lesson is about, and give the naturally artistic students the impression that they can just breeze through the lesson without challenging themselves. The first step in presenting a successful art lesson is to intentionally create, by word and action, an emotionally neutral safe environment in which children of all degrees of natural ability can be open and curious to what is being presented.

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.