Lissa Pedersen, art

My name is Lissa Pedersen. My students know me as “Miss Lissa”. I earned my Bachelors degree in Fine Art at Rutgers U., NJ and my Masters in Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia U., NYC. I am also a Nationally Board Certified Teacher. I have been the art teacher at Leicester Elementary School since August 2011. 

You can reach me at elizabeth.pedersen@bcsemail.org

Or look at my videos on my Youtube channel

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLPfycWlJMYANwgj4JmbClA?app=desktop

BTW:

MY PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING (for those who want to know)

“What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” 

― Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

My main goal for art education is to help children develop their ability to create and respond to meaning in visual imagery in order to enhance their creativity as free thinkers in this ever changing world.

Sounds simple, right? 

However it involves a complex balance of imposing boundaries while giving students freedom to follow their own vision, to learn to ask their own questions. My goal is to create an educational space that values a culture of creativity that results in innovation and flexible thinking.

I believe in the messiness of learning- both figuratively and literally (just ask the custodians who help upkeep my art room.)  I believe in the learning that comes through taking risks. Art doesn’t always work, but many times different outcomes elicit new ways of thinking. When my students can engage in both tangible and conceptual processes with art materials and art ideas they interact with avenues of investigation that spark their desire to ask their own questions and to learn more.

Indeed, my students are empowered through the hands on exploration of materials as it is often a prerequisite of making meaningful art that investigates everyday life. In many instances, students can engage with concepts that they are learning in their regular classrooms through a collaborative extension in art. For example, my second grade students further their understanding of percussive sound through the construction of clay rattles. They look at rattles from ancient Egypt that were found in tombs of children to gain a connection to children from other times and other cultures, they learn the concept of transformation by changing the simple orb of their clay rattle into an animal, a rocketship, the hand of the creator holding the world, etc. In fact, the discovery process that comes through investigations with materials is one of the pillars that I use to guide my lesson planning and curriculum practice. 

I embrace the idea that the failure that comes from risk taking is necessary and is often the most powerful learning tool. Luckily, as an art teacher at the elementary level, I am exempt from the testing standardization that has the (unintended) consequence of the fear of failure.  

It furthers the student’s hunger for learning, their desire to ask questions, and their willingness to engage.

My philosophy of education involves asking questions to spark a student’s imagination and awareness without being overbearing. It is about carefully using techniques of responding so students are able to find and reflect on the depth in their own artwork and the bigger ideas behind what they are making and trying to communicate. 

In my room, there are students speaking through their art about the pain and loss they feel in a painting about an estranged parent, about their understanding of literature as an artform through character development in alternative ending of folktales, about autobiographical storytelling through relief clay panels, about the joy of celebration through large scale puppet making and parades.I believe in writing lesson plans that are developmentally appropriate, and objective and dialogue based to help a student get to this point where they can learn through experience and increasing complexity.

My approach to art education is about creating a safe space where students are not asked to re-present known outcomes. My criteria for a good project is that it affords many different solutions. If all my students’ work looks similar, or heaven forbid, the same, I feel that I have failed in my goals. (But as I have stated before, failure is one of the ways that we can reflect and grow and get better.)  Instead of copying and making follow-the-leader recipe type art, quality art teaching ought to enable students to reframe and re-examine their own experiences through multiple outcomes and explorations.

My goal for art education is about exposing students to the work of other artists and art movements, not so that they can copy what they see, but to invite them into the larger world artistic thinking, acting, and meaning making. To ask the essential questions about why do people make art, and how do artists get their ideas. In this respect, students enter into the authentic continuum of the dialogue among the history of humans and art. They begin to understand that there are cultural contexts not only in art, but in all of human endeavours. 

I like kid’s art. I get excited by their Art Brut aesthetic. I get jazzed by the enthusiasm they bring to my classroom. It truly warms my soul when I have students tell me that art class is their favorite part of school. I hide my smile when they tell me that they are sad for snow days when it falls on a day when they might miss art class. But even more so, the reason why I wanted to work with children and art in the first place was to highlight the job of creativity in public education. In this era of high stakes testing my role as an art teacher is to help students trust themselves to develop their own potential to cultivate critical and creative thinking. 

 My goal for art education is to support students to learn through a wide range of aesthetic art making strategies in order for them to understand, participate in, and contribute to historical and contemporary artistic and cultural conversation.Though it would be a worthy cause, this approach to art teaching is not simply to educating well rounded human beings. Rather, it provides students with the tools to ask and investigate their own questions about themselves and their world.

Of course this is a lot to ask of my elementary students, but it is the baby steps that evoke a freedom of thought and the understanding that the world is an enormous place. And there is still so much to learn and discover.

So as it turns out, my goals for teaching art are not so simple after all. However, if we trust in the power of art and the intelligence of young children, it is possible.