My Teaching Philosophy

  My teaching philosophy has an overarching theme of wanting to provide students with the sense that they can do and that they can make. Above all else, I would like my class to get students over that hump where they believe they cannot do art and they never will. My objective is to become a professor, and you may think that my objective may not apply to college students, but it does. As a student myself, I will run into creative blocks that feel insurmountable, and the teachers who help me over these difficulties end up being the ones I look to while trying to develop my own teaching skills.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree in my family, my mother is currently a special education teacher and my greatest influence. I come from a line of educators, my grandfather is a professor, and my great-uncles are also professors; throw a book in one of my family reunions and you'll hit a teacher. On my first day of practicum when I walked into my elementary school prepared to teach a second grade I was nervous beyond belief, so I wrote to my mom. Her reassuring words were the ones her father told her on her first day, “You know more than them.” As the teacher you know more, especially in the case of a bunch of second graders, and it is your job to impart that knowledge to them, so why would I be nervous when I already know what they don't? Those words were enough to give me the confidence to get over that first hump of thinking I couldn't do it, and the inspiration to continue my path with education.

My style of teaching is more hands-on, I think art involves a lot of critical thinking but I've found many of the topics brought up in an art classroom are harder to grasp when one does not explore it themselves. Asking questions such as, “What is art?” when a student has just been doing math and English for the past several hours may not yield as great a discussion as when asked the same question with a lump of clay in their hands when they are experiencing art at that very moment. My hope is to have every student make at least one thing they can look back on and think about how satisfying and proud they were to create the thing that was sitting in their head. There's no better feeling, and it may encourage some to explore that feeling more and become artists or art teachers themselves.