Art Education
As an art educator at both the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Winthrop University, I worked with undergraduate art education students, returning students in MAT programs, and experienced teachers in MA programs. While meeting the needs of each of these distinct populations, my approach to art education was informed by a set of philosophical principles including:
a concern that art education whatever the level, serves holistic development for teachers, as well as their future students;
an artist-teacher model in which art teachers have solid backgrounds in studio art, and a commitment to their own creative work as a complement to developing their own students’ creative abilities; and
cultivating teachers as “reflective practitioners” (Schon, 1984), whose educational endeavors are guided by self-knowledge and self-determined values in response to student needs.
Toward those ends, my colleague at Winthrop, Dr. Laura Gardner, and I cultivated artist-teachers by ensuring that Art Education majors had the same foundation program as Studio majors; had specialization reviews in both a studio concentration and art education; held an annual exhibition of their own work, their students’ work, or both; and kept a reflective journal/sketchbook throughout their program of study. At the same time, we were committed to cultivating each student’s unique interests and backgrounds, for example, encouraging MAT students coming from design fields to bring “design thinking” and other aspects of their knowledge and experience to their lessons, and similarly with students from art history, as well as popular culture (e.g., comic books or graphic novels). Dr. Gardner and I were fortunate in having a strong coterie of mentor teachers, many of whom had been our former students, and we often collaborated with those teachers in the classroom, as in the example below.
Collaboration with the Schools
These images are examples from a collaborative project my Winthrop Art Education students did with local K12 art teachers and their students. It was for a display held in conjunction with an exhibition of children’s drawings collected by the psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Children of Crisis.
At the time, self-expression was not a priority in art education. Rather, following a “Discipline-Based Art Education” model, lessons often focused on learning to draw and paint in the style of well-known artists. So, for many teachers, some of the work, such as the image on the right, came as a surprise.
One aim of this project was to encourage teachers to offer more student-centered assignments as an opportunity to get to know what their students were thinking and feeling. Today, art education is moving back toward self-expression as part of social-emotional learning.
Artist/Teachers — Reflective Practitioners
* under construction *
In this section, I will invite my former art education students to share their work as students, the work of their current students, and/or their recent art work.