5 t h i n g s

As a future art educator, there is a great deal of content that I hope students take away from my classes—as I’m sure all educators strive for. Looking back at the art teachers I had throughout school, they were always warm yet firm with their pedagogical beliefs. Art classes always end up with kids who truly love the subject, and those who took it for an “easy A.” Somehow my teachers, particularly my high school teachers, always managed to bridge that gap, ultimately maintaining the attention of both groups of students. They knew how to talk to the students who wanted nothing to do with the art community and relate their personal interests back to their artwork. It was an incredible skill that I hope to cultivate in my own classroom.

My teachers inspired me more than I can express in this miniscule blog. Some weren’t afraid to push me to wit’s end—which made me produce projects of such high quality that I even surprised myself. Some you could tell really cared about their students, which made the students want to succeed in the class. Some were delightfully sarcastic, which really made us strive to keep up. The culmination of every teacher I ever had taught me the skills to step into their shoes one day. Out of all of my landmark experiences, I’m determined to carry the following five concepts into my personal pedagogy:

1) Don’t be afraid to be honest. In eleventh grade my class did critiques for every final project. The format of the critique was that my teacher would hang four pieces on a display board and the class would have to critique them in comparison to each other. After making comments about them, we were told to choose the best out of the four, and our teacher would remove that work. He would then replace it with someone else’s piece, and the weaker pieces would remain hanging. He urged us to be brutally honest about each other’s work, which at the time was met with comments like “that’s so mean.” But it wasn’t mean. That was the starting point when I began to realize art teachers only want you to improve as an artist—and if that means being brutally honest, so be it.

        2) Accept challenges with open arms (and an open mind). The WORST (best) projects in classes were always the ones where you were given the assignment and had no idea what direction to take it in. In high school I was given the theme “darkness” and I had to make a project in my own time every single week regarding that theme. By week three I was out of ideas. But it got me thinking constantly. Everything I looked at, I saw it through the lens of darkness. I saw people, diseases, disorders, cathedrals, psychology—essentially everything differently. And that was the goal of my teacher. The final project was made specifically for us, and mine was to show darkness in complete daylight. So I painted a cityscape of 9/11 about to happen (an idea that I still am unsure how I came up with). I made my teacher proud because my mindset was altered completely by this difficult assignment. Looking back, it was the single greatest assignment I ever had.

      3) Incentives are a good thing sometimes. One of my favorite teachers of all time was named Mr. Napoli—a quintessentially Italian man. He used to make us what he called “pizza fritas.” He would deep fry dough in olive oil during class, get squeezable pizza sauce and parmesan cheese and let us enjoy them. He would only make them once or twice a semester (sometimes he made pancakes, too) but it was a beautiful reward for working hard in class. I think that every once in a while, that is a great reminder to students that they work very hard and you appreciate every minute of it.

)      4) Give students freedom. From beginning level drawing classes in ninth grade, my teachers always kind of left me alone during class. While some students like constant attention in class, I much preferred to sit with my music on for 90 minutes, and let my mind wander. In tenth and eleventh grade we worked on a mural on the façade of our building—and being able to sit outside, enjoy the sunlight, and paint was an incredible change from the dark halls of our windowless classrooms. It helped clear my mind and let me art—which is exactly what most of us needed.

5)Work with students outside of class. Pennsbury was the only local high school who had their senior prom at the school. Everyone else would have their students go to Philadelphia or a fancy catering hall, but we stayed at our school every year. Why, you ask? Because our art students and hundreds of volunteers (including parents and community members) devoted 8 months of the year into creating murals, statues, mechanically engineered moving monuments. Our school looked like an artistic museum on prom night rather than the typical locker-covered hallways you’d see every day. The art teachers were the leaders of this creative army. Working with them on out-of-class projects was one of the only ways you could see the students’ raw innovation and collaborative skills. Even though this prom is the only one in America like this, working with students in art clubs, on murals, or in study hall studios is perfect for learning who they really are, and what they are capable of creating.