g e n d e r ?

This is the most powerful challenge against gender roles I've ever watched.

r a t i o n a l e

After reflecting on my experiences in past art classes, I’ve come to realize that those classes were most enjoyable because I respected my teachers. I also loved my teachers, but the respect that existed between us was mutual and I believe that makes all the difference in the world of education. In eleventh grade I was forced to take chemistry and I hated everything about it—most specifically my teacher. He was always reluctant to help his students, and our class as a whole began to struggle intensely. None of us respected the man, which made us loathe the content he was trying to poorly teach us. To this day, I couldn’t even tell you what a Reduction-Oxidation reaction is because the day I asked for help, he was busy listening to music by Diddy Dirty Money (I wish I was kidding).

On the contrary, even when I was given an art teacher who was out there or had a very odd demeanor, they were always right there to help when we needed it. They provided us with guidance not only in art, but with advice for going off to college and doing things in the real world. And we listened intently because of the mutual level of respect that we felt for them. I’m confident that no matter what technology I choose to implement in my classroom, as long as I earn the esteem of my students, they will react positively to what I’m teaching. I don’t need them to love it or approve of it; I just need them to learn about it with an open mind. This is one of the reasons that I feel like both technology and traditional art media shouldn't be overly used in the art room. I think that as long as I act as a means for introducing students to both sets of mediums, they will learn what they like to use—and I am indifferent if they wholeheartedly love one or the other. I want to be a liaison between art forms and the minds of my students, but never a force to push them one way or the other. 

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.

Education Philosophy Animation

The marriage between drawing, a "traditional" art form,  and Adobe Flash, a contemporary animation program, provides students with the opportunity to create their projects as they see fit. The creation of GIFs are possible, which allow students and teachers alike to show humor easily in their artworks.

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In many classrooms, the implementation of technology is nearly as taboo as religion itself, acting as either “the source of salvation or damnation” in modern education (2). As a dictation of culture in the world around us, technology often sparks debate between the extremists who support it and those who deny its functionality; tradition versus modernization—the ultimate chasm in culture. Generations born into the digital age are now enrolling in schools, providing avenues for traditional teaching ideologies to branch out and reach students on a technologically engaging level. This seemingly endless debate is prolonged in the art classroom compared to others, as every previous generation learned with traditional mediums and techniques, disregarding the potential benefits of technology. A specialty area as abstract and subjective as art warrants a medium that reflects its essence. With the sheer multitude of information computers provide students with, the possibilities they provide in the classroom are indefinite—and with the Original Synners entering the education system, the present is as good a time as ever to convert the general public into believers of this philosophy.

Technologies in art are more immersive than ever with the introduction of full-body interfaces. The I/O Brush allows you to manipulate life around you in order to create your own reality. This practice of “playing God” to some extent gives the artist control of their environment, and allows them to metamorphose it to any degree. Some students walk into an art classroom doubting their own skills while assuming they “are not an artist.” With this type of full-body interface, they can choose to add motion, color, patterns, and an array of designs into their work. They can appropriate whatever imagery they want in order to create something entirely new. This technology, like all technologies, “reconfigures culture” and would force teachers and students alike to learn together—as the door of possibilities is thrown wide open.

The abstraction of these types of technologies would not have to consume the classroom; they could be used in conjunction with traditional art forms. The point of an art classroom is not merely to learn how to draw or paint—and if you had a class like that, your teacher was doing it all wrong. Art rooms are meant to harness creativity, challenge, manipulate, and recreate existing ideas. To stir up trouble is doing something right in the art world, because if it’s already been done, it’s already been done. I/O Brush emphasizes the connection between technology and the basis of art education by encouraging challenges from the artist. The inventors of the Brush wanted creative minds to go against the grain while using the tool. They wanted to create prospects not only of constructing new work each time, but inventing a new means of reaching that final product. I think that would be an incredible addition to the classroom, as critical thinking and innovation would be fostered each time students picked up the I/O Brush. As a teacher, we would not have to preach that they had to create in a certain way, but allow them to come to terms with their own set of artistic ideologies. 

Anderson, S., & Balsamo, A. (2008). A pedagogy for original synners. In T. McPherson (Ed.), Digital youth, innovation, and the unexpected (pp. 241-259). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.