LOCATING Self as Teacher

"What are five things that are really important that you hope your students learn from you as a teacher in this imagined teaching context in 2025?"

As an art teacher, there are five things that I want my students can take away from my class:

1) That they are capable

2) Their ideas are worth sharing because they are important

3) I want them to learn to be compassionate and to have an open mind

4) How to convey their ideas cohesively

5) Ideas are more important than technique

These ideas are illustrated in the video below:

As individuals, we are all partaking in the journey of life. Each of us have our own personal landmarks that we pass by and interact with and certain milestones that are common along most if not all of our journeys may be reached at different times, or the roads we take to get there are different.

So what does my journey look like? How did I get to be where I am now? What landmarks along the way caused me to have the ideals above?

For the majority of my journey thus far, I have been filled with self doubt. I was never sure of myself or my abilities, and I felt like I was never good enough at what I was doing. I never fully felt like I was capable. This lasted through most of my K-12 years, but started to change once I got my license. Since I was finally able to get around without depending on other people, I was given a massive sense of freedom. And then physically moving off to college half way across the nation provided me with the space and freedom to learn more about myself and the world. I was an adult all of a sudden and it was awesome!

As an artist, I gained confidence when I started to win awards in the second half of high school. This section of my journey was like I was being stopped on the side of the road and was finally being recognized for all of my hard work, and then was given all of these new tools to work with as I continued on. I wish I had been stopped sooner and was told that I was succeeding and I think that it is very important for students to have their efforts praised, but not overly so.

Everyone wants to be listened to and no child should have to feel like what they say isn't worth listening to. However that is sometimes the case at home some students. I want them to know that no matter what, they have a voice and their ideas are interesting and are worth engaging. I'll never forget the day that I was talking to one of my coworkers at the local art gallery where we taught and she told me how much she loved my student's works because they were all different. She liked that I gave my students the freedom to express what they wanted to within the topic we were exploring that week. This came from a woman who had been teaching for nearly as long as I have been alive and was one of the greatest achievements in my journey so far.

Compassion and Open mindedness. Like a lot of people, I have had some rocky areas of my journey and have endured hardships such as bullying and death of family members. In those times I wish I had spoken up and said that I need some help or needed an extension on assignments. However I will always be thankful to the people who were kind to me in times of need. I want my students to be able to be that person who is kind to those around them and that will help others in their time of need. I want them to be activists about causes that are important to them and share those ideas through art, and I would like them to keep an open mind about things that are thought of as "other" or are unknown to them. That way they can learn to be outstanding, accepting individuals.

One of the most important life skills I have picked up is being able to put thoughts together not only coherently, but cohesively as well. All parts of a work need to fit together, and that comes when an idea fits together fully and makes sense. If you are working through many projects in a certain idea, making sure all of the ideas behind the paintings are cohesive is key. I have to thank my art teacher for introducing us to the idea of having a concentration of works, as it opened up my eyes to a whole new objective of making.

This brings me to the final objective: Ideas and meaning are more important than technical skill. Technique can be taught rather easily with some guidance, however, teaching a person to think about what they want to say visually is much more difficult, and is much more rewarding in the end. I don't want my students to feel like they have to create a pretty picture, I want them to create an image that has power and meaning that is important to them. I don't want to tell them that what they are wanting to talk about is something unacceptable, because most of the time, it won't be.

The interface that I envisioned using in a previous blog post, E-MERGEnt > Self involves creating a virtual reality world where students can explore ideas and places that they wouldn't normally be able to in the real world. I believe that this technology fits with what I want my students to learn in the future because it encompasses everything said above. Being able to manipulate that type of technology and create something is not a small task and will help boost student confidence, thus helping them feel capable. A project using a VR world could be very aesthetically based, but it also has the capacity to be highly conceptual, which is important in two of my points. Compassion comes in the form of the interactions you script in the world. Do you have to help others to reach a goal? Or does the end experience breed compassion for a certain topic or bring to light an issue that the user was previously unaware of? These all play a part in a project using a world builder, but there is still one point that I haven't touched on yet in relation to it, and that is cohesiveness of thoughts which is vital in a situation such as this. The student's VR world has to make sense and work together to make a cohesive and functioning world. Everything has to be thought out and fit into a bigger picture to make the experience believable.