reflect on three aspects of personal teaching and learning experiences

 

One of the first experiences that comes to mind is helping our neighbor and our family's longtime friend, Sarah Dumler, with her in-home preschool and summer play production. My dad helped her throw up a garage where she invited children from families all across our black forest neighborhood to come to her preschool. I was the helper for all the art activities and snack time *lol*. During the summer, kids would sign up to put on a theater production where we would make costumes and put on an interactive play all across the wooded property. Although I was probably only in middle school for this, I can directly look back on it as my first experience really with challenging these preconceptions about what art should look like and taking it for what it is as the child's individual expression. As a perfectionist middle schooler, I could get a little frustrated when working with the children during the art activities or just go on to do it on my own so that it would look like how I thought it should. Obviously these were preschoolers, so they were messy; they were loud; they were all over the place. At the time, I certainly did not think much of it. If anything, I was glad when the mornings were over. But it directly tied into a more recent experience.

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Although it is a little bit sooner than 6 months ago, I really feel that having the opportunity to work with Artistic Abilities last semester has had an incredible impact on shaping my perspective on art and art education. I have tutored a special needs family for a few years back home, but this was a whole new experience. Not only were we writing the curriculum and designing activities, we were building relationships with these adults and working alongside them for weeks. I really had to confront my ideas about the product of art being such an important piece of artmaking and focus on the process. Many of the students really did not care about what their piece looked like; it was all about getting that tactile experience and the conversations with their peers and with us during the activity. This experience showed me the importance of a differentiated curriculum and recognizing that every student has unique talents, ideas, and abilities that they always bring with them. It is just up to us as educators to help draw them out. 

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The final experience I want to cover is also from last semester. This was so impactful to me as a future educator, I took my experiences from it and centered an entire research project and paper for my class on them. My first real step into a modern Art (and Science) classroom as an educator was at Wellington Middle school. I got to experience first hand the effects of the pandemic on the students and it was super challenging. Throughout doing further research, I adopted this sort of new take on looking at their behavior through a trauma lens instead of just getting caught up in how horrible it is and how shocking. Part of being an educator is building a community of learners inside the classroom and inspiring students to focus on taking care of the one outside as well. Especially in this upcoming generation of students, they have been through this really traumatic period where community was not an option for them to grow in and they have missed opportunities for development in key areas. The pandemic, in many ways, has also deepened existing gaps in education for students in underprivileged and ESL families. Working at Wellington with a lot of ESL and students from different backgrounds really made this apparent to me. However, I got to see how different teachers responded to this trauma and the art and science teachers at this school did a terrific job at working to rebuild community inside the classroom and help students to take back control of their learning and their actions. This experience really helped me to recognize the importance of student-teacher relationships as well as student-students relationships in my future classroom.

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Seems this journal entry was more of a reflective practice, for my art activity, I chose to do something of the same nature. Way back when helping the preschool, we created paper cutouts of the children's hands and had them fill out each of the fingers with pieces of how they identify themselves. I spun off this and created a thumbprint of who I was, who I am, and who I hope to be as a future art educator by drawing on these past experiences and material I have learned along the way.