First-year Reflection
It occurred to me that you will, most likely, be viewing these postings in reverse order of their writing. Just so you know, they are all of a piece, beginning with Finding a Classroom Practice that Flows.
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During the summer after that first semester of teaching, I did a great deal of thinking, reading, and reflecting. I examined what had worked (some things had) and what had not (most of the things I had tried to do). I began thinking that teaching is, to a large degree, finding a balance between the freedom students need to be creative and intrinsically motivated and the structure of academic content. For the next four years, that would be my main focus as a teacher, finding that balance, or, rather, embarking on the life-long pursuit of fine-tuning that balance.
Towards the middle of that first semester, I bought a copy of Drawing with Young Children and Teens by Mona Brookes. In addition to having written a popular series of books on drawing and teaching drawing, Brookes runs a franchise of art schools throughout the country. Brookes' ideas amalgamate those of Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain with what I would characterize as a "self-centered" approach to making art. I don't mean self-centered in any pejorative sense. Rather, Brookes encourages students to create art for their own enjoyment first. She stresses the notion that when we make art to please our own internal sensibilities, we make art that others will enjoy as well. Moreover, she suggests that we are most engaged in our own art-making when we are working from our own emotional, creative, and intellectual core.
This last notion has become a centerpiece of my approach to teaching art--encouraging my students to nurture their own internal critical sensibilities. Here again, I was faced with the balance dilemma. How would I balance the elements of art, the principles of design, art history, and the technical aspects of art with the individual, internal aesthetic sensibilities of 30 students per class? How do we, as teachers, balance the demands of the curriculum with the needs of our students?
*** *** *** *** ***
During the summer after that first semester of teaching, I did a great deal of thinking, reading, and reflecting. I examined what had worked (some things had) and what had not (most of the things I had tried to do). I began thinking that teaching is, to a large degree, finding a balance between the freedom students need to be creative and intrinsically motivated and the structure of academic content. For the next four years, that would be my main focus as a teacher, finding that balance, or, rather, embarking on the life-long pursuit of fine-tuning that balance.
Towards the middle of that first semester, I bought a copy of Drawing with Young Children and Teens by Mona Brookes. In addition to having written a popular series of books on drawing and teaching drawing, Brookes runs a franchise of art schools throughout the country. Brookes' ideas amalgamate those of Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain with what I would characterize as a "self-centered" approach to making art. I don't mean self-centered in any pejorative sense. Rather, Brookes encourages students to create art for their own enjoyment first. She stresses the notion that when we make art to please our own internal sensibilities, we make art that others will enjoy as well. Moreover, she suggests that we are most engaged in our own art-making when we are working from our own emotional, creative, and intellectual core.
This last notion has become a centerpiece of my approach to teaching art--encouraging my students to nurture their own internal critical sensibilities. Here again, I was faced with the balance dilemma. How would I balance the elements of art, the principles of design, art history, and the technical aspects of art with the individual, internal aesthetic sensibilities of 30 students per class? How do we, as teachers, balance the demands of the curriculum with the needs of our students?
posted by Marc Callan at 9:49 AM
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