My Approach To Teaching
At a certain point in my life, I could have chosen a number of different careers. I chose teaching because it used more of me than all the others. Teaching uses personal, social, organizational, pedagogical, and content-area skills. Its impulse begins with understanding—an insight that burns within us and begs to be shared. Teaching art in particular appealed to me for not just its end-products, but for what making things teaches, indirectly: seeing, planning, process, a sensitivity to tools and materials, and a respect for beauty—these are the big take-a-ways, the larger life-skills.
But most students find art intimidating; they claim they cannot draw, they are messy at painting, they never work with their hands. While all that is often true, students are familiar with communication (especially digital) and so I present art-making as a form of communication, having both form and content, the result of a regular creative process. From there, we can talk about the different art forms (including language), art-making materials, genres, and styles of depiction; even the big, universal themes of art. Given such context, students do not feel so out-to-sea or lacking in skill.
The organization of my content depends on the course, its duration, and of course the abilities and interests of the particular students. Introductory art courses I have organized by discipline (drawing, painting, etc.), more advanced courses by genre, style, or even materials. Lesson titles, such as Twisted Color, Mostly Sky, and Mad Hats, are meant to draw the students into a more playful, creative world. Parallel to my studio assignments are academic lectures that invite the students to engage with and critique artwork as well as to discuss the nature of art, artists, and art history.
Day-to-day, I mix-in lectures, demonstrations, critiques and, above all, individual help. In the end, I try to model not how to paint a particular subject but a method for working, for sensing inspiration and working through a response.
At a certain point in my life, I could have chosen a number of different careers. I chose teaching because it used more of me than all the others. Teaching uses personal, social, organizational, pedagogical, and content-area skills. Its impulse begins with understanding—an insight that burns within us and begs to be shared. Teaching art in particular appealed to me for not just its end-products, but for what making things teaches, indirectly: seeing, planning, process, a sensitivity to tools and materials, and a respect for beauty—these are the big take-a-ways, the larger life-skills.
But most students find art intimidating; they claim they cannot draw, they are messy at painting, they never work with their hands. While all that is often true, students are familiar with communication (especially digital) and so I present art-making as a form of communication, having both form and content, the result of a regular creative process. From there, we can talk about the different art forms (including language), art-making materials, genres, and styles of depiction; even the big, universal themes of art. Given such context, students do not feel so out-to-sea or lacking in skill.
The organization of my content depends on the course, its duration, and of course the abilities and interests of the particular students. Introductory art courses I have organized by discipline (drawing, painting, etc.), more advanced courses by genre, style, or even materials. Lesson titles, such as Twisted Color, Mostly Sky, and Mad Hats, are meant to draw the students into a more playful, creative world. Parallel to my studio assignments are academic lectures that invite the students to engage with and critique artwork as well as to discuss the nature of art, artists, and art history.
Day-to-day, I mix-in lectures, demonstrations, critiques and, above all, individual help. In the end, I try to model not how to paint a particular subject but a method for working, for sensing inspiration and working through a response.