My Teaching Philosophy

A scientist discovers the cure for a life-threatening disease. An architect designs a bridge that allows pedestrians to safely travel across a busy street while reducing traffic. A mother comes up with a song to help her children remember their multiplication facts. These feats are all accomplished by thinking creatively. Creativity, the ability to transcend traditional ideas, patterns, or rules, to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, and interpretations, is vital to a student’s overall development. Fostering creativity in the art classroom gives students the chance to think in a different way than any other class allows them to, providing them with endless possibilities to explore alternate realities, innovate, and understand humanity. Major companies around the world seek individuals who possess the ability to think creatively to advance their companies. For these reasons, I choose to focus my teaching on harnessing and stimulating creativity to create students who are equipped to handle the challenges of life and the demands of a global workforce.

Throughout my art classes, I design lessons with the ultimate goal of harnessing the creativity of each individual student. Units and lessons engage students on a personal level by using personalized-learning techniques that emphasize student-choice. I choose to incorporate student-choice in my lessons because I believe in empowering students to be the most effective in their talents by exploring their interests and reducing their limitations. These lessons remain flexible to the individual, allowing me to employ differentiation tactics while allowing students to create art that appeals to them, explores new areas, and challenges their pre-existing knowledge. In addition to focusing on creativity, I incorporate the formal qualities of art and design into the framework of each lesson to prepare my students to craft their message in the best way possible. These formal qualities as well as the creativity to put them into practice are reinforced throughout each lesson, allowing students to receive a well-balanced art education that teaches them to be unique and effective creators, communicators, and contributors to their society.

In addition to designing artistically rich and creative lessons, I incorporate interdisciplinary topics into the subject matter of my lessons, ensuring the content is relevant to my students’ lives. By implementing innovative teaching strategies through a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) curriculum and a project-based learning approach, I empower my students to learn how to become efficient problem-solvers as well as to use their creativity to think holistically when approaching challenges. I employ the arts as a way of interpreting other subjects so that my students are able to make real-world connections with lessons and explore possibilities through hands-on learning. I ensure that my lessons stay relevant to my students and the continually changing world they live in, as I regularly adapt content to incorporate popular culture themes and current events. By working with material that is relevant to their interests, wants, and needs, my students are actively engaged in the classroom, and excited about what they are learning, while creating art that is conceptually, aesthetically and personally meaningful to them.

To support the interdisciplinary content and creative focus I include in my lessons, I aim to create a culture in my classroom where students can be self-reflective of their learning process and overall performance. I believe in challenging students to see their progress as a process that is constantly evolving and improving in various ways, much as I see my own teaching practice. To do this, I strive to create a community of artists within my classroom that supports and encourages each other through adversity and acknowledges each other in times of success. This sort of environment allows each student to feel safe and comfortable, while fostering an overall acceptance of individuality, where differences are not only welcomed, but celebrated. In this environment, you will often find students teaching students, genuinely caring about supporting their peers and contributing to the success of others. This sense of community often allows me to take on the role of a facilitator, allowing myself and my students to experience the rewards of a positive learning environment. In an environment such as this, students learn to set aside their pride and seek constructive criticism, with the ultimate goal of improving their process in order for them to grow as artists and people.

A supportive classroom community such as this would be nearly impossible to create without having a personal connection with each of my students. For this reason, I make every effort to build a deeply personal connection with each individual. I strive to make each student feel wanted and that they belong, and that the skills and viewpoints they bring to the classroom contribute to the greater good. This sense of acceptance often makes my art classroom a place where students who battle anxiety, depression, and other emotional stresses feel safe, supported, and connected. My goal is that through acceptance, instilling high expectations for hard work and encouraging mutual respect, my students will thrive in this community, developing a sense of pride in their work that translates to overall success in their academics, school career, and life.

The connection I have with my students also extends far beyond the community I build in my classroom, as I am fortunate to experience the reward of connecting with my students during extracurricular activities. Events such as art exhibitions in the community, volunteer sessions at nursing homes and hunger drives, college visits, and mural painting sessions around our school give my students the opportunity to share their passion for art with others and make meaningful contributions to their community. In order to create strong connections between my students and our community, I seek out community partnerships that connect students with professionals in their desired field, allowing students to make real-world connections with their education and to see first-hand that their dreams are attainable. The lessons I learn from my students through these experiences in and out of the classroom are nothing short of inspiring, constantly challenging my views on the world and shaping me into a better teacher and person.

Furthermore, I demonstrate how to seek success in creative pursuits by leading my students by example, as I remain a professional artist in addition to an art educator. As an educator, one of the most important things I can bring to my students is a strong content knowledge and understanding of my profession. By regularly working in the visual arts field through commission work with clients, art exhibitions throughout the community, and my online art store, I am able to teach my students how to be successful artists from a professional standpoint. I strive to apply my innovative and relevant content knowledge I have gained from my career as an artist to each lesson and unit I create. This sort of content knowledge instantly builds credibility with my students, as they see that I not only teach because I have learned the material in a college art education course, but I also teach because I practice art and find it vital to my existence. 

I like to view my teaching in the same way I encourage my students to view their education; a constant practice that is evolving and improving as I move forward. As Pericles once said, “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” While my job as an art educator is to prepare my students to be the creators of beautifully constructed monuments, my ultimate goal as an educator is that my teachings extend far beyond the classroom- inspiring students to apply what they learned to better their lives and the lives of others. I hope that through my teaching, I am able to help each student better understand themselves, their capabilities, and how they can creatively contribute to the beautifully complex and ever-changing world we live in.