EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY

• To be a teacher means to help students grow as individuals and expand their knowledge. To help Students discover their passions and guide them on their journey. To be a teacher is to provide students with tools for life while helping them find a direction. To teach art is to teach students patterns of thinking that lead to the creation of new ideas Art is a vessel through which students create and synthesize, two of highest the skills on Bloom’s Taxonomy Levels. Investigating the art making process helps students to develop patterns of thinking visual thinking that they are able to take with them from the classroom out into the world.

• Art is synthesis. The bringing together of ideas from multiple inspirations. Exploration and discovery are the focus of my classroom. I want my students to use the artmaking process as a way to think through and expand upon their ideas. The idea of synthesis and building a concept is something that I want all of my students to be thinking about when they are in my classroom. How do we as artists build ideas? We need to develop a concept, a reason for making what we are making.

• Art is Exploration. I hope to give students room to explore themselves and the world around them through art. For many of my lessons, I start with a "Big Idea" and pose questions that inspire creative thinking and problem solving. I want to give students many opportunities to make choices in their artmaking. My lessons leave room for freedom within the structure of the lesson and give students space to create personally meaningful art.

• Art is experimentation. In my lessons, I have my students follow the steps of the scientific method to build concepts and think through ideas.Scientists and artists both take a moment to look more closely at their world. Scientists start with a question, artists start with inspiration, what are they going to investigate? They both research their ideas, scientists form hypotheses while artists sketch and plan to build a concept. Artists experiment with different media and different ways to communicate their concept. Scientists analyze their data and draw conclusions while artist reflect upon their work. What can they gain from this experience? What concepts or techniques might they revisit? Scientists communicate their results in scientific journals while artists share their work with their peers, in galleries, online and at art shows.

• Art is discovery. I want my student to discover facts about themselves and the world around them through artmaking. When students experiment with materials, they can discover inspiration in the pure act of painting or drawing or sculpting, students can discover personal styles and concepts they find personally meaningful. In my future classroom, I hope to provide my students with a creative lens to view the world and help them discover their own inspiration. I want to teach them a pattern of thinking that will help them synthesise ideas both in the classroom as well as out in the world. I want my students to think of artmaking as a vessel for both growth of knowledge as well as growth of self, to see art making as a mode of exploration and discovery.