My Teaching Philosophy.
Values.
As an art teacher, I observe the value of equipping young people with strong visual skills and allowing them the opportunity to study a variety of creative and artistic processes. I persist that the activities pursued in the art room build multitudes of transferrable skills in young people which stand to them in many aspects of their lives. In my role as an educator, I aim to sharpen and develop young people’s visual, practical and soft skills to allow them to approach life with creative thinking and problem-solving skills, open mindedness and an intrinsic interest in culture and the world around them. To cultivate this, my units of learning attempt to harness existing interests of students and passionate teaching and combine them with new approaches to learning and processes to produce free thinkers and confident artists.
Personal Experience.
My journey as an educator has been shaped by my experiences. Art has always been my favourite subject in school, and in secondary school the art room was my refuge from the monotony and pressure of other subjects. I appreciated the experience of independent research and investigating the world through a visual lens. The general atmosphere of the art room seemed so alien to the rest of the school where learning was a structured and standardised process. This experience is one I hope to replicate in my own art room. In my teaching I aim to centre students as active learners, allowing them independent work, with power in the choice of their subject matter. I hope to use unexpected and thought-provoking subject matter to encourage students to consider their worlds in a new light and to bring their lives outside of school into the art room.
My Units of Learning aim to develop students artistic identities by offering opportunities for students to build both technical and conceptual skills, in tandem with investigating why they make the decisions they make and how their decisions define them as artists. I note that in this day and age in which young people present their identities on social media for the world to critique, teenagers are not eager to set themselves apart from the group. Crafting unique identities as artists may feel vulnerable to many students. In the same way that my art room created a refuge for me during my own education, I aspire to cultivate an environment of free thinking which incites students to investigate their own places in the world both as artists and as young people.
Transmitted Knowledge.
My education in LSAD has enriched me with the experience of working as an artist researcher and a teacher. Through working with materials myself and learning from the practices of lecturers and technicians I have gained valuable insights into artistic processes which I aim eager to pass on to my own students. From working with my peers both in groups and through discussions about our own works I have developed my own ability to conceptualise projects and found many resources to bolster this process, all of which I aim to use in my own classroom to allow students to create rich ideas and concepts fuelled by a strong knowledge of art and culture. Creating our Units of Learning with the mentorship of our lecturers has allowed me to craft projects based off my own interests with the wisdom of educators with experience far beyond my own.
Remarking on how my own education has allowed me to develop my own practice in collaborative and communal environments, I hope to produce space for students to work alongside their peers.