Entry #6
March 2, 2020
#chrysalification
Since taking Concepts of Art Education at CSU, I learned about the importance of making art pertinent and personal for my students. My art education experience is limited, but I don’t remember my teachers ever making an effort in making sure art projects were personal or pertinent. My art experiences in school were mostly crafts, holiday related or content area related: an ecosystem diorama, or an Egyptian sarcophagus. I’ve learned so much about making sure the assignments I give my students are relatable, but I’ve been stuck on the issues that I’m passionate about and was getting nervous about generating enough material to create more than one lesson. Understanding the concept of “Big Idea” in lessons has helped me narrow down subtopics and more specific take-aways from lessons I am planning to teach. Big ideas are broad and important human issues that are characterized by intricacy, ambiguity, contradiction, and multiplicity. Big ideas do not completely explain an idea but embody multiple concepts that form the idea. This is right up my alley because I am committed to teaching “important human issues” in my lessons. But when I started in art education, I was totally on board with the trend. The trend of using single words to encapsulate curriculum themes. Learning about big ideas, I realized that this trend has been overused and does not evoke inquiry the way a big idea does.
See, finding the big idea for a lesson also requires asking pertinent questions that will generate inquiry, promote critical thinking and deeper meaning, and engage students in real life problem-solving. Changing goals and content standards into questions is crucial. As a teacher, my job is to indicate what the big idea is, but also teach students that their jobs as lifelong learners is to keep analyzing meaning and value.
This is all extremely meaningful to me because for over eight years, before attending CSU, I worked as a lactation consultant. I worked with moms and babies teaching women about how their bodies work and providing support to feed their newborns. It was a beautiful job, I loved it, but also knew that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working in the medical field. When I finally made the choice to study art education, I felt guilty. I felt guilty because I felt that I was going from a job in which I made an impact in families’ lives daily. A job that addressed the fundamentals of the forming of a human that would benefit from my support for the rest of its life because the benefits of breastfeeding are lifelong.
Realizing that through art education I can, in a different aspect, have a lifelong impact in the form of teaching my students to search for deeper meaning, appeal to emotions through their artistic expression, and learn the skills for critical thinking to benefit them outside of the art class is inspiring and empowering. Not only do big ideas empower me to instill inquiry and curiosity in my students but my students will also be empowered with these skills.
My piece, like the previous, and future, continues to reflect my ongoing growth and evolution as a learner and teacher. My experience continues to transform my approaches to art education and shaping my teaching philosophy.
