MY ART TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Young children are brimming with ideas all the time. Teachers must continue to encourage creative exploration throughout early childhood all the way through high school. “Learning begins with a creative, deeply personal, primary process play. Such play must be truly free, not directed toward mastering a technique, solving a specific problem, or illustrating a randomly chosen juxtaposition” (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1965). This is how children can grow up to be creative thinkers who see other points of view, take risks, envision solutions, embrace diversity, value art and aesthetics, and innovate. During their formative years, children need opportunities to explore their original ideas. They need to take creative risks in order to grow up feeling comfortable with mistakes and finding multiple solutions to a problem.
“A society needs to know how art has shaped its past, how it sees the present, and what is expects to see in the future” (Feldman, 1996, p.6). It is important that students study the history and creation of art from multiple cultures. By doing so, teachers promote empathy and appreciation of multiculturalism. “Art enjoys a special advantage in education because – like music- it’s meaning is not restricted to those who speak the language of its makers” (Feldman, 1996, p.16).
Posing real life problems, asking students to observe and analyze the world around them are important tasks for how they see their community and how they can contribute as a member. “Comparing the modern formulation ‘form follows function’ with traditional postmodern aesthetic approaches that value the decorative, students can identify what they consider to be pleasing design, define their own tastes, and imagine new design solutions” (Gude, 2007, p.10)
“Learning is constructing one’s own understanding of experience, learners need opportunities to engage ideas from throughout the history of the art form, including ideas that came before, ideas of their teacher, and ideas of peers, along with their own original ideas and thoughts about them all” (Wiggins, 2015, p.116). Providing a variety of art experiences that allow space for individual and group creative exploration allows children to continue flourishing into lifelong creative thinkers.
References
Feldman, E. B. (1996). Philosophy of Art Education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Gude, O. (2007). Principles of Possibility: Considerations for a 21st – Century Art & Culture Curriculum. Art Education, January 2007, 6-17
Jackie Wiggins (2015) Constructivism, Policy, and Arts Education, Arts Education Policy Review, 116:3, 115-117, DOI: 10.1080/10632913.2015.1038673
Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1965 (as cited in Gude, 2007)