In the Artroom: A Starry Night Collage and Thoughts on Teaching Art

Friends, Ima be honest with you. I've been in a funk. It started with a sinus-y head cold that morphed into no-energy-itis which developed into a bad case of nobody-likes-me, everybody-hates-me, I'm-just-gonna-sit-over-here-and-pout. I have blamed my cold and lack of energy for my bad attitude but, if I'm being truly honest, there have actually been a couple things eating away at my thoughts. And one of them has been teaching art.

So here's the deal: I recently joined a group on Facebook called "Art Teachers". And it's pretty rad, interacting with art educators, seeing the work of their students, hearing their struggles and successes. But there have also been some, um, debates. It seems that there are two camps of art teachers out there: those that teach choice-based art and, well, those that don't.

Now before I go tip-toeing into a land mine (because those aforementioned debates have gotten very feisty), lemme first say that I am not a choice-based art teacher. Nor do I know very much about the concept although I am intrigued. From my understanding, in a choice-based art room, children are allowed to work with their chosen art media to express their ideas. In a nutshell.

Here's what I love about the idea: children creating art based on their own individual interests and inspirations. In a choice-based art room, the kids are routinely introduced to new media and allowed to explore their ideas with that new material. Or they can use whatever other supplies that have been introduced throughout the year. It sounds so happy and harmonious and free. In my imagination, it looks like a college art studio filled with little people sculpting, painting and weaving their little hearts out.

But here's the thing that bothers me: a music teacher wouldn't simply show a child a room full of musical instruments, teach them a couple of the basics and tell them to then make music. Not without first teaching them all that there is to know about playing, writing and composing a piece, not to mention introducing them to both classical and contemporary composers. Because without those fundamentals, I imagine children would simply bang on the instruments, grow bored and lose interest. Is it possible the same might happen in an art room? I don't know.

I've heard the argument that if you, as an art teacher, know what the end product of a lesson is going to look like, then the work of art is your own and not your students. This really really made me question how I teach. Am I doing a disservice to my students? Am I robbing them of their creativity and exploration? Is this Starry Night/collage/painting/weaving project recently created by 1st grade actually harming the creative exploration of my students?

 Again, I don't know.

What I do know is that, like a classroom teacher giving a test to check for hitting benchmarks and understanding, I can see that my students learned the following (side note: each "Day" is a 30 minute art class. Yes, 30-super-short/very-precious minutes):

Day #1: How to mix a shade of blue with black and blue. How to use a variety of brush strokes and lines to show movement in their sky like our inspirational artist, Vincent van Gogh. How to paint the secondary color green and create a texture onto that paper.

Day #2: How to create a landscape collage by tearing the green paper and creating a foreground, middle ground and back ground. How to create a paper loom for weaving.

Day #3: How to weave. How to use collage to create a house by cutting out geometric shapes from recycled pieces of paper. 

Day #4: How to add a star to my piece (see this post on how we marbled these stars) and have it tell a story in your work of art. Is it a shooting star? A falling star? An explosion of color? What can you think of?

Day #5: How to add that house to the landscape and add other elements of their choosing to that landscape. How to brainstorm ideas for their work of art (what can go in the background? a dog house? a neighborhood? trees?).

(Houses about half finished...still working out ideas for the background and the shooting star.)

Knowing that they have learned all of this, is this lesson a bad one? I like to think not. My students surpassed my notion of what their completed piece would look like by adding animals, trees, dog houses, houses in the distance, moons, curtains in the window, you name it.

But I did have a notion what their finished work of art would look like.

Which again, brings me back to where I started. Sigh. 

Look, I've been teaching art for a very long time (this is my 16th year, time seriously does fly!) and I'm not even going to pretend I've got the answers or even a flipping clue. And I think those folks that do think they have all the answers are just fools. Or maybe cowards that are too afraid to question what they've always done. I mean, shouldn't we always be looking to do what is best for our students?

So, I ask you, honestly, what are your thoughts?

And, if I've offended anyone, choice-based or not, that was not my intention. Thanks, ya'll.