If I am effective as an art teacher, I lead students to the threshold of their own minds and get them to push beyond former ways of seeing and thinking.
Teaching the arts should heighten the student’s senses and increase their ability to experience the world in a more complex, subtle and meaningful manner. As a teacher, I serve as a catalyst providing stimulus, opportunity and space where a “more than ordinary moment of existence” can occur. A boon of insight can occur about the self, the world and everything within it. My goal is to engage students on a personal level and have them confront their own thinking through art.
It is often too easy to get entangled in the technique of art (the how) instead of the why and what of art. Robert Henri alluded to this when speaking about the true aim of the arts; it isn’t only about making a painting. The arts help students to find creative solutions through problem solving opportunities unique to the arts. Too often art educators only skim the surface of art, by teaching technique and manipulation of media alone and fail to harness arts core, its content.
