Teaching Philosophy
I am always seeking ways to spark a learner’s curiosity and their desire to learn. Beyond the learning of content, education is also about making connections, developing self-efficacy, cultivating empathy, refining social dexterity, and manifesting agency. Art allowed me, as a Vietnamese American with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, to work through and explore my physical disability and cultural identity.
Art is a powerful educational tool. When it is seen as a process rather than as a product, it creates opportunities for learners to investigate and understand their lived experiences and the world. By allowing learners to investigate their lives through the arts, I am providing learners with a chance to acquire a sense of agency. Art empowers learners by allowing them to examine and transform aspects of their lived experience, whether beautiful, mundane, complex, or oppressing, into the material for their art. When conditions such as muscular dystrophy, often seen as debilitating, can become the conceptual substance for an art piece, it become malleable and less constrictive. For someone like myself who has muscular dystrophy, the arts provided me with agency, a sense of reprieve, and a moment of reflection. Art gave me the opportunity to see my condition less as a “thing” that was restricting my life and more as a concept that was open to reinterpretation. In doing so, my muscular dystrophy became my unique way of being in the world that I wanted to share with others through art rather than as something that prohibits me to be in it. This realization of the arts as a powerful tool for agency is what I want to share with my learners.
Whether in a K-12 classroom, a museum, a warehouse space, at home, or through an object, learning can always take place. However, before educators can cultivate empathy, manifest agency, create critical consciousness, or develop self-efficacy in their students, educators will need to take into consideration the type of learner-educator relationship they want to create. As Roman and Kay (2007) write, a positive relationship between the learner and the educator is beneficial to the learning experience. Consequently, if educators create an environment where students “are tentative or fearful of making a mistake, or humiliation, adequate learning will not take place” (p. 205). When I began my career as an educator in 2005, my teaching philosophy was informed, in part, by how I had been taught. Because of my own fears and anxieties with teaching and classroom management, I was quick to adopt a model of education that was overtly teacher-centric. As I understood it, the teacher-centric model sees the teacher as the authoritative figure and the students as their well-behaved subordinates. However, my students reminded me that no amount of knowledge or content mastery would matter if I did not care about them as individuals first. This was a realization I had following my first year of teaching in public education. From this point in 2005 onward, I began working away from what Paolo Freire (1970/2007) describes as the “banking” model of education towards an approach that strives to be dialogic and more democratic.
As I went about improving my practice as an educator, it also became necessary to reshape the philosophy that informed my teaching. As I learned, teaching and learning is an active process. When education is viewed in this way, teaching becomes less about transmission (what they, the learners are learning, and what I, the educator is teaching) and more about reciprocity. In other words, education becomes less about how well knowledge is being transmitted from one source (the educator) to another (the learner) and more about how we (learner/educator) are learning and teaching together and from on another. However, how does one go about this form of teaching? As Ursano, Kartheiser & Ursano (2007) reminds us, good teaching benefits from setting the context for learning, opening modes of communication, and identifying barriers to learning. In discovering the work of Ursano, et. al, I have co-opted their concepts of good teaching to describe, in part, my teaching practice.
Trust
I believe that I should first create an environment that is conducive to learning. A space that is safe and non-threatening. A space where my learners and I felt safe to share our aspirations, insecurities, build connections, be wrong, make mistakes, and fail. Regardless of the classroom’s title, what my learners and I worked towards was building a safe and non-threatening learning environment together. We worked together to set classroom and learning expectations. I assisted in making sure that the expectations were made clear to each learner. While, each learner worked towards meeting and helping each other meet the expectations that we created together. In this co-created safe space, my learners were free to make mistakes, experiment with artistic expression, and fail. I helped my learners manage their time, outline start and stop time, set deadlines for their projects, and asked them questions about the choices they made in the creation of their work. In this co-created space, I felt safe as a teacher to experiment with new projects, while my learners felt safe with telling me whether the project was good or bad. This is the trust we built together. My learners and I felt safe in our classroom, because we co-created the context for learning. We established clear expectations about how we should treat one another. We made mistakes and failure was a welcomed and accepted part of the learning process. We felt safe because we knew that in our shared space of learning, the experiences we were creating is in the pursuit of life-long education.
Openness & Encouragement
My learners come into the classroom with a wide variety of life experiences, interests, aspirations, and insecurities. Forming the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that come together to create my classroom. As their teacher, I feel a moral obligation to be receptive and open to the multiple ways my learners will process and convey their knowledge and understanding. Each student, much like a piece to a jigsaw puzzle forms an important part of the bigger picture, that of my classroom. Because each of my student’s understanding and perception of the world is unique, and thereby the way they learn, I strive to be open and receptive to my student’s ways of learning. Being reminded by my own experience with adapting to the limitations imposed on me by Spinal Muscular Atrophy, I strive to always encourage and remind my students that their way of understanding and being in the world is okay and that I am there to help them achieve their goals.
Service
Learning, much like life, is filled with obstacles, seen and unseen, physical and mental. As a teacher, it is my accepted responsibility to help my students achieve their goals by helping them see and overcome the barriers that impede their learning. Having lived with Spinal Muscular Atrophy for most of my life, my lived experience has taught me how to live with and overcome barriers. From this experience, I have learned the importance of not only helping my students recognize and understand the barriers that might impede learning, but to provide them with sustainable strategies to create conditions that will allow for success. Will the strategies always work? No. However, what I believe is important is that we, my students and I, are overcoming these barriers together and that we are helping each other develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and each other in the process.
Harry Broudy (1991) states that “the arts are skills that, once mastered, function as tools or instruments in a wide variety of situations or that, as works of art, they are avenues to other resources of the culture”. (p. 126) As an arts educator, I believe there is a difference between preparing students for the profession of art and teaching with art. As mentioned early on, I believe art is a powerful educational tool whose multivalent qualities allows it to adapt to a variety of educational settings, topics, and students. Art provides students with multiple ways of investigating and responding to the complexities of the world and their lived experiences. Through outlining three principles that guide my teaching practice, I aim to illustrate that irrespective of the topics, skills, or concepts that I teach, if I do not attend to the students as individuals first no adequate learning will take place. Good teaching integrates and models the concepts of trust, openness, and service. Good teaching acknowledges that education happens together and that it is co-created. If education were simply about transmitting knowledge, there would be no need for teachers since books do a fairly good job of transmitting knowledge already. Teaching involves taking the time to build trust, to be open, and to act with sincerity and service; otherwise the task of building and sharing knowledge becomes increasingly difficult, and all our efforts for naught.
References:
Brenda, R., & Kay, J. (2007). Fostering Curiosity: Using the Educator–Learner Relationship to Promote a Facilitative Learning Environment. Psychiatry, 70(3), 205–208. http://doi.org/10.1521/psyc.2007.70.3.205
Broudy, H. (1991), The arts as basic education. In R. Smith & A. Simpson (Eds.), Aesthetics and Arts Education (pp. 125-134). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Friere, P. (1970/2003). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, Continuum.
Ursano, A. M., Kartheiser, P. H., & Ursano, R. J. (2007). The teaching alliance: A perspective on the good teacher and effective learning. Psychiatry, 70(3), 187–194.