Educator Statement

      When I was younger, I spent a lot of time with my family in India. Occasionally the power in our neighborhood would go out, so sometimes we would lose electricity for a couple minutes to a few hours. These were my favorite times. My family would sit together around candles and tell stories. Real stories, imaginary stories, goofy stories, stories that had morals, and stories that made me think. As the candles flickered and my cousins and I made shadow puppets, I lost myself in the safety of creating. We were sculpting stories with our words, drawing pictures with our descriptions, and collaging a community by sharing with each other. As an educator, my goal is to give students a space where they can create in the same way. I want students to be able to use art as a tool for understanding themselves, connecting to the power of their own imaginations, and for connecting to their communities.

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       Art making begins with an understanding of the self. I often tell my students that artists think by working with their hands. They don’t sit and wait for inspiration to strike. Artists take action by working and using their process to determine their ideas. This way of thinking is a powerful tool for students as they develop their self-perception. Having tools to increase self-awareness is so important for the development of young minds. As a result, opportunities for meaningful choice are incredibly important to my teaching philosophy. This means that students in my class will use their art to make conscious and thoughtful choices that lead to critical thinking. Allowing students to explore their personal interests lets them use art as an opportunity to showcase their diversity within the classroom. I encourage expression of diversity by talking about my own role as an educator of color, showing examples of diverse artists, and by offering prompts that can have variable answers. I recently created a lesson where my first-grade students were prompted to illustrate a memory that was important to them. Seeing the conversation that took place as a student grieved the loss of a beloved pet while being comforted by his classmates was a powerful moment for me. It reminded me of the importance of sharing and community in the art classroom. 

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       Community and place-based learning are also very important to my teaching philosophy. I aspire to create an empathetic, inclusive, and supportive classroom community. I want my students to be able to turn to each other as resources for both information and opinions. They should come out of my class with an understanding that art is often made by groups of people who work together. Outside the classroom, art is a powerful tool for students to connect with their local community. I try to create lessons that tie directly into the daily lives of my students. The intersection of art and nature is an especially powerful way I’ve found to do this. In my classes students have used nature as a resource by using leaves to make paper, berries and soil to make paint, and sticks and grass to make paintbrushes. I think grounding student learning in the practicality of the world around them is important for retention and for building meaningful connections.

There is deep intrinsic value in teaching students about the process of creation. These are technical and creative skills they will carry with them for the rest of their lives, but they begin with something much more fundamental. They learn about who they are, about how to support the people around them, and about how to connect with their local community. Art education teaches students the value of their own contributions. It validates the voices of students, teaching them that what they create matters.

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