I want to teach high school art in New York City because I love the diversity and energy of NYC’s youth. I particularly enjoy helping students explore their cultural and personal identities through artmaking. While my Spanish language skills help me better communicate with recently arrived students from the Spanish speaking world, I enjoy working with students from all backgrounds.
Everybody deserves quality visual art education. My preferred approach combines skill building with student choice and experimentation. I embrace the Teaching Artistic Behavior (TAB) model of instruction where classrooms are “...highly structured studio environments with clearly delineated expectations for self-directed learning…” In this approach students learn to think and behave like artists, from ideating, to planning, to creating, to displaying art. Instead of cookie-cutter projects, students use higher order thinking to develop their own ideas and see them through. While self-direction is critical in this approach, it is key to provide structured guidance in art techniques to scaffold their abilities.
It is particularly powerful for students to get exposure to artists in whom they can see themselves. For example, in my recent student teaching experience, we introduced students to Jean-Michele Basquiat, a Black Haitian-Nuyorican artist who became one of the most successful and original visual artists of the 20th century. Basquiat’s sensibility was multirooted, but the themes of Black culture and place in society were central to his work. His explorations of identity, race, and justice resonated powerfully with our students as did the relationship of his upbringing to his artmaking. I believe this resonance occurred partly from Basquiat’s powerful style, but also because many students could see parts of themselves in him.
It is my practice to bring professional artists and designers into the classroom. In my student teaching experience I brought in three working artists to talk with students. Both students and artists let me know they found these discussions valuable. I plan to continue this practice. Interacting with visual arts professionals is a great way to connect students to potential careers. Many students will not go on to art or design fields, but visual proficiency is useful in most workplaces (if you don’t believe me, think about the last indecipherable PowerPoint you sat through. Don’t you wish whoever made it had a better design sense?).
I bring years of experience teaching outside the K-12 school framework including in after school school programs, the MET, and New York University. For the last dozen years, I worked as an artist doing visual listening. Visual listening is the practice of actively listening to what people say at meetings and conferences and summarizing the key information in words, diagrams and drawings at mural size for clients from the New York Hall of Science, to the Maryland Society for Educational Technology, to Ben & Jerry’s. I look forward to putting my energy, experience, and knowledge to work at one of NYC’s high schools in the service of developing the creativity and confidence of our city’s amazing students.