Category Archives: 517: Visual Arts Research

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My pedagogic ecology has had an interesting impact this year. Compared to the last two years I was teaching full time in one building, the dramatic change my job has undergone this year has taken a dramatic impact on my positive mindset. I love teaching art to elementary school kids. I feel overwhelmed by their interest and love for the arts. It brings such a great energy to the classroom that I then exert on my kids. I love them and the classroom environment in those situations. Those are the days I find myself leaving with a huge smile on my face. However, now that I have taken on seventh grade, I feel as though I have become a monster. I don’t feel as though I get much time to teach, and all I am dealing with is behaviors. I think it is important and best for the kids when you realize as a teacher that you are not effective for them. I am not this year with seventh grade. It is forcing to question everything I am doing and whether or not I should quit the profession altogether. I do not feel as though I can meet their social emotional needs to help them, let alone to present the art lesson. I have tried several different tactics, changed projects to modify and surveyed what areas of interest they would like me to teach. Yet, I am still found wanting. I deal with random nonsense every day that no teacher should have to endure. I find myself having good days, and something always seems to squash it. For instance, I had the week from hell last week. Thursday was ending on such a positive note; and as I was driving to my second school, I hit a road block. Most of the roads getting to my second school were shut down due to construction. As I arrived late to school, and finally got my seventh-grade class running (and the kids were doing well on task), a vent in the floor starts to leak sulfuric smelling water. As the water rose from the vent, the kids went crazy; and I could not get them to calm down to listen to instructions. Well, needless to say, the seventh and eighth grade students clogged all the toilets on the second floor with goodness knows what. It caused my later classes in the day to be shared with the librarian. Having art and library in the same class is never affective.
Needless to say, with all that is going on, I am currently applying for a job outside of my current district. One in an extremely small district where I would not have to teach middle school. I am torn because I love a good chunk of the kids I still teach, but I feel disconnected from that school because I am itinerant this year. My other school has grown on me because of the majority of the students, but one of my sections of seventh grade is ruining it for me. One class. I only see them every other day, but they are having the capacity to ruin it all. I don’t know how to change that mindset. Then there is the underlying doom that every year I could be at a different school because I do not have seniority. I know that I do not want to teach at a school district that has 37 elementary schools. That leaves the uncertainty that I can be swapped in any of those buildings, any year, due to budget. However, the current position I am applying for is itinerant and will stay itinerant because it is a small district. I would be teaching Pre-K through 5th grade if I am offered a position. I am contemplating throwing the towel in at the end of the year and doing a career change myself. Becoming another statistic that many teachers quit within the first five years. Demonstrating that maybe all my influences on pedagogic ecology were just not enough or lining up correctly.

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I was able to speak to Lindsay B yesterday about our Literature Review project and it turns out we chose similar topics. For those that don’t know, Lindsay and I teach in the same district and the community has a huge impact on how the students learn and function in school. Many of our students come to us hungry and in need of emotional attention. Just yesterday I had a 5th grade student tell me she was punched in the stomach repeatedly the night before and did not want to be in school. It is really upsetting that the students have so much going on at home but are asked to put these things aside and learn how to multiply and read. In my review I’d like to work with Lindsay in some way to research place and the community that we work in to get a better sense of how I can make a difference, even a little bit.

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I have always been interested in my community, whether that be through my artwork or actively volunteering. I have hosted and taught classes within my community since I graduated from college. I always felt like there was a place for our community to connect within the classroom, and that the classroom itself was a community. Where I currently teach I have such a diversity of students and the school itself is very large (about 600 per graduating class). About 60 percent of my students are below the poverty level also. My own home county (Sullivan) also has a very low income rate and is rated one of the lowest income counties in N.Y. I have always taught students with special needs, and lower income situations and this is where I fell in love with the idea of meaning making, community based art education that encapsulates everything around us, i.e visual culture.

Visual Culture is something that I learned during my undergraduate studies at the College of Saint Rose, and I was immediately hooked. Although I love museums, and feel as though they benefit and aid art education, most of my students will never step foot inside of one. They will not visit galleries in Chelsea or anywhere else for that matter. Most of the artwork that they will see are on their walks home or on their T.V’s or iphone.

Meaning making has been my top priority this year, and my students have been getting really engaged in the curriculum that my colleagues and I have been doing. Collectively we have moved away from the standard design components and moved more into what,and how we can accomplish making students see, and create self identified, meaningful art for themselves. We are teaching them to think like artists. Artist’s who take their own experiences, i.e their community, and their personal lives and create work that they are proud of, work that is reflective of who they are as people.

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I am primarily interested in looking closer at museums and the impact that can play in engagement of learning and education. Currently, along with being an art teacher, I also am a museum studies teacher. Having taken a Museum Studies Course in Undergrad, I am aware of some of the ways that museums can present themselves, as well as see how they can function, both positively or negatively.  Further reading of Fenech’s “City Museums and Park Museums” encouraged me in my own thinking of how museums have the ability to communicate and array of ideas and beliefs to a wide audience, and also can play an important part in a community.

As a part of a community, museums can serve as an interesting tool for further learning for students. When visiting museums, students’ knowledge, be it new or old, is expanded and they are also encouraged to think more about the world around them. Given the environment I work in, going to a museum may be the first exposure to the outside world (aka outside of the Bronx/NYC metro area) that the students may experience. It is important to thus not only understand the information being shown, but also see how such information is presented.

Each museum takes different approaches and I believe that better understanding the ways that museums do so can better inform me as a teacher also in new ways of teaching students, be it through simply observing different practices presented to he public, to attending PD’s/physical teaching experiences provided by such institutions. I have previously attended to two PD’s offered exclusively from two NYC museums- the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and the Met. These two institutions, while both have the purpose of serving as a place of learning to the public, take two completely different approaches in their interactions with the visitors they receive, as well as the teacher’s that attend the PD’s. Understanding these differences, as well as why they choose to enact such differences, proves extremely useful in thinking about my own approaches in teaching, as well as considering different ways to combining the two methods to further engage my students.

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Swimming Through Ideas
My ideas and focus first started around the idea of visual culture. I am still very much intrigued by the influence of visual imagery, and its impact on individuals consciously and subconsciously. However, the exploration into many of the articles for this course has caused me to think greater into material culture. The reality is, all things have an influence; not just visual images. With this idea, couldn’t things (objects) we even create or recreate impact our conscious and subconscious? Object and imagery influence has become my main focus now through material culture. I was even thinking about pursuing a research topic I came up with after reading “From Topics to Questions,” which was: I am studying/working on the disconnect between administration and teachers in creating effective school atmospheres. I want to find out whether this is the cause for failing large inner city school districts. I want to help my reader understand that teachers are not failing our students and deserve greater freedoms that allow for less testing and less strict surveillance. I am beginning to think that material culture could even give insight into this proposed topic. Since this topic was formulated after a day filled with disheartened belief in the abilities of my district to make decisions that were best for the success of students and their teachers. I also just read an article from City newspaper here in Rochester, the article is called, “Black Teachers Matter.” Tim Louis Macaluso writes on page 10 that, “we often view [black] students through the eyes of poverty and underappreciate some of their soft skills—the resilience and the ability to adjust to complex situations, code-switching, and being able to adapt.” I think through the exploration of objects with students, a teacher could find the way to reach a student’s adaptability to lead them to a successful route. Material culture will allow for a teacher to connect with a student’s strength.

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Hello everyone! I posted this previously on my own personal blog/the Discussion forum but now that I am approved for the group blog as well I can share it here.

School began just last week and it is already extremely overwhelming. On my first day alone a student had a seizure, I have been placed in charge of busing the students in the afternoons (one student was left by a bus and another was on the wrong one), and I have also been assigned more lower-functioning classes than I had last year. I want to do so much with my students, but it is hard to believe I truly can with some of the student I work with when my largest concern is if they are going to have a seizure, eat the materials, or harm either themselves or others (including myself) in the classroom.

Oddly enough, last year, even as a first year teacher, was not nearly as overwhelming. I was never planning on staying at this school for long, but it honestly has crossed my mind to find other employment before the year is over. The more I read and learn in this program, the more I wish to be able to do more which, unfortunately, I really cannot do in the place I am now. I hate this feeling of giving up, but I also feel like I have to do what is best for me, both personally and career-wise to enable further growth as a teacher.

I anticipate this year having little personal time for myself as well. With waking up at 5:30 in the morning and not getting home until anytime from 5-6 at night, I’m both physically and mentally drained. Because of the stress I am under, in terms of my own studio research, I am seeking out art practices focused on simplicity and that can be relaxing through the process itself. Conceptually, I think the ideas of multiple perspectives and perceptions of the artwork are extremely interesting. Rather than just having one concrete understanding of the work, it would be nice to encourage diverse thinking and interpretation from viewers.