Miss Lissa's Art Education Philosophy:
My Main Goal for Art Education
is to help children develop their ability to create and respond to meaning in visual imagery without killing their creativity.
Sounds simple, right?
However, it is a complex balance of imposing boundaries while giving a student freedom to follow a vision. It involves asking questions to evoke learning toward a specific objective that sparks the imagination and awareness with being overbearing. It is about carefully using techniques of responding so students are able to find and reflect on the depth in their own artwork. It is about writing lesson plans that are developmentally appropriate, and objective and dialogue based to help a student learn through experience and increasing complexity. It is about exposing students to the work of other artists, not so that they can copy what they see, but to invite them into the larger world of artistic thinking, acting, and meaning making. It is about creating a safe space where students are not asked to re-present known outcomes. Instead, quality art teaching ought to enable students to re-frame and re-examine their own experiences through the medium of art. My goal for art education is to support students to learn through a wide range of aesthetic strategies in order for them to understand, participate in, and contribute to historical and contemporary artistic and cultural conversations.
Not too simple after all. But if we trust in the resonance of art and the intelligence of young children, it is possible.
This website offers many of the visual results of
what has happened in my art classroom. They
are beautiful to see. But, the full value is in the
experience of the thinking, discussing, making,
and reflecting that is part of the lived
experience behind these artworks.
--- Lissa Elizabeth Pedersen
B.F.A. in Art, M.A. in Art Education, AIG licensed, NBPTS