Abstract
There are specific steps that an art teacher can take to ensure student success in teaching artistic behavior. One belief that I have to make a student most successful in the classroom would be to put them in a home-like environment and incorporate gamification. My creative pedagogy has been based on my experiences with creativity as a new educator and how I will encourage my students' creativity. As a teacher, I focus on the curriculum's learning environment and gamification to promote student engagement with their creativity.
Personal Connection to Creativity Expression and Communicating
Expression, learning, and communication are essential in the art room, even when it seems challenging.
As a visual artist, I became drawn to ceramics. I like that the clay comes from the earth, the soft, cold, and wet textures on my hands. From the first time I put my hands in clay, I felt like I was creating something worth creating. This tangible experience was one I have never really had with any other art that I've ever created before. Being able to create with my hands is very therapeutic and educational for me and a fantastic way for me to express myself. I create tumors not only with my hands but also inside my body. I have a condition called Neurofibromatosis. One of the symptoms it causes is spots all over the body and tumors along the nerve endings. After being diagnosed with two brain tumors, I found a great deal of comfort and control in producing my ceramic tumor sculptures.
As I created more of them, I turned it into a game. I created 100 of them. I hid them everywhere, in parks, stores, and anywhere I could. It was very powerful and inspiring and a bit of a game. I also found it to be a way for other people to not think of the word tumor as such a dirty, horrible word. I understand the fear of the word. It is the fear of the unknown. For me, it became a word of perseverance and determination. Making this work is a way to open up a conversation about Neurofibromatosis. I connected so much while working with the clay because it has a lot of similarities to the texture and mass of a tumor. I also like that I can physically throw and mold the clay over other mediums. Using this experience greatly influenced my ideas of creativity and art making. By taking something highly personal and heartfelt to myself, I created an experience to educate other people and give my diagnosis meaning to myself. Understanding creativity is being able to take our surroundings and put them into a new way of viewing them, a new way of experiencing them. Being able to create that experience in A New Perspective is what creativity is all about.
Learning Environment
My connections to education and creativity are highly personal. I want to show this to the rest of my students, encouraging them to put a part of themselves in every piece of artwork that they create. I will foster these ideas in my future classroom. When making lesson plans and creating units, I make sure to incorporate student voices as much as possible. When my students in elementary school were creating their lava lamps, I wanted them to make the shapes inside of them, things that are important to them. On the high school level, Students created Dungeons & Dragons characters based on a famous artist. Students were encouraged to give them their personalities or however they chose and to design those features in the ways that they saw fit.
One of my teaching values is creating a positive, comfortable, and accepting learning environment. Some ways I intend to do this would be to have comfortable seating options and an accepting environment for students. By providing visual aids inside the classroom, like posters accepting that it is a safe space for LGBTQIA+, having other posters in other languages, and showing students I am an ally to them by modeling this behavior in and out of the classroom. Studies have proven that students perform better. When students are comfortable in their learning space, another way to make sure that students feel comfortable is to make sure that they feel welcome in my classroom. Making sure students know that bullying is not tolerated because it's incredibly harmful to creativity and mental health would be one of my top priorities (Rodgers, 2020). It is also essential to validate identity in the classroom.
Building a strong connection and relationship with each student is essential for creating a welcoming environment. Building a strong connection and relationship with every student helps to make this environment. Having a good relationship where students feel comfortable coming to me is essential for the educational experience—being able to create units based on student's interests, having students feel more engaged in the lessons. Studies have also shown that when students are comfortable and all their other needs have been met in the classroom, they do better academically in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. (McLeod 2007)The final tear on Maslow's hierarchy of needs is self-actualization. This is the desire to self-actualize and become one's best self. By being an art teacher, this is something that we can help them achieve to get that highest point of the pyramid. That's our job to make sure that students feel comfortable enough to be creative enough to want to achieve self-actualization. This can be achieved by ensuring that the classroom feels the most like home, warm and inviting, and like a safe space at all times for students, once again instilling that this is a safe space open to all Students ready to learn.
Curriculum
The most important thing for my curriculum is gamification. They are using exercises that constantly challenge a student's perspective. It is essential for gamification in the classroom and gamification in art. Some games use problem-solving skills when students feel like they have conquered something. Slowly building up Different aspects of the game by having students entirely create this character that they will be playing makes them feel more connected to the project as well as the character. Well this is being done. Students are still learning about art, history, literacy, and Mathematics, as creating a Dungeons and Dragons character requires building stats for the character, like strength, wisdom, charisma, and intuition; by using a D6, they roll these six times with four, adding them together and then dropping the lowest number this is incorporating math and incorporating gamification. Students are then learning about art history because we are connecting this character to a famous artist and famous artworks. The students are researching about this specific artist, their movement and how they create art to incorporate these techniques into their characters. Students are then asked to create a backstory about this character Loosely based on the artist. Students are using their creativity and knowledge now on this artist to give this character an entire backstory and life to the character.
I want to Create a space that will build their confidence in art making. All Students must take an art or music elective to get a degree in New York State. So why not make this class something everyone can enjoy? Gamification encourages problem-solving skills, communication, and creative thinking. This enables students to learn more problem-solving skills and utilize these skills in other core classes. Throughout my student teaching experiences, Constructing a unit plan based on a Dungeons & Dragons-esque game where students create characters based on famous artists and artworks and then play as that character in a game gives students a clear picture and objective of what they are meant to be doing. We start small by slowly Giving students the tools to get them to do more complex art-making skills. We begin by teaching value skills, then move on to observational drawing and then adding in shading and highlights, incorporating the values they've already learned. Then we also give them another observational drawing but now we're going to add in elements of another artist. By giving these students the stepping stones they need to create more complex art builds their confidence because it's something they've already learned, and now we're adding on top of it.
Another way to promote this skill is to constantly change perspective and get a new point of view every time you look at something. (Kent Learning by heart).
The last curriculum tool I would love to use in my classroom is scaffolding. Jerome Bruner introduces this. It gives them prompts and examples of what is required to complete the task. As a student, I now recognize that my teachers used this to teach me, which is why I use this in the classroom.
In conclusion, this approach explores the importance of including personal experience creating an inclusive and home-like environment, and using gamified learning and education to support student learning. By being able to create this comforting environment where students feel as if they can create and use their creativity in power students to try and explore there are artistic potential.