The Significance of Artist Trading Cards

Growing up in the large urban community of Des Moines, I have encountered a wealth of diversity in life and livelihood. Iowa has quite a few significant things to offer that I have come to appreciate in life, from quality educational programs to the rolling hills of prairie grasses that greet the sun at day in and day out. I value the adversity I have experienced living here over the years, because without all those obstacles to overcome, I would not be as wise as I can say I am today. In all difficult things, there has been beauty to be sought. It was my goal to express that idea in the artist trading cards I am working on. I wanted to portray my gratitude for opportunities and support others to relinquish the fears or doubts that inhibit their self-expression and living a life rich in meaning. My artist trading cards reflect many of my personal values that developed under the circumstances of my upbringings. Regularly, I embrace the necessity to evolve, compromise, or contradict my values to bridge understanding between my past, present, and future. We are all objects of change and require nurturing guidance to broaden our horizons. A strong spirituality and connectedness with nature frequents my work.

The issues I foresee secondary students to be encountering relate to identity issues and interpersonal relationships. At that age, we all seek acceptance by our like-minded peers. We want to figure out who we are, why we are here, and what are we going to make of our lives. At the same time, we are strongly guided by our emotions to make complicated decisions that impact our daily relationships with others, including our peers, families, and authoritative figures. During the secondary school years, change is rapid and sometimes dramatic. Strong insecurities erupt during this time, as personal image is influenced and challenged by the media and our surroundings. Life for students at this age can be fairly complex. Social structures within schools and communities both confine and uplift students. Relationships with others can be debilitating or progressive. My job as an educator is to guide students towards better decision making and a greater sense of purpose in life.

Becoming a Transformative Teacher through Social Justice Arts Education

The divisions that make up the Emerging Qualities Continuum diagram vary as a teacher evolves from representing traditional to responsive to transformative qualities in their pedagogy. We see four distinct characteristics of curriculum and instruction under transformative teacher qualities that identify with the educational needs of students in our classrooms.

Firstly is to integrate global citizenry into our classroom's agenda. To be a global citizen in the classroom is to tend to the well-being of the individual, their social and emotional necessities, in order to promote in them the empathy and courage to contribute to and defend the needs of others. It is to advocate for a world without boundaries, where people can make a difference in the lives of those who need it, regardless of their location on our planet. In chapter 8 of Art Education for Social Justice, we witnessed these teacher and student qualities firsthand when classrooms took on the challenge of creating safer and healthier environments for those people living in poor-living conditions, with limited access to food or safe drinking water. The Empty Bowls and Potters for Peace projects both used ceramics to address social justice. They provided a service for those who would otherwise have gone without. Through means of learning about social issues, creating solutions to the problems, and reflecting on their impact, the students who involved themselves in these projects made a difference as a global citizen. By using this example, I can myself implement curriculum and instruction that challenges students to see beyond the confines of the classroom and community, to creating a better life for themselves and others across the world.

Secondly is to address rapidly changing content. While specific information that we teach may be relevant to the era we live and teach in, those skills that are eternal must be reconciled to sustain the variable living situations we will all find ourselves in. The content we teach should be applicable in a medley of circumstances. It should attend to the global community and our commonalities; to universal skills that will help students to succeed wherever they go. This puts a strong emphasis on interpersonal and communication skills, making connections across disciplines, and supporting student success with technological access that will broaden the scopes of their learning. In chapter 19 we saw this connect across time and cultures when the author, A. Zettler, addressed Tom Anderson's previous writings about art history as a social construct, relevant to its time and place or origin. In our classrooms, we can learn about the history of the relationships between diverse groups of peoples to bring about a deeper understanding of their relationships today. We can also incorporate other disciplines to solidify the multi-faceted reality of knowledge construction and application.

Thirdly is to tend to the multiple ways of learning and teaching that best support student needs. This quality focuses on diverse approaches to attaining information and a greater demand for student-centered inquiry. When I look at the Emerging Qualities Continuum, I see this as the most substantial difference between being a traditional or responsive teacher. The relevance of a quality education extends the boundaries of the lesson at hand. Learning opportunities present themselves everywhere in everyday life as teachable moments that could seriously impact the drive we all want our students to attain to be lifelong learners! Being innovative, clever, and fun are ways to adapt what would be a dull and forgettable lesson into something students will value for years to come. We want our students to play a great role in developing their education, as much as is appropriate. Giving them choices and functioning as a guide and mentor creates a more sufficient environment for lots of important learning to be done. By using many means of representing the same idea, we ensure that the diverse learners of our classroom have a fair opportunity to grasp and understand the curriculum and draw bigger ideas from it. In chapter 18, students were given a plethora of relevant practice activities to enable them to have a greater understanding of the final project. Some students may have connected more with some assignments than others, but the point was that they were diversified so that students could relate in a significant way to some part of the practice before they were expected to demonstrate deeper meaning. This is a great idea to borrow in my own teaching- to ensure that students have plenty of opportunities to grasp a concept before moving forward. I could use warm-up activities and other ways to reflect on objectives before they create their final products.

Lastly is to promote leadership, collaboration, and advocacy. Students learn how to work as a team, what it means to be a team member, a leader, an advocate, and contribute their unique skills. The students are involved in the learning process by having a substantial role in deciding what to learn about. They engage in issues that are significant to them, and thus connect more with what they learn. The classroom functions as a collaborative body. Students work together to solve problems and learn more form one another than they could ever have learned by their lonesome, or by solely the teacher delivering instruction. We see this demonstrated in chapter 13, when students collaborated to create an Eco-Wall of Hope. The students chose what endangered animal they related to personally, and together they built the wall of hope from ceramic tiles depicting their animal. Each student had a role in making the project successful. It involved a lot of problem-solving and cooperation. In the end the wall represents something much bigger than just their individual tile-something that they could not have created by their lonesome. It was a team effort that made the project more meaningful. I hope to incorporate many opportunities for students to collaboratively advocate for things that are important to them in my classroom.

All of these factors that contribute to transformative teaching intertwine in a complex relationship between both teacher and students, allowing for students to play a greater role in their own education. Being a transformative teacher means being a teacher and a learner. My hope is that representing these qualities will elicit a similar response to education in my students: that learning is multi-dimensional and can occur anywhere and everywhere!

Social Justice in the Elementary Art Classroom

How do you imagine teaching social justice issues in elementary school?
In Chapter 18, "We Begin Again After the Tabula Rasa", the thoroughness and complexity of veteran art teacher Anne Thulson's plans for incorporating social justice in her elementary classroom seem quite intimidating. She has collaborated with classroom teachers to coincide what she teaches with what is already being taught outside the artroom. Preparing the focus of her lessons requires a significant amount of coordination between the parties involved. The intricacy undertaken in her planning is ideally what I would like to take on someday. In the meantime, with less experience and not having encountered the numerous tribulations yet to manifest themselves that will shape the kind of art teacher I will inevitably become, I have what I have learned thus far in my teaching career to guide me. My intended course of action for educating my elementary students on social justice issues relies heavily on collaborating with classroom teachers, pulling from historic and current events and issues that have the greatest impact on the communities in which my students live, and drawing parallels between their lives and other inhabitants from all over the world. Teaching students empathy, as is the focus of chapter 13, will allow my students to recognize and overcome adversity not only for themselves, but for others as well. This is a necessary component of teaching social justice at any age level. 
 

What strategies and ideas emerge in chapters 13 and 18 of Art Education for Social Justice that would help plan realistic and meaningful projects for kindergarten through fifth grade students?
Reading chapters 13 and 18 has equipped me with several additions to my teaching strategy toolbox. I would like to incorporate the use of field notes, photographs, and film to document and study student participation and interests, as was used by Michelle Creel in chapter 13 when studying students for the Eco-Wall of Hope project. This information can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of my planning and instruction, as well as assisting to direct the course of the students' studies over time. The partnership between schools and grade levels when working on the project was also inspiring. It gave deeper meaning to the project to give students role models and the opportunity to be a role model themselves. It builds on a sense of community and common ground between students of different age levels. Students could use more chances to interact with peers that are not of the same walk of life. The creation of works that exist beyond the walls of the classroom was also employed in these chapters. Using this approach, students see more of the bigger picture and how art relates to everything we learn about and do. In chapter 18, students learned about the war between Spain and Mesoamerica in their homeroom and the art room. This creates a more holistic representation of not only the history that was taught, but education itself, by showing learning can be achieved through diverse processes. We can and should use what students are learning elsewhere to fuel what we teach them as well. Tapping upon resources that are available to us is an excellent beginning for teaching social justice. Anne Thulson used documents that are all too real, videos, photographs, etc. to convey the meaning she was hoping her students would find.The point was that students should find and develop their own significance in what they are being taught. The teacher again becomes merely a guide towards an end goal. This exponentially effects the way students connect with what they learn.

Creating Authentic, Reflective Experiences for Students

The issues addressed in chapters 17 & 19 of Art Education for Social Justice focus on tapping into a student's history and experiences while in the artroom to enhance their understanding of and relationship to the artwork they create. In these two chapters, students were confronted with the need to express and share their thoughts and ideas on important issues, sometimes requiring research in order to do so. Perspectives were awakened and reformed. They reacted to the assignments with increased involvement and a drive to want to make art. These projects had been reinvented to address the social conditions the students were living in. A self-portait project evolved into a drawing of a soldier killed in the war currently effecting all our lives. The famous and generally well-received PostSecret project began by Frank Warren became the basis for a school-wide junior high project about hopes, wishes, and regrets. Students were guided to make more authentic work that reflected themselves. Alexandria W. Zettler expressed this idea in chapter 19 when she wrote, "we should create art about what we know, about who we essentially are. We should address our own social, cultural, political, and emotional points of view" (146). Creating assignments with these aims in mind means students will learn to be more reflective of their beliefs and reflect on the beliefs of others.

How can you get your students to move beyond the everyday issues to think more critically about their community and the world they live in?
To get students tuned into their environments is a daunting task. Depending on their level of development, they will have varying concerns encompassing their minds and distracting them from the realities of their society. Thus, to stimulate them into that proactive mindset required to engage in the curriculum requires a lot of planning on our, the teacher's, part. We must incorporate activities into the curriculum that allow the students to research and discover for themselves what is happening in their communities and society at large. They need the opportunity to reflect on what they are learning and develop informed opinions. By providing experiences where many viewpoints are represented, they will challenge their perspectives and become more aware of the concerns of other peoples. After building a foundation of mutual respect and understanding of others' viewpoints, we can channel those ideas into a greater understanding of the human race. With any luck, we will foster in our students the want to contribute what they can to make life better for all the world's people.

What did these teachers do to help them reach success?
These teachers were striving to build a deeper connection between students and the work they were creating. They made what the students were doing meaningful, and the students in turn put more of themselves into the projects. I enjoyed in the student's response to the project "Hopes, Wishes, and Regrets" when she said, "When we make a piece of art out of someone's secret, we have to try to figure out what the person was feeling so we can express it through the artwork. I also tried to put my own personal feelings into the artwork to help me connect with the person that wrote the secret" (131). The teacher made it possible for the students to experience empathy first-hand, and in doing so, build stronger relationships with their peers. The students' reactions to the project, their greater enthusiasm and motivation to continue making art, is very rewarding as an art educator. I hope to elicit such responses from my students when I begin my career.