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!