Elizabeth Will is the Art Teacher at P.S. 309 in NYC. She has been an educator for 10 years and an art teacher for 6 years. She has been nominated for the Distinguished Art Educator Award and has recently completed her Master’s degree in art education from Bank Street College in NYC. Elizabeth also sits on the Parent Advisory Board at P.S. 309 as well as being a member of the Bank Street College Alumni Board.
As a professional educator, Elizabeth strives to empower students by allowing them to make choices, providing instruction and support, and empowering students to make choices and take ownership of their artwork. She believes that children learn best when they are intrinsically motivated through choice making and creative self determination.
This blog is designed to share her thoughts on teaching, learning, education, curriculum development and life with young people.”
Art education is a complex process in which the role of the teacher is to guide students into becoming artists. The most important aspect of this process is that it has to be led by its students. Teachers can only do so much. They can provide the necessary resources, but they shouldn’t impose their ideas on their students. They should let them take the lead. This way, students will be able to experience freedom while they are exploring their art and create something meaningful.
Telling students how to create their art can be beneficial, but it’s not enough for them to know how to do it: they also need to understand why they do it that way. When children are guided without being told exactly what to do and when, they can find their own path and discover things about themselves along the way.
Empowering children through art education is a great idea because this topic allows teachers to engage with people who have different perspectives and come from different cultures. Nobody has the same ideas, let alone the same perception of art, and this diversity should be encouraged as much as possible.**
Art education is one of those subjects that seem to invite dismissal with the wave of a hand. The basic idea behind art education is that children should express themselves and learn through their creative process. At its most basic level, art education helps people see the world in a different way, think outside the box and appreciate what others have done.
Suppose you are walking past a field, when all you see are flowers, and then suddenly you see hundreds of butterflies flying by. You start to imagine what it would be like if they were lights on a Christmas tree. Your perspective has changed and you can now see something that was there before but hidden from your view. This is the power of art education.
Art education teaches students to look at the world around them in new and different ways. It offers students a chance to express themselves using any medium – paint, pencils, clay, wood or any other material that allows them to create their own vision of the world around them. As an art teacher who works with both elementary school children as well as special needs children in high school I have seen first hand how this can change lives.
There are many different methods of teaching art including drawing, painting, sculpture and collage and each have their own benefits depending upon what you
Art is a way for children to explore the world around them. It can be a great way for them to express their thoughts and feelings about things in a positive way. The following blog post from an art teacher in Florida discusses how art education can help kids. It is a great read for anyone with children who are interested in art.
Telling you that art education is important might not be the most original thing I can say, so I’m going to skip that part and focus more on why it’s important. We all know the usual reasons: art helps develop some very important skills like creativity, problem solving, and critical thinking. But those are just words until we actually start talking about what it looks like in action.
The picture above is of my students after they finished creating their self-portraits. One of my students asked me why he was drawing himself while other students were drawing other people. I told him that any subject or object could be art if you treated it right. He thought about it for a minute and then said, “Well if this chair is art then there’s no need for school at all because this chair could teach me everything I need to know.” At first glance, it may seem like he’s being silly, but he’s not
When I started as a first-year art teacher, I didn’t think much about the work of teaching art. I was excited to share my love of art with my students, and thought that would be enough. But one day in my second year, a student asked me what I perceived to be an innocent question:
“Mrs. Will, why do we have to make these ugly things?”
I was caught off guard. At that point, it had never occurred to me that my students might not like my projects or the art curriculum.
It turned out that this student—and many others—didn’t understand what all the making of ugly things was leading up to. He didn’t understand the purpose of art education.
He challenged me to dig deeper into what it is that I wanted my students to learn through art education, and how to convey that more effectively so that students could internalize those skills and make their own creative decisions and choices.*
Art education is often seen as a luxury, or a field to be outsourced to a “real” teacher. Those who do care about it are often frustrated by the lack of support for the arts in schools. But these sentiments miss the fundamental role art has to play in young people’s lives and in the world.
Tearing down misconceptions —- Art isn’t just decoration; it’s a way of thinking, a way of making sense of the world. Art education is not about debating which art form is best, but about giving students all kinds of opportunities to create what they want. It’s about helping them find their own unique voice and style, encouraging them to think independently and critically, and guiding them towards being creative citizens in our complex world.
Art can help close gaps —- The arts have long been recognized as powerful tools for connecting with students, especially those who are disadvantaged or struggling academically. This is not because they’re easier than other subjects, but because they provide an engaging way to communicate ideas that are essential to learning.
Art changes everything —- By developing an understanding and appreciation of art and design, children develop skills that will help them succeed in any field they choose. They learn to think creatively, communicate effectively, work collaboratively, analyze
When it comes to art education, I have always been passionate about sharing the excitement of making art with children. My own background in visual art is in animation and illustration. I was lucky enough to grow up around artists and teachers who encouraged me to follow my passion for drawing, painting, sculpture and drawing.
This training has given me a unique perspective as an art educator, where I get to see the creative process from both sides of the table. As a teacher, I get to listen in on the conversations that happen when students are working on their own artwork and learn from them how they interpret different media, how they look at objects in the world and how they communicate their ideas through two dimensional imagery.
I love being able to share this process with students of all ages. The youngest children are just learning about the materials that we can use to create art, so it is very important to me that we start with simple tools like crayons and colored pencils, which can be used in interesting ways even at a young age.
When I work with older students I focus on helping them learn new skills and train their eye so they can find inspiration in each day’s surroundings. This is an exciting time because teenagers are often looking for something new to express themselves with as
