The art room offers an arena for students to develop craft and creative confidence, practice life skills, discover connections, and explore themselves and their communities. They can practice, try, succeed, fail, observe, support, analyze, and witness. Art making can be a very vulnerable experience. I see the relationship between student and teacher as foundational for student courage and safety, essential elements to learning. I prioritize eye contact and one-on-one conversations whenever possible to let students know that they are seen. I value social emotional learning, infuse mindfulness into my art curriculum, and engage in trauma-informed teaching, and believe that arts integration and cross-curricular activities build culture within a school district.

I see myself as someone with the opportunity to facilitate authentic learning experiences--both for my students and for myself as an educator. I continually survey my students so as to have a thoughtfully reflective teaching practice and to gauge individual curiosities of my students. I differentiate instruction so that all learners of various abilities can access the curriculum. I reflect moments of discovery back to my students, individually and as a class, as a means to empower them as artists and as learners. I strategically flip my classroom to allow for students to learn from each other. I believe this is how they can better understand their knowledge and make connections to their life experience.

Student-centered assessments, such as checks for learning, Visual Thinking Strategies, one-on-one conversations, and art critiques, build meaning and community in my classroom. My lesson planning begins from a place of inspiration. I strategize about which art medium will best allow for students to practice life skills and discover something novel. Then, I weave in elements of art and design and offer connections between art history and contemporary artists to round out a lesson. I look to the National Core Arts Standards, Maine Learning Results, and Social Justice Standards to guide learning goals for my students. I value the contemporary art classroom as a space for exploration, connection, and collaboration and seek to celebrate all that it offers in each lesson I design.

I believe that materials help ideas manifest. I value student voice in my assignments and have seen how leaving space for choice can lead to more creative and more personal artwork. Collaboration between students, across disciplines, and with the community reflects my understanding that if multiple avenues are activated in a student, the more that student will integrate learning goals into their identity. I also believe that grounding student learning through a place-based art education leads to personal connection and deeper understanding. I prioritize working with museums, community makers, and the local environment (natural and manmade) to create meaning and offer relevance to the art making process.