CLASS REFLECTION AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

My reflections on the class Curriculum Planning and Assessment in Art Education - Art Education 7607 SP 2024 taught by Dr. Shari Savage could not be more positive. By using peer feedback and encouragement, I could do something I haven’t done yet as a teacher or mentor and that is develop full units of study in a comprehensive and (above all) cohesive way. Before this class, my units development was based in my own studies that varied little with my own input. Much of my curriculum creation was based in what I had studied. With the help of this class, I was able to weave into the instruction, my own experiences and thoughts from the beginning and not wait until the actual class time to add my two cents.

Before this course, I was basing my teachings on what I felt was quality curriculum and I lacked a standardized methodology to measure, not only my students output within the class, but the quality of the class itself. Through readings and class feedback, I could step back and see where my curriculums lacked insight, interest, and connection with the students and I could see where my own grading systems were flawed and uneven.

The biggest take away for my own process is that I now have the ability and foresight to create a map of learning outcomes for each assignment and with enough planning, I can match those outcomes to each student’s projects so that they can be graded equally. This class, essentially, has offered me a way to create an engaging curriculum as well as a plan to see how students retained the information given. This class has provided a number of practical tools for me moving forward with my career.

Although these readings could be used in many different settings, the overarching message that is held aloft in this class is that it is up to the teachers to put their best foot forward to take art education forward. Each article is loaded with ways that teachers can make a difference in moving away from cut and dry technician teaching to curating and engaging material that keeps their students thinking and striving to create work that represents their ideals and passions. These articles and class have been presented to push new art teachers away from the cookie-cutter and uninspired past and into the malleable, positive, representative, and forward progress of the future.

Annotated Bibliography:

Buffington, M.L., Bryant, A. (2019). Changing Practice: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in Art Education. National Art Education Association, The Journal of the National Art Education Association, Jan 2019, V. 71

Buffington makes a great argument for teachers to search harder for finding art lessons that are more diverse in their teachings. Buffington makes a point that teachers need to dig deeper than the skin-deep searches on Pintrest to find more diverse lessons for their students. Many of the top searched lessons on Pinterest that teachers default to do not promote diversity but create harm by simplifying it. “These projects are not celebratory, but trivializing. They reduce complex cultures to simple projects aimed at a reproducible, usually cute, product.” (Pg. 22)

Desai, D. (2020) Educating for Social Change Through Art: A Personal Reckoning. Studies in Art Education. 61:1. 10-23.

Desai makes a splendid case that creating art can be a source of power and a voice when creating change through social justice. By breaking down Western epistemologies within art and design is opening of the flood gates to realizing how powerful art can be as a tool for social justice. Art can be used to challenge social norms and take a stand against social hierarchies. "Art in its representational form can affect politics by serving as a moral witness to gross inequities and state-sanctioned atrocities." (Pg. 15)

Sawyer, A.G., Dredger, K., Myers, J., Barnes, S., Wilson, R., Sullivan, J., Sawyer, D. (2020). Developing Teachers as Critical Curators: Investigating Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Inspirations for Lesson Planning. American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education,
Vol. 71(5) 518–536

In this article, the authors treat lesson planning less as a culmination of facts to be bundled together to be learned and more as a curation process of ideas to be presented and shared. This is a major shift from technician-style teachers delivering a memorized lesson with very little to no deviation from the plan to curation-style teachers who collect ideas and present them in an ever-changing way by continually adapting the lessons to best meet the student needs. "Being a curator of content means going beyond choosing an activity from Pinterest just because it has a lot of pins or assuming that an activity is developmentally appropriate just because a CT suggested it." (Pg. 533)

Wilhelm, J.,D. (2012). Essential Questions. Scholastic Instructor, Holiday 2012.

Wilhelm writes that leading students to the ask more questions is an essential key to keeping students engaged in the subject. Wilhelm states, that we keep students energized and engaged by asking essential questions. For students, distilling larger ideas into essential questions then framing them in a way that connects with the students, leads to longer discussions and more specific questions that keep the students wanting more information. "An essential question frames a unit of study as a problem to be solved." (Pg. 25)

Ploof, J., Hochtritt, L. (2018) Practicing Social Justice Art Education: Reclaiming Our Agency Through Collective Curriculum. Art Education. 71:1, 38-44

Ploof and Hocktritt agree that it is impossible to study art and social justice without participating in the process. By presenting the ideas behind social justice art, teachers are offering their students fodder to create their own voices in the art world. "practicing social justice art education is not an individualistic academic exercise but a dynamic collective process in which art, education, and action are interwoven." (Pg. 39)

Winner, E., Hetland, L., Weenema, S., Sheridan, K. (2006) Studio Thinking: How Visual Arts Teaching Can Promote Disciplined Habits of Mind. New Directions in Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (189-205). Amityville, New York: Baywood Publishing Company, 2006.

The authors present their findings for whether studying art can help students score better on testing from reading to mathematics to sciences to writing. Most of the findings show that it is inconclusive evidence to prove these theories one way or the other. While there are no silver bullets in the studies, the authors do land on some amazing discoveries about studying art. "Thus they are teaching their students to focus and develop inner-directedness. They teach them to break out of ruts and blocks and to feel encouraged about their work so that they are motivated not to give up." (Pg. 12)

Smilan, C. (2016) Developing Visual Creative Literacies Through Integrating Art-Based Inquiry. The Clearing House. 2016, V 89, Nos. 4-5, 167-178.

Smilan ties the ability to think creatively and to effectively communicate said creative thinking is a prerequisite for living in the 21st century. Even though the mediums have changed within creating art (painting with brushes versus digital creation), Smilan argues that much of the basis for art remains the same. And against much of the old-school thinking, Smilan argues that creative thinking permeates all walks of life and that teachers from all curriculums should engage in art-based practices. "What remains a constant in this educational reconstruction is the essence of arts-based teaching and learning: the situational ability to analyze, integrate, conceptualize, and [re]create." (Pg. 176)

Class Reflection and Annotated Bibliography

My reflections on the class The Artmaking Process - Art Education 7604 AU 2023 taught by Dr. jt Eisenhauer Richardson, begin and end with the statement: this class is a game changer for me as a teacher, a mentor, and as an artist. I have known about the idea of ‘Play’ as an artist for some time but until this semester, I was unaware of how it could help me reach my goal preparing students to be creative problem solvers through making art.

 My most significant take away from the class was how I could integrate the idea of ‘Play’ into my teaching. Sydney Walker tells us right off the bat that Play is tough to define. “Although it seems that defining play should be a straightforward enterprise, the difficulty of corralling it, a complaint often echoed by theorists of play, indicates its complexity as well as its illusiveness.” (Walker, pg. 13) For me, the definition I attach to the word Play comes from the Miriam Webster dictionary “scope or opportunity for action”. As a creative, I have embedded the idea of Play into my brain as an opportunity to think freely and without judgement. Play is the space where I can be as outrageous or as buttoned up as I want to be. I see the idea of Play as not a game to be completed but as a frame of mind to use when creativity is needed. As Walker suggests, “extensive literature surrounds play, theorizing located in education, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and game studies. While I have drawn upon this body of work, it has been in a highly selective manner, laying hold of concepts that resonate with classroom artmaking. This approach led me to highlight six types of play and delineate the text chapters through them. These are nonsense play, physical play, experimental play, social play, participatory play, and chance play.” (pg. 5).

Walker’s chapters on the six types of Play opened the door to formalizing the idea of Play so that I could create lessons deeply rooted in my teaching core belief of using art to turn out creative problem solvers years after their last art class. I have now been able to apply lesson plans that create the space for students to see that art is not a cookie-cutter class where expectations need to be met in order to succeed, all based in the ideas of Play.

Before this course, I was utilizing the ideas laid out in this class to students in VERY broad strokes by creating spaces for them to explore their own creativity. Much of what I was teaching was left up to the student to either grasp or neglect the idea of Play. Since this course, I’ve been able to hone in on specific lessons (using repetition, verbs, chance, etc.) to directly impact the student’s way of thinking about creativity while showing them that literally anything is possible with their camera.

If you can problem solve it, you can theoretically make it.

Annotated Bibliography:

Walker, Sydney. (2022). Artmaking, Play, and Meaning Making. Davis Publications, Worcester, MA.

This book details the ways that Play can be used within the artmaking process along with hundreds of examples of real-world artists utilizing it as well as teachers utilizing Play within their classrooms. Walker takes us through detailed ways to get students to think differently about making art via chance, movements, repetition, community creation, and many other ideas. This book should be taught to all art teachers in hopes of creating a basis for creativity at the grade school art level. 

Ingold, Tim. (2013). Making – Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge Publishing, New York, NY.

Ingold spends much of this book describing the ideas of creating and making as anthropology and thus the data presented to a culture by creating something can be used to study the culture as well as the individual. The acts of using one’s senses to glean even more information from various cultures through collection and art is just as important as reading about other cultures. Serious cultural connections can be made by replicating the creative process yourself as you study other peoples, places, and things.

Kaprow, Alan. (1986) Art Which Can’t be Art. Letter, self-published.

Kaprow, a well-known artist, used this letter to define why the mundane actions of humans, when repeated with purpose, can be considered art and not just sociology. The relationship between the artist, the action, and the documentation cannot be disconnected and thus must be received as art.

Kaprow, Alan. (1996) Just Doing. Keynote address for 'Performance Art, Culture, and Pedagogy symposium held at Pennsylvania State University 13-16 November, 1996.

Kaprow uses this keynote speech to show how performance art can be considered a higher form of creativity. Kaprow shows us how experiential art can be fleeting to the performer but lifelong for the viewer. Kaprow uses polite public rules in his favor to create a palpable imbalance within his works, occasionally pitting people in public against their better judgement for the sake of art. Kaprow uses his examples to show that art can create imbalance and make people think without much effort.

Smith, Phil. (2013). Walking-Based Arts: A Resource for the Guided Tour, Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism. Routledge Publishing, London, UK.

Smith uses this article to connect how art is created when the path of what should be happening is strayed from. Using tour guides as a metaphor for creativity, Smith shows us episodic regurgitation of information is bland and boring while the spontaneity of freethinking creates flashes of greatness and holds attention longer. Thus, spontaneity creates art just by it’s own introduction.

Annotated Bibliography and Class Reflections

This semester I started my Masters in Art Education program with the class Critical Analysis of Multicultural Art Education taught by Dr. J.T. Eisenhower Richardson. Throughout the semester we explored, historically, how both race and racism drive, divide, intersect, and create issues within the education system while also focusing specifically on race and racism within art eduction. The course highlighted the rise of post WWI housing policies that have led to the segregated communities around the US and the many educational policies that followed said segregation that whitewashed how and what the children of the US would learn. In the end, both the housing system and the education system let a large portion of the population down by not adjusting to the needs of everyone and seeing the population as Americans and not as different races and genders.

Throughout the course, we tackled many ideas such as race is a social construct, the white-streaming of the educational system, and how, as teachers, we are not always given the best tools to handle a multicultural classroom. It was through these readings and conversations that I could truly realize my own part in the process and my own shortcomings in real life situations. One thing that was hammered home is that in any teaching environment, a connection must be made between student and teacher if a higher level of learning can take place. To do this properly, I need to be more than just a liberal white male who has already reaped the rewards of being just that, and I need to progress to an empathetic ally who is here to help anyone through my door, not just the students that look like me. 

Through this course, I have extended my own understanding of what it means to be an ally and how I can put my own privilege to good use as a teacher, a mentor, and as a friend and a colleague. Within the first weeks of the semester I was brought in to a project outside of my day to day teaching that paired me with a number of underrepresented communities in the Chicago theater/film/art industry and I was chosen to help mentor them through an entire independent film production where I could apply my knowledge and help support those around me who have had a hard time getting the chance to work in such a setting. It was eyeopening, beautiful, stressful, gratifying, tragic, and wonderful, all at the same time.

Annotated Bibliography

Kohli, R. & Solórzano, D. (2012). Teachers please learn our names! Racial microaggressions and the K-12 classroom. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 441-462. 

Within this article, published in 20212, Kohli and Solórzano argue that students of color constantly encounter racial microaggressions between the grades of K-12, specifically in regards to the pronunciation of their names. They argue that “enduring these subtle experiences with racism can have a lasting impact on the self-perceptions and worldviews of a child.” (pg. 441).  Both authors have firsthand experience with these microaggressions and it lends to their thinking. As someone who is named something that is not very generic (yet still understandably white), I can empathize with how it feels to be called something other than what your parents named you and how that stays with you for a very long time. It is a stark reminder that paying attention to your students cultures is just as important as students paying attention to your teachings if you want to connect. 

Rothstein, R. (2018). The Color of Law. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Within this book, Rothstein draws direct parallels between decisions made by the US government (a very white establishment) in a post World War 1 society that helped create and solidified the segregation within our major cities and suburbs that our country subtly continues to propogate today. Within those decisions made by the whites in power, Rothstein shows us specifically where BIPOC groups were not allowed to participate in the growth of generational wealth in the form of land ownership while white families could invest in their future generations. The driving forces behind these decisions and racist laws were a need to keep races separate. The whites in power used legislation as well as written and unwritten real estate practices and guidelines to keep BIPOC families from investing in real estate. Within the system, those BIPOC families that could invest were charged 3-4x more for their investment while facing stricter rules for missing payments than white families. If there is a book that every teacher in America should read, I would vote for this one. It is such an incredible reminder of how we got to the times and places that we live in today. “I think it can be fairly said that there would be fewer segregated suburbs than there are today were it not for any unconstitutional desire, shared by local officials and national leaders who urged them on, to keep African American from being white families’ neighbors.” (pg. 54)

Kraehe, A., Acuff, J. (2021). Race and Art Education. Davis Publications Inc.

Kraehe and Acuff spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of their book, defining what it is they see as race and as racism. They outline ways to talk about race and racism and they show how whites have used it throughout the education system. They also add in how they themselves have grown up in radicalized classrooms and how to overcome it. The beauty in this work is how the authors describe the difference that will be made if art teachers begin to undo the whitewashing of art in our society and history by using an anti-racist art pedagogy and an abolitionist mindset within the classroom. It is through these techniques that we, as future and current art teachers, can change how all students look at art and the history that surrounds the story of it. If you don’t know how racism affects the arts classroom, than you will not know how to reverse it. "The meaning of race is not stable or fixed in biology but rather at different moments is reshaped by human beings to exploit a variety of circumstances." (pg. 18-19)

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press.

Love takes the story of her own life and brings it to the forefront of her book. As a young black student all the way through school and into her own classroom setting, Love take us on a journey of healing and facing her own faults while pointing out the holes within our teaching system, ones that she herself fell prey to before she could fully grasp what she was doing as a teacher. Love shows us that to be truly excellent teachers, we must teach with the the urgency of an abolitionist out to correct the wrongs of the previous generations. It is within her own stories where her techniques shine as she shows us how it did not work the first time around for her as a teacher and how a new mindset and educational outlook must be taught to teachers for them to be affective at their job. “Abolitionist teaching is not a teaching approach: It is a way of life, a way off seeing the world, and a way of taking action against injustice. It seeks to resist, agitate, and tear down the educational survival complex through teachers who work in solidarity with their schools’ community to achieve incremental changes in their classrooms and schools for students in the present day while simultaneously freedom dreaming and vigorously creating a vision for what schools will be when the educational survival complex is destroyed.” (pg 89)

Katz-Buonincontro, J. (2018). Creativity for Whom? Art Education in the Age of Creative Agency, Decreased Resources, and Unequal Art Achievement Outcomes. Art Education, 71 (6),

In this article, Katz-Buonincontro makes a case for creativity to be a human right and not just a human act. She uses this argument to show that inequality in art education has stunted students views on what creativity is and how it should be used. With creativity as a human act, the way our current education system teaches many, the acts are small, separate, and skin deep where as creativity as a human right means that no matter who you are, where you come from, you should be given an opportunity to excel and given the tools and teachings to exceed in the arts. But our educational system holds back many BIPOC communities in larger cities where art education is one of the first fundings to be removed from the budget. The access to arts education within the major demographic groups is widening with affluent whites receiving the easiest access which means that underrepresented groups are being left by the wayside.  "When art educators open up the curriculum to allow students to make socially relevant and personally meaningful connections, then it’s possible for students who may feel disenfranchised to excel at learning in the arts." (pg. 37)