Why Teach Art?

 

The question “Why teach art?” seems a simple one at first.  I want to teach art because I love it!  The true reasons behind why I love art and why it is important to teach are much more complex.  In High School when it was finally revealed to me that art can be used to express your emotions and tell your stories, my love for it grew tenfold.  I now had a personal connection to this creative process.  Creating art and having critiques about art has taught me how to give (and take) constructive criticism and learn how to think outside the box.  I learned how to work hard when I became an artist.  You have to put in extra work and research to get the product that you want, and it didn’t even feel like work.  Learning how to work hard on something that I love helped me to learn how to work hard on the things I don’t like so much.  My new critical eye that didn’t just take things at face value learned how to unpack readings and question facts and opinions. 

The arts can increase parent involvement in the school and with their child’s school work.  In the Principal Magazine the first article is called “Connect With the Arts.”  This article discusses how different schools used art to bring parents into the school and to spread diversity through their students.  At Sunnyside Elementary many parents were comfortable in the classroom because of their own bad experiences with school.  The principal instigated a monthly family night where the students, parents, and teachers all came together to eat a meal, create an art project, and listen to a guest speaker.  One of the projects was to make a fleece blanket to snuggle with while doing a nightly reading session together.   Speakers would speak on many important subjects, such as using art to express your emotions, and how it can help with math and other subjects.  These ideas really demonstrate how art can help bring students and parents together and get parents involved with their kid’s teachers. 

I also believe that having visual arts and literacy education is critical because it can help connect different subject matter in a cohesive manner.  For example the Principal magazine gave the example of using a project to create symmetric butterflies to reinforce what the kids have been learning in geometry about symmetry, and/or what the students have learned in biology about the makeup of an insect.  Art can be critical for connecting the dots with many students and providing different ways of learning. 

Learning how to have visual literacy is also critical for students to understand the world around them.  Our society is so immersed in media and advertising that is important for them to learn to decode these messages and the lies they are being told.  Learning how to evaluate an image based on its composition, color choice, scale, juxtaposition, and meaning are just a few of the tools that our kids need.  Art leads kids to have a more critical and analytical eye, they are better able to strip down and image and understand what is really there by having Visual literacy. 

 

Source:  "Connect With the Arts." Principal Sept.-Oct. 2012: 2-4.