Art teachers encourage students to investigate their own ideas and make connections to the world around them. High-school students discover that the zine is a powerful medium for self-expression; middle-school students create symbolic artworks to honor teachers and staff members who inspired them; elementary students express solutions to community issues through printmaking; young students design a hat for a friend based on their friend’s preferences; and more.
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We were happy to recruit art educators to write for this issue of SchoolArts and to demonstrate that all educators are researchers, especially when it comes to creativity and art-making. These art instructors share their enthusiasm for learning and using their own ideas to explore the world while sparking their students’ imaginations. We extend our deepest gratitude to them for sharing their curriculum, lessons, and pedagogy.
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After sharing the picture book Hooray for Hat!, written and illustrated by Brian Won (Clarion Books, 2016), I introduce students to the work of milliner Philip Treacy, who designs incredible hats for others. Students then thoughtfully design a hat for a friend while considering their friend’s preferences. The lesson concludes with students sharing their hats with the class, completing a prompt and presenting the hats to their friends.
Students are asked to choose a topic that interests them based on their experiences in their communities (local or global). This topic becomes their community issue to address. Students can also choose something positive within their community in an effort to make the curriculum more asset-based. Once students have chosen or created a community solution to their topic, they synthesize their ideas into a slogan through class discussions, peer collaboration, and teacher feedback.
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In this article, we’ll explore the idea of integrating wacky drawing challenges as a daily activity to motivate students to push their creative boundaries. “Foodles,” or food doodles, are not your typical drawing activity; they are inspired by the drawing game Foodles from the Imagineering Company. By integrating foodles into the art curriculum, I provided students with a playful way to challenge themselves creatively.
Students wrap up their eighth-grade year with one final art project—one that students and staff members always look forward to. It generates students’ interest and drive, even though they only have a few weeks left in the school year. This assignment is called the Teacher-Inspired Artwork, and it’s an opportunity for students to create an artwork for a teacher or staff member who inspired them during their middle-school career.
This project allows students to think like problem-solvers and innovators. I encourage them to look around their world and see what small “problems” in their lives need solutions. For example, maybe their kitchen sink at home is in need of a container to hold a bottle of soap. Maybe their parent’s desk could use an organizer, or perhaps their bedside table needs a holder to charge their phone.
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If creativity is the destination, how do we get there? What methods of transportation could we take? Might I interest you in a popular vehicle, the zine? The zine (pronounced zeen) is a sturdy and reliable vehicle with few limitations. It’s a versatile medium that allows the artist to explore the world through the pages of a book. The zine vehicle could be a one-seater when you want to take a solo drive, or it could hold many passengers, engaging a whole community of zinesters in a collaborative adventure.
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Activist art often elicits a knee-jerk response, and I’ve noticed that many art educators are understandably fearful of navigating controversial topics in their classrooms. Though today’s contentious educational climate can make these conversations difficult, I believe that asking young people what they think about tough subjects is more important today than ever before. Empowering students to interact with complicated social issues via the art-making process can unlock their creative potential, increase their engagement, and help them connect with the world around them.
I noticed that many students, especially post-pandemic, had difficulty choosing what they wanted to create when given the opportunity. I also noticed that outside the art room, students didn’t have to consider what book to read, what to write about, what to have for lunch, or even what to wear to school. I could see that they had very little choices to make in the traditional school environment. I asked myself how I could offer students more authentic choices to build both their art skills and decision-making confidence.
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Rosa Ibarra is a Puerto Rican painter of people and portraits, mostly of women and children. She is inspired most by innocuous aspects of humanity: a gesture, a contemplative moment, a radiation of strength, or a quiet moment of connection between two people. Her imagery is made powerful by her attention to intimate details, and even more powerful by her used of mixed media to build up the richness of her surfaces and colors.
