Art teachers provide a variety of lessons for students to communicate their unique stories and ideas. Young students identify starting-place symbols in various texts before designing their own personalized letter designs; elementary students create a mural based on local food systems after learning about where their food comes from during farmer visits; middle-school students create nine-panel digital collages with symbols representing their likes and interests; and high-school students learn how cellphones and comic books can be powerful tools for visual communication.
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How does one begin to tell a story? Does it start with a memory, a recent experience, or perhaps an essential question that sparks an idea? Through the stories we share, we can transport our students on a journey via our words, images, and excitement. Our stories are as unique as the students we teach.
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As educators, we understand that getting to know our students is a vital part of teaching them. When students are invited to share details about their life, family, hobbies, dreams, developing identity, and culture, they feel seen, heard, and safe—the perfect milieu for the risk-taking necessary to learn and grow.
Celebrating local food systems benefits schoolwide wellness and strengthens community. On the shores of Lake Superior, in Michigan’s Rural Upper Peninsula, our growing season is very short. Over 400 miles north of Chicago, Houghton Elementary School’s art students were inspired by our food service director’s passion to facilitate a vibrant farm-to-school and summer meal program. Experiential learning through farmer visits led to students designing and creating a mural in our cafeteria.
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As an elementary art teacher in the San Diego Unified School District, I was inspired by the 1,800-piece kolam that was installed on inauguration day near Capitol Hill in January 2021. I decided to have my students collaborate on a kolam-inspired installation at our school. Kolam designs are a perfect way to integrate several concepts in art such as symmetry, line, shape, color, space, and repetition.
Students were asked to reflect on a favorite and significant family memory and to write down a description of that memory. Next, students were asked to think of images that come to mind when they recall that event. In keeping with the tradition of some folk artists working with available materials, I distributed an inexpensive bundle of lumber scraps from a local hardware store. After students selected the scrap of wood on which they wanted to illustrate their family story, they were instructed to sketch out the plan in their sketchbooks and to sand and prepare the woodblock for painting.
My students often explore their individuality and personal stories through their work. This year, they experimented with storytelling in various media. One student, Jorge Guifarro, a senior at the University School of Milwaukee, captured his daily life as a contemporary teen. I sat down with him to discuss his process.
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At the beginning of a new semester or school year, art teachers have an excellent opportunity to get to know our students through storytelling. National Geographic’s online education website states, “Storytelling is universal and is as ancient as humankind. Before there was writing, there was storytelling” (para. 1, 2024). Students of all ages can tell their stories visually using a variety of materials.
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My design students start the year taking photos and end the year creating their own hand-drawn comic books or animatics (animated storyboards). If you want your students to create art that communicates, my advice is to have them take lots of photos with their cellphones (both in and out of the classroom) and read comic books. This is a quick and fun way to improve and artist’s sense of visual composition.
I studied illustration in art school. One way that we practiced was by dividing a text into portions that each student illustrated. After a given time – sometimes a very brief amount of time – everyone hung up their artwork, and we read through them like a picture book. It was an engaging, exciting, surprising way to see how different artists approach the same challenge and how different readers interpret the same text.
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Ryan Gardell is a mixed-media artist who works primarily in painting both on canvases and walls. He embodies the contemporary street art ethos of community involvement, beautification of neighborhoods, and uplifting community spirit. Gardell is also a graphic designer who enjoys illustration, photo-editing, motion graphics, and animation. It is his street art that he considers his most powerful tool because of its ability to communicate complex emotions to the widest possible audience.
