Teaching can be a solitary experience, even if your art department has multiple art teachers. The art room becomes an island full of art, materials, and ideas. The reality is that this does not have to be a solo journey. There is magic in collaboration, which lies within our teaching practice—a release to get those creative juices flowing to inspire your students.
Frank, Rama Hughes, and James Rees collaborate on a presentation at the 2024 NAEA National Convention.
How We Collaborate
Collaboration can look different from one art teacher to the next. Examples can include working on a project alongside your colleagues, bringing a local artist into your art room to work with students, visiting your local arts center, museum, or gallery, and using a video conferencing platform such as Zoom, FaceTime, or Skype to expand your outreach and build connections that enrich student art experiences both in and out of the art room.
I have found that participating in a Professional Learning Community (PLC) has led me to new curricular inquiries and implementations and given me a broader perspective on student learning from art educators across the US. The most important questions to me are: 1) What is it that I want my students to learn? 2) How will I know if a student has learned it? 3) How will I respond when some students do not learn it? 4) How can I extend and enrich the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency? Engaging in PLC work has calibrated my focus inside the art room and motivated me to continue to grow professionally.
In This Issue
How and why you collaborate can result in positive outcomes that stem from collegial conversations, engagement in problem-solving, being open-minded, and a willingness to try new ideas.
In the elementary lesson “Collaboration: A Way to Reach All Learners” (p. 38), April Malphurs shares how collaboration benefits the personal and artistic growth of her students by building their problem-solving, social-emotional learning, exploratory learning, and team-building skills.
Barbara Weiss’ middle-school lesson “Eighth-Grade Docents” (p. 36) expands student learning into a real-life scenario at the Cleveland Art Museum. Through research, class presentations, and feedback, students recreate paintings of Renaissance-era artists. Their final projects are brought into the museum to be shared with family, friends, and museum staff.
At the high-school level, Tim Needles shares his passion for animation with his students. In “OK Go Sandbox Animation” (p. 34), he introduces Brush Ninja, a free online digital platform to inspire students to create a collaborative animation.
The idea of collaboration and what it can look like within our teaching practice continues to evolve as art educators explore ways to connect. Since 2020, the world of video conferencing has opened the doors to expand our reach in sharing ideas, building camaraderie, and of course, to collaborate. Is there a project that you are thinking about that would benefit from a collaborative exchange?
This issue highlights several ways in which art teachers have integrated collaboration into their teaching practice, such as providing students with opportunities to problem-solve and work together throughout the year, learning about the Sustainable Development Goals and creating a tile installation symbolizing them, inviting a local florist to teach an art lesson, collaborating with an artist to create an outdoor installation using materials reclaimed from the ocean, and more.
