Philosophy of Art Education

Jeanna Jerde I want to teach because I feel a desire to help people and I feel teaching is the best way I can fulfill this desire. I want to teach art specifically because I love it and I truly believe it is important to teach. I want to share my love for art and hopefully form a love or appreciation for art within my students. In addition, I believe that education itself is the cornerstone of a wellfunctioning society and I think art has a significant role in shaping our societies and cultures. Education forms the foundation of a working, civilized society. Through education, people learn the basic skills needed to endure in todays society. Education also provides people with knowledge of the past. We must be knowledgeable of and learn from our past in order to progress as a society. In addition, education supplies people with experiences that are important for social development. Finally, education, especially art education, encourages and builds upon peoples creative abilities. It is this creativity and knowledge of the past that creates the innovators that will shape the future. I believe it is incredibly important to teach art for several reasons. First, art teaches many important life skills such as the importance of hard work, decision-making, dedication, and personal pride. Art teaches students the joy and satisfaction that comes from a job well done. In my classroom, I will encourage my students to work hard to produce the highest quality of art possible and will discuss ways that this hard work and dedication to creating a quality product can be transferred to many different situations in life. Also, the process of creating art is filled with subjective choices, which indicates that it is also imbued with constant decision-making. I will teach my students to make their own choices and then reflect on the choices that they made. Finally, I will also help to instill in my students a mix of personal pride and humility; through constant constructive criticism, the students will analyze and identify areas of quality and areas that they could improve on in their art. In addition, art teaches people how to healthily and effectively express themselves visually and verbally. Art can be often be therapeutic and has the ability to express that which cannot be said. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know.1 Art teaches that language does not define our cognition. Students in my classroom will encounter multiple critical thinking and creative problem solving tasks, which will cause them to learn that problems can have more than one solution. These problems can be solved through the process of manipulating a visual form or verbal expression. This verbal expression will often be in the form of an interpretation, description, or analysis of a piece of artwork. The study of art also teaches people the way to interpret our rapidly increasing visual culture. Visual language is imbedded within present-day culture and is rapidly increasing in its effect on our choices and lifestyle. After leaving my classroom, students will have the skills to interpret and speak the visual language, which will in turn give them a vital power over the influence of advertising.
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Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press.

Lastly, art education can instill in students a better comprehension of values and ability to make moral choices. Through the study the art of many lands and peoples, we expose our students to the expression of a wide range of human values and concerns. We sensitize students to the fact that values shape all human efforts, and that visual images can affect their personal value choices. All of them should be given the opportunity to see how art can express the highest aspirations of the human spirit. From that foundation we believe they will be in a better position to choose what is right and good.2 I aspire to prompt my students to consider their own values, beliefs, and emotions and create art that truthfully reflects those. This introspection will help them to better understand their own perspective of the world while also celebrating the existence of multiple perspectives. Overall, I am incredibly excited to teach students art for so many reasons. I am excited to impact my students life in a positive manner by nurturing each students unique abilities, fostering their creativity and critical thinking skills, and teaching real life skills such as hard work, decision-making, dedication, and personal pride.

Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press.