Teaching Artist Handbook, Volume One

Tools, Techniques, and Ideas to Help Any Artist Teach

Nick Jaffe, Becca Barniskis, Barbara Hackett Cox

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780226256887
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226256917
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Art General

Teaching Artist Handbook is based on the premise that teaching artists have the unique ability to engage students as fellow artists. In their schools and communities, teaching artists put high quality art-making at the center of their practice and open doors to powerful learning across disciplines.
This book is a collection of essays, stories, lists, examples, dialogues, and ideas, all offered with the aim of helping artists create and implement effective teaching based on their own expertise and strengths. The Handbook addresses three core questions: "What will I teach?" "How will I teach it?" and "How will I know if my teaching is working?" It also recognizes that teaching is a dynamic process that requires critical reflection and thoughtful adjustment in order to foster a supportive artistic environment.
Instead of offering rigid formulas, this book is centered on practice—the actual doing and making of teaching artist work. Experience-based and full of heart, the Teaching Artist Handbook will encourage artists of every experience level to create an original and innovative practice that inspires students and the artist.

part I

TOOLS, TECHNIQUES & IDEAS

1

What Will I Teach?

AT ITS BEST, teaching artist work is similar to art-making in that it is inventive, improvisational and flexible. To teach in such ways we need to know our medium and any other areas we wish to teach in combination with our medium. We also need to have an attitude of curiosity about both the areas with which we are familiar and areas we wish to know more about. This combination of knowledge and curiosity about what we teach is what enables teaching artists (and all good teachers) to engage students in dynamic and exciting learning and art-making and to encourage students to develop and pursue original ideas.

Teaching and art-making also share another characteristic: they are largely about identifying what is essential in a given context. An artist’s power resides partly in the ability to identify what is essential to an idea, vision, association or functional characteristic so that it can be communicated, embodied or designed in a medium. Similarly a teaching artist, or any good teacher, must identify what techniques, concepts and processes in a discipline are essential to teach in a given context so that students can better make original work that successfully applies and extends past practice and knowledge.

What you decide to teach matters. It is the single most important decision that you can make as a teaching artist. It informs every other aspect of your teaching and is the place to begin, always, when you are heading into a new teaching situation. It is also worthwhile to return again and again to this question and reexamine what matters to you as you develop your practice as artist and teacher. Maintaining clarity on what you want to teach is essential to improving not only your own teaching practice but also the practice of others—students in your classroom, teachers and other artists and the field of arts education in general.

This chapter is about deciding what you want to teach through a process of discovering (or re-discovering) and naming the skills and concepts in your medium that you think are most important and interesting to teach and finding new areas that you’d like to investigate. Ultimately the question of what to teach is intertwined with that of how to teach, so you will find some overlap between this chapter and Chapter 2. You may even wish to flip back and forth between the chapters as you develop curriculum ideas and experiment with planning.

This chapter includes a critical essay that aims to place the question of what to teach in a larger context, as well as specific prompts and questions designed to help you think about your art form in very concrete ways. It also includes a series of exercises/tools and a range of examples to help you do the following:

Identify your own expertise and experience in your discipline.

Identify what skills and concepts you view as essential to teach in your discipline/medium.

Identify areas you’d like to study more within your discipline.

Identify areas of knowledge and experience outside your discipline that you would like to incorporate in your teaching.

Throughout this chapter we offer ideas and pose questions that we have found helpful in our practice. There is no single way to do this kind of inquiry; we want to share some useful entry points that have helped us and other teaching artists to begin.

We’ve divided the chapter into two parts: “Ideas and Context” and “Concrete Steps.” If you are in the mood to consider some more general questions before getting to work on actual curriculum design, you may wish to keep reading. If you want to get right to work, you may want to skip to “Concrete Steps.”

WHAT TO TEACH: IDEAS AND CONTEXT

Who are teaching artists?

Teaching in an art form makes you a teaching artist. Practicing artists can be teaching artists; arts specialists (visual arts, music, dance, theater, media arts, etc.) can be teaching artists. For the purposes of this book we are defining teachers, administrators and facilitators who introduce and contextualize art and artists for learners as arts educators—that is, people who can both understand an art form on a deep and meaningful level and break it down for learners. Arts educators usually understand how teaching artists work, and they often support the work of teaching artists in meaningful ways. But the focus of this book is on those who create work regularly in an artistic discipline and who also teach in that discipline.

In a sense, what distinguishes teaching artists as a type of artist and educator has mainly to do with how education is organized in the United States. Working in an art form and sharing one’s knowledge, ways of thinking, and responses concerning art is often separated out as an experience distinct from educational experiences normally associated with schools and other institutions. This handbook is focused specifically on the concerns of the teaching artist, but any type of educator, from a Kindergarten teacher to a professor of mathematics at the college level, must teach from a deep well of knowledge and experience in one or more content areas in order to teach well. It is that knowledge and the confidence that springs from a strong grasp of one’s discipline that allow a teacher to reach students effectively, to teach what is most essential, and to engage students as individual and unique thinkers and makers. One need not be an experienced teacher and pedagogue to be an effective teaching artist. One need only be entirely grounded in one’s medium and be able to break it down in useful ways.

We also have a certain luxury as teaching artists that most educators do not. Although we are sometimes asked to engage existing curriculum and educational priorities and standards, our primary role is to teach from our own practice and experience as artists. This approach is what creates an art-making context in schools, community centers, prisons and other places that is different from what already exists there. This approach also potentially expands upon what people learn and ordinarily experience in such places. Most educators should design curriculum based on the question “What is currently known in the field I am teaching and how can I prepare students to use and extend that knowledge?” Teaching artists design curriculum based on the question “What do I know in my medium and how can I equip students to use that knowledge to make their own art?”

Closely examining the “what” of your teaching is an excellent and focused way to improve your practice as a teaching artist and is also potentially artistically liberating and enlightening. Thinking about your medium as a teaching artist can generate all kinds of new ideas for and about your own art-making. This is one reason why so many teaching artists find their teaching work such an integral and stimulating part of their life as artists. If you articulate what matters to you in your discipline, you are both creating curriculum and thinking as an artist. This first step in teaching artist work goes right to the heart of what makes the work so exciting—it is simultaneously teaching, learning, and making.

You are a teaching artist NOW

There are established methodologies in arts education, and arguably even in teaching artist work. One organization or group of teaching artists might teach according to a specific type of arts integration. Another might approach teaching from the point of view of a specific methodology or theory of art, like Aesthetic Education. The Reggio Emilia approach to arts teaching has been very influential in many American arts education circles in recent years. The pioneering work of the German Bauhaus and the Soviet Vkhutemas design and architecture schools of the 1920s through their practice developed some of the most important insights in modern arts education theory. Any of these approaches, philosophies or methodologies undoubtedly has useful insights to offer a teaching artist, even if in the form of negative examples or provocations to further research. Some of these approaches incorporate significant theoretical work and have important and interesting historical roots. All are potentially worthy of study. And it is useful and interesting to think theoretically and historically about teaching artist work. If you are looking for precedents and ideas as a teaching artist, why not investigate what has already been done?

However, a premise of this book and this series is that applying overly general methodologies and too formulaic an approach to teaching artist work is limiting. Teaching artist work is not a science; it is an art. It may have scientific elements to it, just as science has many artistic dimensions. But to attempt to reduce the great variety of teaching artists, contexts and students to a single methodology seems to work against two central strengths of the teaching artist field: variety and flexibility. Precedent and methodology are necessary in art-making; no art-making is completely “new.” But too much deference to precedent and methodology inevitably le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Teaching Artist Handbook Series Introduction
• About This Volume
• Part I: Tools, Techniques and Ideas
• Part II: Context
• Endnotes
• References
• Index