How Art is Made

While I was reading through this article about how children learn art I could not help but relate things that I have learned about being in the classroom to things I am now learning about art. Through methods courses we are always talking about ways students learn aside from the typical instructional strategies. Little things that teachers do, maybe not even intentionally that students pick up on. One thing that came to my mind while reading this article was that most teachers preface any drawing they do in front of the classroom with "I'm a terrible drawer but..." and then everyone laughs after the drawing is complete no matter what it looks like.

Teachers need to be modeling for students the idea that drawing is a part of a person, you do not need have amazing skills and create a Mona Lisa to be respected as an artists. Some how the idea of every student needing to color in the lines, every student needing to make grass green and apples red has created a sigma that makes someone either good or bad at art. Teachers feed off that sigma when they stand at the board in front of the entire class and allow everyone to make fun of their drawings because they do not look exactly like the trees that grow outside or the car that drives down the street.