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Janet Silk: Teaching Philosophy
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By supporting a person?s innate creative drive, you support their
capacity to grow and develop as a human being. Art challenges your
daily experience of the world and asks you to consider what is
beautiful or aesthetic. It provokes a new way of viewing the world or
opens an opportunity for personal expression. Through art, you can
learn how to have original ideas.
In my personal work, I remain open to experimenting in many different art forms. This took me to some interesting realms, including collaborative work, installation, and performance art. My own art education includes traditional studio skills in drawing, painting, and sculpture, I have always considered it a foundation from which to explore. Being open to new possibilities nurtures a flexible attitude, a resourceful mind, and a critical eye. My students learn how to apply these qualities to their work and to other activities in their life. It can be a way to channel critical and philosophical inclinations into strong, clear statements, which evoke understanding and respect from the people in their environment. For me it is important to listen to the needs of my students, to be committed to their growth and to gain their trust. From this relationship of mutual respect, I have found that my students can develop their own artistic voice quickly.
Examples:
While teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, I had many challenges. First, I was asked to teach an experimental studio course in Installation Art. The students were not used to the form and methodology of the course and were at first very resistant. In their other art classes, they were discouraged from exploring their own ideas and were taught with a regulated, hierarchical methodology. Their educational experience had left them with low confidence and a sense of disempowerment. I encouraged them to develop their own ideas and led them through a series of activities where they were encouraged to take risks, mainly through playful experiments with materials, without judgment about the final outcome of the piece. This allowed them to gain confidence in their own abilities to respond spontaneously, problem-solve and they experienced their capacity to develop a work of art from its conceptual to its final stages. I gave them a lot of freedom to develop their own content, guided them through choices of materials and form, and advised them how to meet deadlines and work with real budgets. The result was that they left my class with a set of ?real-world? skills that they felt would enable them to make Installation work outside the protected setting of the classroom. It gave them a sense of confidence in their abilities to make their artwork a reality.
My other class at the American University in Cairo was a Modern and Contemporary Art History course. I had the challenge of presenting a Western Art canon to students who live in a complex Middle Eastern culture. It was clear to me that they would benefit from a more critical relationship to the material I had to present, mainly because there is much debate as to the state of contemporary art in Egypt: questions of influence and authenticity predominate in the art press, galleries and in the Universities. I was careful to explain the historical development of Western Modern Art, to discuss its theoretical and cultural background and to point out the problematic issues that still exist because of its underlying ideological base. I attempted to present this complexity in easy-to grasp
language and concepts. The result was that the students felt engaged with the material and were involved at a conceptual level. The information became alive for them, because it had contemporary resonance with the questions they already had about art in their culture.
One of my teaching experiences was with kindergarten through high school age students at the South of Market Cultural Center (SomArts), in San Francisco, California, for an exhibition honoring the Mexican holiday, Di? de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead.) I worked two years for the duration of two exhibitions. For both shows, I guided the students through the exhibition, performing a short educational lecture about all the pieces in the show and explaining the artists? responses to Di? de Los Muertos. From this experience, I have learned to communicate about complex cultural issues to a wide range of age groups and have cultivated sensitivity to cultural differences and the many ways people relate to art. I believe this experience gave me a strong foundation, from which I relied on for my more complicated teaching situation in Cairo, Egypt. It is important in all educational contexts for the students to feel safe to confront me with questions they have. I see it as my personal responsibility to be sensitive to each student?s age, culture, and ethnic background and to foster a sense of community in the classroom.
Another experience from which I learned much was teaching a graduate level course at California State University in San Francisco, in the Inter-Arts Department. The class was an introductory history and theory course in interdisciplinary art. I taught this class with my collaborator of eleven years. During the semester, we developed a discursive method of teaching the course, based on Paulo Freire?s pedagogical studies. Students responded best to our acting as mediators to a discussion they would have about class readings and material. We promoted discussion by responding to the conversation with questions; our role was to keep the conversation going, to provide focus and to arrive at conclusions based on the students? interpretations. We phrased questions to help students realize what they are thinking and why. Again, I learned that the student-teacher relationship works well when both students and teachers encourage a mutual respect for each other, in a sense, the students were empowered to become teachers by sharing their knowledge with us and each other.
Pedagogy:
I believe education can build self-esteem and a sense of purpose for one?s life. My desire is for students to leave my class with more self-confidence than when they had on the first day of class. By this, I mean it is important that the person not only learn a new skill or bit of art history, but that they gain knowledge about themselves and their capacity to respond creatively and intellectually to their environment. I try to identify issues that the students have throughout the course and respond to their needs. This means I make room to modify my curriculum to address subjects the students are interested in, to develop skill-building exercises or provide suggested readings. No class is absolutely the same; I have a base of material to cover, yet augment the course from feedback by the students. I believe with this kind of flexibility, that I am able to collaborate with the students in achieving their educational goals.
I draw on inspiration for my teacher/student relationship from the work of Robert Greenleaf, the author of Servant as Leader.
Robert Greenleaf describes servant-leadership in this way.
?The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve ? after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.
The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people?s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived.?
Taken from the Servant as Leader published by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.
Through this approach to education, I find that I can respond creatively to my students in a way that encourages their growth.
For practical art practice guidelines, I rely on the work of Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers. I studied with professors who were students of Albers in particular during my undergraduate studies at the California Institute of the Arts and because of their influence, I believe in the need to build foundation skills, which I incorporate into my studio classes, even if the subject is experimental or digital. My studio classes include a version of these concerns:
1) Studies of nature, exercises in observation, observation of texture and form.
2) Compositional studies of ?Old Masters? (Sometimes what I use as ?Old Masters? may be from a non-Western tradition, or be combined with contemporary artists.)
3) Color theory, via Itten and Albers, exercises in contrast and observation, textual description of color.
4) Drawing: from life with a basic understanding of rendering perspective and shading, the ability to draw simple figures. I see drawing as a tool for observation, (an important skill for artists) and have used Betty Edward?s exercises from her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. In my art history classes I have used observation exercises to stimulate students? interest in the art we are discussing.
5) Improvisation with materials, natural and human-made. I often introduce ?play? and improvisation followed by analysis and critique.
I adjust these five foundational principles to suit the studio course, but I attempt to convey to the students their need to build a relationship to these skills.
In addition, if appropriate to the class goals, I have a strong background in the use of the critique session as practiced by my professors at CalArts: Michael Asher and John Baldessari. For these two artists, the critique was a pedagogical tool to enable the student to clarify their intentions, gain awareness and mastery over their tools and artistic vision.
Other methods I have used are from two art educators, Edmund B. Feldman, whose work on ?How to Look at Art? I have used to augment my history classes and critique sessions. Also the work of Marvin Bartel, whose paper: ?Nine Classroom Creativity Killers? I refer to often for inspiration. He says:
?Artists use a variety of problem solving strategies, some move things around until they look right, some know that they need to cause an accident and look for ideas in the accidents. Some know that they need to simplify, or to edit, some make order from chaos. Some want to point out the problems of the world, while others search for perfect beauty. There are many methods of working aesthetically and an art teacher must expose students to as many paths as possible.?
I define myself as a successful art teacher to the extent the students learn to formulate questions that they find compelling. The questions energize their own creative process and inspire them to be active participants in their art and in their life; they are then motivated to be active learners and to pursue knowledge with sincerity.
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