I love to rouse every new academic year of an art class with an open-ended question, “What is Art?” Invariably, the query stirs up an entire classroom of pupil reactions. Most often students mull it over quietly or will answer with juvenile jeer. Back in the 80s, my high school art teacher asked something similar. I don’t recall my initial response, but do recall how it had been a catalyst that led to a raison-d'être unto limitless possibilities.

Today, as an art educator I often begin a module or lesson by listening to students' concerns and queries to prompt self-awareness. Thus enabling me to gain insight and feed discussions when making art alongside students. Exchanges often hover around otherness, relationship, belonging, community, equality, justice, current affairs, and imagined futures to name a few. So, with carefully directed stimuli the art process will become an impetus for communicative expressiveness beyond that of mere aesthetics.

Learning objectives are designed with the intention of prompting youth to broaden their perspectives. As such, modules are carefully developed to meet academic criteria in a manner that considers divergent learning alternatives for all type-learners. Through scaffolded guidance and motivational ploys, I foster conditions to meet overarching learning objectives. Subsequently, gifted, challenged, anxious and disengaged learners are encouraged exploratory options that challenge and support authentic self-expression.

When assessing intention over technique and genuineness over fakery, I weigh a range of assessment markers to set an objective evaluative portrait. Valuation targets may include a combination of oral explanations, gestural acknowledgments, and individual art journal entries. These can then be amalgamated into an assessment that both student and myself validate jointly.

My teaching approach is one that seeks to provoke and deepen original thinking. When addressing contemporary issues, social conventions, community awareness, and inclusiveness, art-making then becomes the foundational structures that are built with and for students to construct and create personal concepts. Subsequently, when youth express themselves artistically on an issue, an event or a topic they activate deeper responses. Through art education there is the potential to nourish the human experience by engaging all five senses. This then incites self awareness, empowers a healthier ego, promotes self-esteem, reveals possibilities and provides fresh outlook.

My rationale incorporates formative pedagogy, coupled with thirty plus years of real world multidisciplinary and media arts experience. My cosmopolitan perspective is sourced from four decades of extensive world travels, international journalistic investigations and a wealth of cultural exchanges and experiences. Today, as a qualified art educator that also teaches History, as well as French and English Language Arts, I’ve found that teaching Visual and Media Arts are ideal programs of study to promote self-awareness and self-esteem. It is then that Art becomes an exploratory processes that stimulates independent thinking and idea making beyond the proverbial box.