Online Arts Education

WHAT A YEAR! This past year has seen all of us stretched to our maximum capacities and inspired to be the change we wish to see in others. In examining and reflecting on 2020 and bearing witness to everything that has been part of our collective learning curve, this meme came across my desk and left me giggling......could this sum up our past year of online learning?

Perhaps...

We need to take a moment, a collective sigh and give ourselves the credit we all deserve to really examine what we have accomplished- we as educators and students have all taken an immense leap into a world many of us lived in fear of.  We have done what many of us and many outside the world of education thought possible. We may have been able to use the excuse that we do not have the tools we need to be really successful educators, maybe not our own classroom or not the right supplies.....but this year we all have been made to use the most important and always undervalued skill sets of CREATIVITY, CREATIVE PROCESS and CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING. We have had to use that part of our being that childhood knew innately and we work so diligently to undervalue in our current education models. We have been called to use the part of our being that only saw possibility.

Can you imagine this last year without these critical and essential visual literacies and creativity skills? It would be like going to the bank without knowing numbers, currency or mathematical literacy you need to have to ask for what you want. Perhaps, we as educators, parents, caregivers etc. have been transported back in time to a place where we were students again and opened ourselves to the possibility of co-creation, play and wonder. We put aside the expectations of administration, parents, students and did our very best to learn, create, manage and make possible the impossible with the tools we had to work with. I found this incredible short film that I think so directly speaks to what a true education experience holds for our students and helps us understand that nothing can stand in our way when we really listen to our students needs. We as educators are the Creators of Possibility and hold the tools, skills needed to provide every single one of our students the opportunity to achieve and accomplish their dreams. We lead the way as Creative Beings open and ready to tackle any challenge when we give ourselves the freedom to believe in what we are born to share.

If this film is not showing up please look up Miranda July "Swim Team".

CONSIDER: What is this film trying to communicate? Has there ever been a time in your educator practise that you have had to overcome a challenge such as having no pool but having students that wanted to learn to swim? What did you do to create that opportunity?

Here are some examples from the past year of how other educators accepted and adapted to the challenge of online learning! I have watched an absolute transformation happen online with Arts education and I promise you that now more than any other time in history.....ART EDUCATION is accessible, innovative and inspiring!!!!!   We truly can move mountains when faced with roadblocks!!!!

One of the BEST:

Remai Art Making

 

 

THE SHOW MUST GO ONLINE! A Virtual Children’s Musical

https://www.njea.org/students-imagine-what-their-teacher-will-look-like-post-quarantine/

Best Online Art Classes of 2020

 

The Show Must go Online

Remote Learning Toolkit

NAEA Tips for Teaching_Hybrid Learning

A Behind the Scene look at Online Art Teaching

Best Apps to Help you Teach Art Remotely

Free Sheet Music

21 Distance Learning Projects

 

 

So why do I share this?

Like many of you, I wondered when asked to move this class online... IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE and HOW?

Here is my answer in short (NOTE *this answer has changed daily and continues to do so. By the time I have this written the world will have shifted again with more information available*).

YES AND NO.

YES, of course- one can teach art online, aren't all good educators adaptable and always wanting to stay current? This is the way of our educational systems have been asked to move: online, remote access, synchronous, aynchronous, whatever the new title is, it's what the world is doing. There are many examples that I have often used in my classroom experiences of YouTube techniques, etc. and it's often that those words fly out of my mouth..."just Google it".

YES, it's completely insane to try to take a circular, fluid way of thinking and try move it into a linear, static box.....yet...here's the beautiful part my learning journey: discovery.....this box has a vast amount of little boxes that contain spaces within their space and the possibility of possibilities that fit within this box are....yes....limitless. With one exception.

Me.

I am not the technology genius I wish I was and the biggest stumble so far (and not an elegant one at that) has been learning the platform and doing my best to work within it's framework. If I could apply the skills and technique I use everyday in my arts practice, this would have been an easy transition...I would simply cut, paste, layer, foreshorten, filter, perform my way through each module, with the grace that 25 years of practice has supplied me with.

YET.....

I stumble, trip and have fallen enough times in the last 3 months to realize that just because I put a heading onto the page with some words of wisdom that follow doesn't mean that my students are learning anything. Just because I put a fancy picture with a link to some amazing content doesn't mean that my students will follow that link and end up down a rabbit hole forgetting the whole point of what they were supposed to be engaged in. Just because I feel like I have somehow connected the dots, doesn't mean those dots will ever make the same picture for each of my students.......

So........

Where does that leave online arts education?

A place for renewal, reinvention and reinterpretation.

This is our chance as a class, to redefine what online arts education can and should look like.

As I have put together each of these modules, I feel that I am only scratching the surface of the available information, what's missing for me in this experience is simply - YOU....

YOU are the part that I look forward to everyday I come into my classroom. I look forward to hearing about what YOU have learnt, what YOU are curious about and most of all I love the dynamic nature that YOUR energy brings to our time together while you are creating something for the first time. As mistakes get made and messiness happens, YOU  become the teacher that shifts the conversation, YOU embody what it means to learn and most of all YOU open yourself to the endless possibilities that exist within yourself and remember what it's like to play. That energy is what creates the most incredible classroom dynamic and builds the relationships that online learning is missing.

Our goal as teachers should be to facilitate the amplification of what we teach so that what students learn resonates more fully in their lives. In this way, the skills that students build will strengthen them not just in building successful careers but also in searching for meaning and connection in their years beyond the university. -Michael S.Roth

Reflecting upon my own teaching experiences as a means of contributing to my professional growth, I am able to comprehend and contemplate these various implications. Firsthand experience lends me the memory of what it was like being the  student to then becoming the actual teacher.  This transition has provided the time every teacher needs to look within themselves and shift the way they HAVE been doing things, shift the WHY they do it that way and now-shift the HOW the information gets translated. We have been granted the space to look at how we are learning IN, ABOUT and THROUGH our experiences.

I am grateful for shift and space COVID has provided, it has moved (perhaps forced ) me into a multi-dimensional  direction. My hope is that by sharing this experience and the nuances, challenges and discoveries that come with it,  each of you (future arts educators) will find the space to breath knowing that we are at the forefront of sense making and meaning creation. Advocating for visual arts programs in all of our schools (be it in person or online), we  the Arts Educators are the leaders that our students and colleagues will look to in distinguishing how excellent teaching is represented. We provide insight into what is possible, through our adaptive, creative and imaginative ways of knowing.