Teaching Philosophy

My Teaching philosophy is based within creating Significant experiences within the classroom. Throughout the education system there can be quite a strong and sometimes detrimental focus on Academia, the art classroom allows students room to breathe and to be the focus rather than grades, this is important for schools to recognize. While the main goal of Irish secondary schools is to get students in , get high points in their leaving cert and send them off , that is not every students experience and that needs to be recognized .particularly the experience of SEN students, Many Junior cert SEN students will not participate in the exams for many subjects but will do so for art, now there’s reasons for this but I believe its because art is one of the few subjects where all students can have significant experiences, the art classroom should be not closed off but a model for the rest of the school (Hickman, 2010,pg 37-38). That’s why in my classrooms The Universal Design for learning is key to every lesson I teach , differentiation should not be box ticked in a lesson plan it is integral, All Students deserve to have the most significant experiences they can have in a subject. Students have different ways of suceeding that can exist outside of a traditonal way which needs to be recognised A large basis of my Teaching Philosophy is on allowing students to develop a strong sense of Culturally Identity. Ireland is rapidly changing and the classroom needs to reflect that, what a vision of Ireland is and what it can be. in my classroom students aren’t meant to assimilate into a monolith of a culture but rather to be incredibly open about their own culture , each student is different and their work should reflect this. I believe in embedding students into the local communities through having units that incorporate their local areas and the activities, outside of metropolitan areas art isn’t held in institutions but on roadsides, similar to Heise these students, do not have a connection to typical art spaces such as museums and galleries but see art in their own community , such as story tellers, musicians and dancers, (Heise, 2010,pg,63), Hickman echoed this in when he discussed how what Is considered art is highly based on culture (Hickman, 2010 pg 110), Making art needs to be siginifcant to students. If students do not connect with what they are creating they are not making art. Feminsit writer Camille Paglia, speaks about how many young people are being led away from the arts “to me, it’s a tradegy that young people are moving only into that area (technology)when in fact there is a huge dimesnion of art , of knowledge of art, exposure to art, that’s missing because they havent been taught art in the right way (Paglia,2017), Students don’t engage with art because they are not creating art in a way that significant to them, if youre students don’t see art in what they are doing you are not teaching them art, which is why im really passionate that the work students create in my classroom is engaged with their cultural idenities and who they are as people. The Art Room and subject is often thrown aside as an afterthought, a place seen by others as less of a subject, a class of doodling, however an art education is increasingly important and needed. In a world of AI and deepfakes where students spend the majority of their time consuming visual media, that they have no skills to understand whether the information they are viewing is true or factual. Students need to have a strong sense of Visual Literacy, this is the cornerstone of each Unit I employ with students, students need to be able to understand what is the truth and what is false , to be able to critically examine and be able to understand what an image wants them to think and what is actually the truth Works Citated Heise, D., 2010. Folk Art in the Urban Art Room. Art Education, 63(5), pp. 62-67. Hickman, R., 2010. Why we make Art and why it is taught. 3 ed. Chicago: Intellect. Paglia,C,2017. Free women, free men, Sex,Gender,Feminism. what I intend to do with my teaching practice.