My teaching broadly focuses on preparing individuals to be productive members of their community. As an art educator, this community includes people who shape and interpret our visual world and who teach others about art and design. My goal is for students to gain an understanding of how art and design interacts with other forces to influence and enrich our lives. Consequently, the thrust of my instructional endeavors involves guiding art education students toward professional competence where the importance of art and design in daily life is recognized and investigated.
My teaching responsibilities include both undergraduate and graduate courses in visual art education. In relationship to the undergraduate program, I help prepare prospective art specialists and elementary classroom teachers for careers in schools and other educational settings. As part of this process, I assist future educators in gaining a theoretical foundation for teaching art while helping them develop the necessary professional outlook. This involves acquiring an historical perspective of the field, learning about current relevant research on teaching, recognizing patterns of children's growth and artistic production, and realizing the varied approaches to effective art instruction undertaken in educational institutions. Thus, students should become familiar with the scope and substance of contemporary art education while conceptualizing and developing realistic art teaching methods.
Fundamentally, my aim at the undergraduate level is to shape the perspectives and dispositions of future educators. They should understand the demands and responsibilities of being a successful art teacher while gaining the habits necessary to continue their own learning beyond university coursework. To accomplish these goals, I first help students examine their existing knowledge and beliefs about art and teaching. They are also encouraged to be open minded and raise their expectations about what pupils can learn about art and design. One way of assisting beginning teachers in refining their thinking is to promote a positive attitude towards the art education profession. In particular, I encourage my undergraduate students to become professionally active by joining and participating in local and national arts and education organizations. This involvement strengthens their engagement with art education, deepens their knowledge, and teaches them that learning about art is a rewarding, life-long process. As a result, I challenge future educators to think critically about instructional practices and expand their professional, intellectual, and artistic understandings. Ultimately, they should view teaching and learning as a meaningful, exciting, and fulfilling endeavor.
My responsibilities at the graduate level focus on teaching and guiding students in their thesis research. I primarily teach history of art education, aesthetics in practice, and research methods. Also, I have an interest in curricular methods that focus on design and architecture in art education. In these contexts, graduate students should refine their art education perspectives to advance their own professional practice and expand their understanding of the field.
At the graduate level, I encourage students to reflect on what they already do in the classroom and what they would like to accomplish in their career. They consider their pupils' performance, their interactions with peers, and their own teaching in order to make connections between theory and practice. At the same time, they review existing scholarship in the field to determine what has been explored and what needs further investigation. These issues guide graduate students' efforts in coursework and in their thesis research. Most important is the idea that what art educators do makes a difference in the lives of their students and to art education as a whole. My intention is to instill a sense of personal responsibility for the advancement of the field as well as for graduate students' continued intellectual and artistic growth. As with the undergraduate program, I emphasize a substantive approach to art education where high expectations for pupil learning are coupled with the view that research is an essential aspect of advanced education. As a result, graduate students should know that professional commitment and leadership are hallmarks of a graduate education.
My research encompasses two main areas: educators' use of art content in teaching and the practice of teaching for higher order understanding. Because student learning is tied to the depth of teachers' subject area understanding, I am particularly interested in the role content knowledge plays in art teachers' instructional decisions. At the same time, I am concerned about the pedagogical strategies teachers use since their approaches also influence what students come to understand about art and design. To this end, I have concentrated on art educators' subject knowledge and their thinking regarding instructional processes. Most of my investigations have focused on preservice and early career art teachers because this population is critical to the future of the field and to my own teaching duties.
My interests in teacher thinking and practice first developed as an exhibiting painter and art teacher in South Florida. While working with other art teachers, I found it intriguing that we would make considerably different instructional decisions even when using the same curriculum with similar student populations. Although many factors influence how lessons are taught, I noticed that knowledge and beliefs about art seemed to have a substantial impact on what some teachers emphasized in their lessons. If their knowledge of a specific artist or artwork was shallow, then their teaching approaches to it were likely to be superficial as well. I wondered why some art teachers seemed to have difficulty using the art content they learned in their teacher education programs. When they lacked knowledge, why were some not motivated to add to their art understandings? Why did some art teachers seem to be more efficient at recalling and using their art knowledge? Given these questions, what could be done to enhance the overall depth of the art program? For the past 10 years, I have focused on these questions while exploring ways to improve teachers' use of art knowledge in their practice.
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The University of Kansas School of Fine Arts Lawrence, KS 66045 785/864-3421 |
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