We're Here!

We've all arrived safely in Seattle and ready to be inspired by the NAEA conference! On Wednesday, before the onslaught of sessions, I took a walk with (SU alum Corrie Burdick's student at Alfred University) Katie down to the Public Market. A visual feast! Katie is a smart cookie because she had created a set of t-shirts to wear to the conference:

 SU Art Ed students take note for next year in New York City! We want to get you all there working when you graduate!

THURSDAY, Conference Day One

Today's theme was - CHOICE! Corrie and I started first thing by attending a great session with Julia Marshall from San Francisco State, who recently lectured at SU. Prof. Marshall and high school teacher Kimberly D'Adamo presented on a project on Arts-based Research put into practice. To see the work these high school students did was mind blowing as they each chose their path of research, creating visual journals and completing their visual expressions of their learning through art. Students are given a great deal of autonomy and choice in their work. One student did an investigation of this public art space in Berkeley, CA called the "Albany Bulb:" Kimberly D'Adamo remarked that her role in the class is to model how one does research as an artist. I will definitely be reading more by Julia Marshall!
My next session was Dr. Rolling's lecture, Arts-Based Research Methodologies for K-16 Curriculum Making, which discussed his research, giving contemporary art examples and how the frameworks these artists work within are applied in the art studio classroom, along with elementary school student artwork. Someone start bugging Dr. Rolling to hand out presentation notes!

One of the great things about this conference is the range of perspectives you can get from presenters who are teaching in K-12 art classrooms, and also from the many scholars whose articles we read for our coursework. It is SO exciting to see the "rock stars" of our field. These people are so accessible and willing to give you their card so you can email them a question at a later date; they truly are educators! Another session I went to was a panel discussion called, Unpredictable and Unimagined Ways of Knowing: Emergence and Art Education Curriculum. I went to this panel not only because the title intrigued me, but because one of my personal Art Education heroes is Olivia Gude. I was crushed to miss her at SU, but it was great to see how she inspires the audience with her philosophies of Art Education until they applause wildly, hoot and holler. She is a joyful educator. This panel was all about fighting the over-prescripted art lessons, probably a lot of the ones we did in school, in favor of letting student artwork unfold in unpredictable ways. Thought-provoking questions to the audience for discussion and then addressed by each of the panel members made us all question the way we teach, why we want to teach art, and how can we encourage pre-service art educators to embrace the unpredictable and imagine how much further we can all go as art educators.
I enjoyed my first Julia Marshall presentation so much that I attended another she did with Aileen Wilson,  a professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. You can access the presentation at their blog on teaching with contemporary art. There's also some examples of student work here at this terrific art education blog, From Studio to Classroom.
 Exhausted but exhilarated, we all walked to a local Thai restaurant for some delicious dinner and then early to bed!