What does it mean to be a teacher of adolescents in the media arts?

By Katherine Percival
Answering the question of what my philosophy is on teaching is very difficult for me, let
alone answering what does it mean to be a teacher of adolescents in the media arts because I
dont often consider myself a teacher. To elaborate a bit, I found that after teachers college and
my several placements within the school system, I graduated with a sense of disconnect. I
realized that despite 5 years of hard work towards the end goal of teaching, I no longer wanted
the path I set out on. Right after teachers college I scrambled to find any program that I could go
into to postpone my familys pressures of applying to a board and coincidentally found myself in
the Gallery and Museum Program at Georgian College. During this course I was introduced to
education from a different perspective as galleries and museums became an alternative space
for teaching, where learning was encouraged but never forced, marks were never assigned and
exploration was always the main goal. This new perspective was inspiring for me and since then
I have made a career switch to use my own schooling in alternative ways.
As a result of this career switch, my philosophy on teaching is consequentially different
from most. I particularly struggle with general educations stress on the end product. This
emphasis on the final piece of art work or the final essay or the culminating task, lacks what I
believe is most important about education and that is the journey. As educators we hope to
create lifelong learners but I would argue that this is hard to achieve when an assignment
comes after every lesson. I feel that these end products have the potential to hinder the
enjoyment that we hope to foster around education.
As an individual who has experience with the Ontario Curriculum, I understand that
grades are a part of the process in determining if a student has completed the expectations, and
nowhere am I suggesting it is the wrong or right way to teach. However, for myself, from my
experiences as a student and from my experiences with my own students, grades can become a
method of determining self-worth. This connection with self-worth and grades is one of the
reasons I moved away from formal education. I witnessed so many students and families stress
over a number and not focus on the overall experience that in the process I no longer knew how
to or wanted to be the person to make those decisions. As a student-teacher I saw so much
potential in my students and saw how much hard work and dedication they would contribute to
a subject and I was often critiqued for inflating marks that should be lowered based on
curriculum expectations.
With all this in mind, my experiences has led me as an educator to focus on helping
students explore. The amazing part about teaching in the gallery setting is never giving students
assignments. My role in this environment is to only foster and encourage material exploration,
likes and dislikes in art and to help students create work that is to symbolize the experience of
the day. This role has evolved my philosophy of education. I believe that my role as an educator
is to encourage the experience of learning rather than the end goal of learning. To teach
students about the journey it takes to love or hate a material, the time that is needed to
appreciate and learn about a subject and to foster a thirst for knowledge for knowledge sake.
With my new found philosophy, I recently was asked to partner with a local high school
to create a high school art course for students who were working with the Alternative Education
Department. The course was to help students who have difficulty being in a standard classroom
get their art credit. With this course, it was very important to me that the focus of the students
grades revolved largely around their time spent exploring materials and big ideas during studio
time rather than their finished works. During this process I encouraged students to not to focus
on a finished product but to spend as much time as possible exploring the materials provided,
researching their interests from a lesson and to challenge themselves in ways. During this
course I made it very clear to the students that they were not being marked on whether their
art looked good but that I would be marking them on their engagement with the creative
process.
This course was my first formal teaching experience since teachers college and I found
that I would catch myself drifting to old ways of thinking, sometimes hyper-focusing on not
having enough product to mark for the program. However, during the marking process I found
that the reflections, documentation and the product of students creative process provide more
material to evaluate than expected. My evaluation demonstrated that the students began to
find a new sense of confidence in their artistic practise and were beginning to make connections
past the classroom and in the community.
To apply my new philosophy and experience to adolescents and Media Arts, I still
maintain the importance of helping students enjoy and explore the creative process and
experience that is Media Arts. However, in the case of Media Arts I believe the teachers role is
much more removed. As adolescents change from generation to generation they are becoming
more involved with media and its applications than any teacher, school board or community will
be able to keep track of. Students will become the experts at understanding the techniques and
skills needed to manipulate mediums to their use, whereas teachers will become much more of
the facilitator, challenging students to push past the techniques and take their creative process
to new levels like trying to create ones own media application. With this in mind, I think the
teachers role will particularly focus on teaching the skills of critical thinking and analyzing how
different Medias can be used to communicate ideas. The importance of analyzing personal,
cultural and historical context will become a higher expectation. It is important to foster these
critical thinking skills as adolescents are becoming a target demographic for marketing and
sources of information. This fostering of analysis and critical thinking will than allow students to
transcend this knowledge into multiple facets of their life, encouraging a thirst for knowledge
for knowledge sakes.
So to make a long story short, what does it mean to be a teacher of adolescents in the
media arts? It means you have to be conscious that your students will have a growing
understanding of the medium as technology continues to become a resource to our daily lives.
Resulting in the importance that critical thinking and analysis will be in order for adolescents to
have the tools to research and understand information and images in a formative way. All while
maintaining a safe and caring environment for growth and exploration with less focus on the
end product and more focus on the journey getting there.