Teaching Philosophy

Teaching Philosophy

I feel that education is not only based on the basics, but built on them. To me, creative expression revolves somewhat around those basics that are taught and also around the areas in life that are unseen, or thought. Creativity opens a person’s mind, to not just focus on what has been taught to us, which is information stored in the left side of the brain, but also to utilize our own ideas and imagination to express ourselves, which utilizes the right side of the brain (which is rarely used in the average individual). By doing creative things that use the imagination, it helps to strengthen that part of the brain which has been weakened with time. As children we feed that part of the brain, all is growing at once. But once formal education is introduced, that vision is narrowed to the point that it becomes lost and usually never recovered. What we are taught contradicts vision in art and destroys the vision of an artist unless given the proper instruction and guidance on how to combine the known knowledge acquired and what is seen in actuality. A class that offers this guidance but to have freedom in a pressure-free environment that allows for creativity is what I desire from my class because for me, the art program when I was a child lacked. Art was mostly for holidays, something to take home to your mom for a certain special occasion, not for individual expression.

I think out of all the philosophies that would best suit my desires in an art class would be the existentialist approach. Existentialism rejects the existence of any source of objective, authoritative truth other than the individual themselves, in which that individual determines for themselves what is right / wrong, true / false, and beautiful / ugly. Existentialism fits perfectly for an art program in that it gives the student a chance to have freedom of thought to be as creative as they like without something/ someone controlling what they do. In the existentialist class, students are allowed to choose their own medium, like prose, poetry, art, or music, and evaluate their own performance and sometimes each others performance.