VCUarts Art Education Student Teacher Blog

My 9th grade students have been working on a symbolic portraiture unit. They are creating monochromatic, vector-style portraits of a person significant to them, choosing a color to symbolize an aspect of their personality. We looked at examples from contemporary portrait artists including Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, Hope Gangloff, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, discussing how […]

My IB Art I class was tasked with creating a sculpture using paper pulp that would make the whole class feel empowered. Prior to beginning this assignment, I gave a presentation that highlighted the life and work of Niki de Saint Phalle.  Her work focused primarily on empowering the female form, so I decided to […]

An issue I ran into during a zine project was material organization. It’s something that is really important and disastrous if it’s not done well. In this photo, my CT set out bins full of magazines for each table to use. This was a life saver for me because I hadn’t thought about organizing materials […]

In this photo, this group was working like a well oiled engine. Every person had a task and if they finished, they would help others out. One foreseeable issue I had to handle during this group project was task delegation in each group. On the first day of the project, I hadn’t thought about telling […]

My 6th graders made board games for their project on CHANGE. This particular group went above and beyond with their concept. They made a game about how people’s emotions change and using the game to inform where the player will go, which emotion will change, and having cards with important facts. Something they did which […]

One of the things I have enjoyed about the middle school teaching experience is the longer class periods and the relationships I have been able to form with each class period since I see them every other day. I knew that for my first project with the middle schoolers, I wanted to try a peer […]

Art I is always a class that can be unpredictable for a new teacher.  So my solution was to allow my students to use acrylic paint to depict the flower on their table.  From a teaching perspective, this assignment can easily serve as a pre-assessment of students’ painting skills.  Also, it gives the students opportunity […]

On Fridays at my school, I see every class for a 40 minute session. I decided to do a “designer” spotlight on the Guerrilla Girls for my Graphic Design class. Many of the students have not taken art since elementary school, and none of them had heard of the Guerrilla Girls before. I showed them […]

Check-ing In As Art Educators, we can only hope that every class will be full of student engagement, inspiration, and creative art-making. However,  as humans, we all have good and bad days; on good days, one can say we might feel overcome with joy, motivated, and ready to conquer anything... However, our wake up on […]

My fifth grade students seemed to be somewhat nonchalant when it came to art class.  I wanted to write a lesson, then, that would expose them to more kinesthetic materials that they may not have worked with before.  Because I try to incorporate as many found materials as possible in my art-making and classroom, I […]