I've been spending the last few days trying to find a speaker who could effectively take the diverse field of visual art and classroom teaching, and somehow merge them into a conflated whole that could both amuse, delight, and entertain a divergent group of people, some of whom have no interest in either topic. Not an easy task.
The more my brain is engaged with this topic, I'm starting to see, or I guess feel, that we've kind of missed the boat with our societal interpretation of what a teacher or artist really is. We've been so focused on teaching the "science" of education, hoping to somehow take the raw material of someone who may or may not be predisposed to teaching, and molding them into an inspired, dedicated, teaching machine. It doesn't work.
What we end up with, more often than not, is a slightly terrified place holder--sometimes with appropriate content knowledge--that tends to focus on the black and white tasks of education. Enforce the classroom rules? Check. Assign appropriate homework? Check. Teach the mandated state outcome for the week? Check.
We should be searching for rebels and revolutionaries that can grab a group of children and lead them down a meandering path that would seem to any outside observer as play time. But at the end of the process, that same, seemingly crazy teacher emerges, with artist/engineers in tow. We've been spending our time foolishly separating content areas when we should have been mashing them together all along.
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