My role as an Art Teacher, as I see it.

We all see things differently.  We all have our own unique perspective.  I am not on the backside of your eyeballs.  I don’t know how you perceive the world nor do you know how I really perceive the world.

We all can be artists because we all have great individual perspective.  But a successful artist, visual or otherwise, must communicate their perspective to others through their medium.  So for me, that would be painting, sculpture, and drawing; for a musician, it is music; for a dancer, it’s a dance, movement, theatre, drama, production.  And also literature is art.  It’s something emotional, a perspective.

We need to get students to be able to communicate, non-verbally in my case, also through mediums, artistic mediums.

So this is the dilemma.  Every art teacher has to go to school, you learn, you know what it is to be an artist, you get to class and the kids are all like, “teach me how to draw like you” and you sit there and it suddenly hits you like a ton of bricks… I can’t teach anybody how to be an artist.

Why?  Because it’s praxis.  It’s an internal process.  It’s hand-eye coordination, ideation, motor planning and execution.  So what do I do? What is my role? My role is to guide and facilitate.  I am kind of like the art tour guide and since I like metaphors, and I like visual metaphors, I am your art tour guide.  (Mary Beth Scheerer, Art Teacher, Celebrate the Children)