Being Our Own Teachers

DAY 21:

One of the hats I wear in my freelance career is as a teacher or art educator. This role enables me to work with many different groups; children ranging in age from 9 to 18 years old, adults, young adults 19 - 25, adults experiencing mental health challenges, adults in crisis, professionals from corporate backgrounds and in the past; early years learners. A wide and varied genre of minds and personalities.

With each of these groups and individuals there are some elements of my teaching that are consistent across them board and that is to approach with encouragement. I’ve never believed or applied criticism as an incentive for learning, it feels dated and victorian and even when an adult student of sound and independent mind and asks for the blunt truth, expressing that they want to know what they are doing wrong so that they can change it, my response is still the same. To observe and share what HAS been achieved, find the successes first before moving onto the areas that can be improved and how this can be developed with support and guidance. In a creative field it’s too easy to be self critical and see the defects. It’s partly due to the nature that as artists we are always looking for the problem to solve, the angle of composition, correct colour, texture of hair, communicating our themes through visual imagery…We spend a lot of time working from the mathematical part of our brain. It’s a high level of intensity and this can also lead us to find fault with our creations before we see the positives.

This can also be the case when it comes to emotional self reflection and in my case this is something that I am very happy to apply to my daily musings. Instead of acknowledging what I have achieved on a given day I will often give myself a hard time, find what I haven’t completed or undertaken. Look to berate myself for a mistake I might have made and completely forgetting my own philosophy of teaching: Encouragement over criticism…any day of the week.