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I MAKE ART WITH MY STUDENTS.


The layers are the images I selected from the digital drawings I created after reading the art326 students' journal entries every week.


I want to show the students that I also make art along with them.


The drawings tried to capture some impressive feelings that I had during teaching art326.


The first and second layers represent how I always feel stressed at the beginning of the semester because different students would react to the same course content differently. Although the second layer looks like a flower, I was trying to capture how my nerves enlarge and shrink when I adjust some of the changes. I taught most of the students last semester, but I still felt nervous, and my heart raced sometimes. When I taught 326, I often traced back a lot of my teacher college training. One thing was about writing lesson plans. Oh, I understand how students hate writing long detailed lesson plans. I used to hate them too. However, when I started teaching at CSU, I could easily understand the lesson plan's structure and how to write one based on Colorado Art Standards. Why? I would be thankful for my previous training in teacher college. Yes, there would be many different templates of lesson plans, but if they are thoughtful lesson structures, their ideas are usually similar. I also often thought about art making. The art professors in the art education program were mostly studio professors. The program's structure was actually training students to become artists instead of art teachers. There was probably one particular professor who taught our method course that really worked in the art education field. However, I only remembered making easy craft art for elementary students in that class. In art326, my previous colleague, Dr. Patrick Fahey, designed many significant components to probe students to think about teaching art beyond teaching those simple craft/cookie-cutter projects. The students have to learn to develop their peer teaching lessons based on technology integration. We also decided to add social justice components in peer teaching lessons when I joined the program. Students in art326 could feel pretty overwhelmed at first because they had to think about incorporating many different things in their lesson designs. However, from the ideation to the first draft of the lessons, I saw huge growth in students' works. I wished they could see what I saw (Layer 3). 

We also had some discussions in terms of assignments or requirements in the course. I knew I was doing the right thing---hearing students' voices, but it was sometimes imitating because I had my view as the course instructor. Finding the balance and respecting students' voices has always been a learning process. Throughout my academic learning in Taiwan (and I know many Asians share this experience, too), I never had the chance to communicate with teachers or professors about my thoughts on the assignments. It did not seem to be an option to me. I first realized that I actually had the right when I came to study in the U.S. The professors had office times for me to stop by and ask questions. I learned that I could request revisions for higher grades. My professors asked me to challenge their thoughts and told me there were no correct answers for personal interpretations. I was very excited about these empowerments. I remember I often went to talk with my academic advisor about my ideas of research. She rarely told me right or wrong but asked me a lot of questions to think about. The only time she did not ask any questions was during my dissertation. I asked her, "Don't you have any questions?" She said, "I think you already thought it through. What should I ask? Do you have any questions?" I always appreciated her questions because those questions made my research solid and thoughtful. I wanted to provide a similar space for my students to discuss with me, so I tried to remind myself to ask more questions than say "no" (most of the time, I could successfully achieve it, I think…). My visual representation (Layer 4) represents how we spent 1.5 hours discussing one particular assignment, and many students gave me suggestions to make the assignment reasonable. I tried to accept the suggestions but also clarified my point of view. I did not think there would be a perfect method, but at least we tried to build this constructive circle during the process.

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By layering up these different moments together, my idea is to show people how I felt at the individual moments but also demonstrate how these moments compose the final unity. Often, we see or feel the event we perceive at the moment and are stuck in the feelings (usually negative ones), but we forget that those feelings are just part of a whole. Not until we step back and see the whole picture do we realize that those moments are just a piece of our lives.

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Layer 7 #wemakechangetogether

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