New York City Public Schools NYCPS
School of Visual Arts SVA
Teachers College, Columbia University
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY: As an art educator, my primary objectives are promoting self-awareness, mutual understanding, and collective responsibility to one another and the world in which we live through exploration, engagement and thinking through artistic materials, tools, and mediums. In forming my teaching philosophy, I found direction in the ethicist Kwame Appiah’s (2017) invocation that, “Once we come to see that many of our best theories are idealizations, we will also see why our best chance of understanding the world must be to have a plurality of ways of thinking about it.” Creating art and meaning is as much about exploring our personal and collective histories as locating paths that will bring us forward. Indeed, the intersection of thought and worldly experience is how John Dewey describes imagination. Maxine Greene asks her readers to give special consideration to the “as-if” power of the imagination to move us into an invented world through the portal of our own lived experience (Greene, 2001). The center of my teaching philosophy lies in the belief that the special purpose of teaching is to discover how to activate the state of “as-if” in each student, to uncover or reclaim potential yet to be realized, and to instill the joy of sharing this gift with others so that dreams can be achieved in unexpected and astounding ways. Appiah, K. (2019). As if. Harvard University Press. Dewey, J. (2005). Art as experience. Tarcher. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. Teachers College Press.