PPDP+Reflection

 PPDP Reflection As Leslie was leaving my last mentor visit, I started telling her how this whole experience has sort of “woken me up” from what seemed to be a sort of “art hybernation” over the last few years. I have been a teacher at Uniontown Area School District for 5 years now, serving grades 1-8 in art education. My first 3 years, I was young, excited, and tried so many new things. Year's 4 and 5 were good, but something was missing. As I reflect now, I know exactly what was missing...

My first few years, I didn't need any sort of “new thing”. I had my own art room, I was finally a teacher. However, after those few years, things started coming monotonous. I started repeating projects (which I rarely did), and I feel like I started losing my spark. Being a teacher at a high poverty level school, that is always hassled by low PSSA scores, I was becoming frustrated. I was often told to focus more and more on PSSA's, sortof put the art stuff second! I'll never forget one time when my one principal came into my room when we were doing this amazing printmaking project, he quickly said, “and how does this apply to the PSSA's”! I was devestated! How dare he. I was doing what I was taught to do, teach kids art! And here he was questioning my agenda. Not that I'm not certain there were many reading and math connections put into place, but that's ALL he was concerned with. He wasn't concerned with the fact that ART IN EDUCATION IS SO IMPORTANT!

Which brings me to Arts Educator! You have truly awoken me from my hybernation! You have brought the spark back! You have given me an IU experience, that is so often never about art, and gave us a community of art teachers to talk to, and a revitalizing art experience to get us excited again.

When working on creating my PPDP, I quickly knew that it had to be something about how important art is in education and how frequently it's pushed aside. Therefore, I came up with working with the school and community to create a sort of “arts awareness”. My plan has been a working process of educating myself more about arts advocacy, and then in turn, passing that knowlede along to my administrators and parents. With the help of Arts Educator and Leslie, I was quickly given great reading material about community arts and arts advocacy. I have posted some responses to some of those articles, passed some of them along to other educators and administration, and even used the idea from one of the articles to create my mini-grant! I then decided that what would be better than having a “Community Arts Day” here at my school. On this day, parents and students will come and learn more about the importance of art and have fun celebrating art by participating in projects and having fun! (Flyer and Schedule available on wiki). A packet will be handed out to the participants that day including handouts about the importance of art, suggestions for parents about what to do with their children at home to promote art, and a list of local activities available to them concentrating on the arts (theatre and visual). At the end of the celebration, we will have a short assembly where we will present the prints that I purchased with my mini-grant funds to the school i will then explain how we hope to continue adding to this collection by soliciting local businesses to purchase a print for the school. This was an idea taken from one of the suggested readings! I'm really excited about this idea, and I'm sure local businesses will show there support for the school by purchasing a print! This will certainly show our students that there are people out there that care about them and the importance of the arts in their education!

Thus far, I have included some event information on my wiki, and will continue to do so by posting a video and pictures of the actual event.

I was actually hoping to send this reflection via video, but because of technical difficulties, was unable to do so. I will be sure to have all tech difficulties cleared up when it comes time to share the success of the day with everyone!