SchoolArts - January 2012

Editor’s Letter

The orderly construction of this old gas station made from bricks and petrified wood in Glen Rose, Texas, has withstood the ravages of time. Even with a crack down the middle, the arch has maintained its strength and held together.

My life as an art teacher is driven by a desire for order and an inability to actually attain it. But still I try. I’m always surrounded by piles of papers, books, and art supplies I might need at some point. As an art teacher, it’s hard not to be a hoarder.

How do order and organization apply to the artroom? Practically, it helps to have at least some order in how you store and distribute art materials and student work. Conceptually, I believe curriculum should progress exponentially and spiral in an orderly fashion.

Perhaps it would be helpful to share some of my organizational practices. At the end of every day, before I left school, I would gather and stack everything I needed for my six classes for the next day. I wanted to have materials and artwork at hand so my students would not have to wait while I hunted for artwork or supplies. I would even “set” the tables for my first class to be ready when I arrived in the morning.

During the day, before each class left, I would try to put the artwork in the proper cubby and write down what they would be doing the next time they came to art. Otherwise, things could get quite confused very quickly.

Concept-wise, I agree with Jerome Bruner,
author of The Process of Education (Harvard
University Press, 1977), that “any subject can be
taught effectively in some intellectually honest
form to any child at any stage of development.”
I think that most art concepts can be
addressed for different levels simply by varying

the vocabulary and the complexity of the ideas. This is reflected in Bruner’s “spiral curriculum,” which revisits basic concepts repeatedly, in an orderly approach, building upon what the student has already learned.