Project: Art Education

Coming to VCU, I planned on majoring in Art Education. Art Ed. is a safe major. It's something that I could always fall back on. Besides, I love kids and I think that it would be a blast to work with them every day! I think making art with young students would be a wonderful job, where I would want to wake up in the morning. So when it came time to pick a project class I picked Art Ed.

The class only lasted five weeks. Going into it, I was hoping for a super Intensive class where I would be able to learn about working with children, how to make lesson plans, the do's and do not's with younger people, and just an overview of what the major is all about. Well, I was really in for a surprise.

Well, not enough people signed up for this particular project class. So a couple of months before they sent me an Email notifying me that all of the classes were going to be combined into one space. And, instead of me taking the class the first available five weeks, it would be the second available five weeks; just because that's when they felt the time would be most appropriate. This change was fine, it didn't really affect me. When it finally came time for class, I was really excited. I couldn't wait to meet my professors and see what this major was all about. But, I didn't get really get to meet them because neither of the two professors showed up. No note, no nothing. They just forgot. Lame. So, they apologized through Email, and announced that class would start the following Monday (the class was on a Monday) an hour late. When the class actually started we hardly discussed anything that dealt with art education. We had to professors, one was Dr. Taylor and the other one was a blonde named Sara. Sara was an ultra feminist. The only thing that she talked about was how women are viewed in today's society. Dr. Taylor basically emphasized the importance of second life, so the days that she was the professor, we learned about second life and went to the computer lab and played in second life. We only had four assignments for the class. One was to create a second life, read John Berger's, Ways of Seeing, Reinvent a doll, and create something that represents art education from a piece of provided cloth.

I was really disappointed in this class. I was expecting to get more out of it. But, it turned out to be more of a class that explored feminism. This was mostly because one of our professors was a feminist. She preached her views to us. It was really interesting, but not what I signed up for. When Dr. Taylor told us about second life she emphasized how Harvard has a second life island, and all of the students are a part of it. She also explained that VCU's art education was the only department at VCU that had a second life. I wasn't really impressed by this. I felt that maybe Dr. Taylor was just having us create a second life account so we could boost the department of Art Education.

I am really glad that Dr. Taylor and Sara assigned the John Berger reading. I was interested in John Berger and his views on things! I felt that his ideas were extremely interesting, and his views actually changed the way that I look and think about things. I also enjoyed the doll and the cloth project. I always get really into projects. I think that they are the best part of every class. I just really like making things! For my doll project, I found a little dutch doll at a thrift store, completely stripped it, ripped off it's head, added a male head, painted it, added wings and tons of other things. I was stoked. I named him Nike, like Nike of Samothrace (goddess of victory). They reminded me of each other. I was really embarrassed when I went to class and Nike sat up next to a naked Barbie doll that had been modified with scribbles of sharpie. (Actually, I thought one girls Barbie turned out to be very successful. She painted it to look like a zebra, and broke of the legs and re-glued them to be hind legs. You can imagine how Sara loved this- women in society being viewed as animals) Instead of a critique, we set out a piece of paper by our doll and everybody walked around and wrote "essential questions"- questions that can't be answered. One of the essential questions that someone wrote on my page was, "Did you have a lot of time on your hands?". I mean, I knew that it wasn't that serious of a project- but I still cared about it. Here is a picture that Dr. Taylor took of it in class.

Nike

Nike of Samothrace

The same thing happened with the cloth project, people just colored on their cloth with sharpie, and were like, "I just did this because I liked the colors". Here is a picture of me presenting my cloth project that Dr. Taylor also took.

me with my cloth project

This class made me realize that I didn't really want to major in art education. I mean sure, I would still love to work with kids. I'm just not ready to give up all of the studio resources that VCU has to offer. I mean, I know that I would still have to take studio classes if I majored in art education, but I would rather have studio classes be my focus for the next four years! Also, I think that feminism is important and that it was important. However, I don't feel that it is happening anymore. I don't view myself as a piece of meat. I'm really glad that I did take this class though, because it helped me realize that not all classes are going to be the same and they are not always going to be what you expect. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and deal with it.

Who knows, maybe I will end up double majoring in art education and something else.