Contemporary Arts Theory & Practice in Education - a Multimedia Presentation
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, I’m Mrs Close and I can’t wait to be a teacher!
Teaching is my passion! My vision as a teacher is to inspire students to have a love for learning, to open minds, to be critical thinkers. I want to celebrate each student for their individual distinctions and creativities to build upon students’ skills and knowledge while integrating and developing vital literacies, numeracies and technologies. I believe it is essential to provide a stable, safe, challenging environment in a classroom and work towards creating a journey of learning that is as enriching as possible for each and every student.
To become a teacher, professionally, I must show that I have reached the graduate level in all Australian Professional Standards for Teaching.
Know students and how they learn
Know the content and how to teach it
Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments
Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Engage in professional learning
Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers in the community (AITSL, 2014)
Nearing the end of my studies I believe I have reached the graduate level in these standards through engagement in professional placements but even more so in my work teaching aiding at local schools. Not only has this experience cemented teaching as my future career but I have gained priceless knowledge in effective and exciting teaching strategies and pedagogies, behaviour management and developing great teacher-student relationships .
As a teacher I believe it is essential that although I am to teach, that I am always willing to learn; am open to feedback, being critical and self-reflective. It is crucial to be flexible and continue to move forward with the current world and new technologies.
The Queensland College of Teachers provides a Code of Ethics to guide and encourage teachers (QCT, 2008). In summary, the following values have been identified: Integrity, dignity, responsibility, respect, justice and care. These all being indispensable in dealings with students, families and colleagues.
My understanding of the importance of the arts is that much of it is blanketed by a hidden curriculum suggesting that The Arts are of much less importance than other areas of schooling. This, I believe, is especially the case in smaller, rural schools where resources and support are lacking. For this reason, I take much encouragement from Elliot Eisner’s words describing his idea of a new culture of schooling as follows:
I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached.
(Eisner, 2002).
As a future arts educator, I am well aware that there will always be ongoing professional learning. I have joined a number of teaching associations, have wonderful, supportive networks in fellow colleagues and past mentors as well as am constantly searching for new and improved resources and technologies.
I can’t wait to be a teacher and through my teaching values, attitudes, skills and ethics and being open to continuously learning I hope that I continue to grow towards becoming the best teacher that I can be for my future students.
References
AITSL. (2014). Australian professional standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standards-for-teachers/standards/list
Eisner, Elliot W. (2002) What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education?. Retrieved from http://www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_of_education.htm
QCT. (2008). Code of ethics for teachers in Queensland. Retrieved from http://qct.edu.au/pdf/CodeOfEthicsPoster20081215.pdf
