It's Complex: Teaching for Artistic Behavior In the Age of #Covid19

Despite leading the World in #Covid19 infections and deaths, the U.S. will be sending K-12 students back to their classrooms for the 2020-21 school year. The US Department of Education has prioritized sending children and their teachers back to school this fall.  School and public education is an integral part of reopening and maintaining the US economy.

My initial thought on this situation is the idea that federal and state departments of education, their lieutenants and system functionaries would send children and teachers back to crowded, indoor confines during the #Covid19 pandemic without doing exhaustive research and preparation for their health and safety, is unconscionable. Let's be clear, public schools in the U.S. are already operating on shoestring budgets with overcrowded conditions. I foresee immense problems here. The spread of #Covid19 from home to child to school then back home is a very real concern.

Compounding this situation for K-12 public education is that waiting in the wings of the #Covid19 pandemia, are proponents of school privatization and data-driven ed-tech. Eliminating brick and mortar public schools and teacher unions has been a dream of public education deformers. Never mind there are immense neuro-developmental problems related to children staring into computer screens for hours at a time, remote online learning platforms are being pushed as viable substitutes for brick and mortar K-12 school experience.

From my perspective, technology is a two edged sword. In K-12 settings, digitized media can enhance constructivist and creative learning experience. Writing, researching and reflecting on art, photography, video, audio and interactive experience through digital media is quite meaningful and provides immense personal satisfaction. Conversely, I  believe sequestering children for extended periods of time in virtual or hybrid digital realms, locked inside adult designed data-driven, information processing learning programs is problematic.

I look at the call to go back to school as a challenge that I readily accept. I am not fearful. I will answer the call to go back knowing that their is no substitute for in-person educational experience and in particular, Teaching for Artistic Behavior.

The Subjective Realm and Emergent Curricula

I don’t want to enter into this situation with naive exuberance. I will be there for my students and to provide the very best educational experiences that American public education can provide. For better or worse, children and their teachers are heading back to school in the midst of the worst pandemic in over 100 years. I am determined to make a difference in the educational lives of my students. Consequently, going back to school is going to generate stress and distress on untold numbers of children. In order to counteract that certainty, I am going to double down on my pedagogical practice. The gift that keeps on giving is the fact that Teaching for Artistic Behavior means students have opportunities to take their subjective realm and situate it for investigation and exploration. I will be there to facilitate this process for my students.

If state and federal lawmakers think increased numbers of children are not going to experience toxic stress in school during this pandemic, they are mistaken. Ameliorating children's stress through cognitive behavioral therapy is problematic. Children should not be conditioned to be passive about their situation. The curriculum becomes inconsequential to the real issue that confronts children and that is the situation of their lives. The curricula should be centered upon the child's lived and experienced reality, their concerns, interests, fears and ideas. In a TAB classroom, these realms can be addressed, investigated and extrapolated upon.

TAB philosophy and pedagogy is all about strengthening pathways to intellectual, creative, literary, social and emotional development within the heterogeneous school settings in which they occur. TAB curriculum experiences practiced from a school, hybrid or remote setting can be emergent and rhizomatic. I will be utilizing more dialogue with students, offering more content, suggestions for investigation and possibilities for study. I am prepared to offer more interdisciplinary exploration. If I could paraphrase Nan Hathaway, "In a TAB classroom, the behaviorist objective of creating an art object like the one modeled by a teacher is not the thing. The child and their subjective learning experience is the thing." The development of and capacity to utilize one's agency, to learn about one's creative capabilities, to learn about one's capacity to collaborate, to connect with one's interests and concerns to art and the world of art around us and to learn about one's identity, that is the hallmark of Teaching for Artistic Behavior.

TAB Resources for #Covid19:

https://teachingforartisticbehavior.org/resources.html

https://college2book.com/Art-Themes-Choices-in-Art-Learning-and-Making-p187691069

https://catalog.davisart.com/Promotions/PDF/choice-based-instruction-for-secondary-level-art-education.pdf

https://www.davisart.com/art-education-resources/making-artists/