Dear Colleagues and Friends in Art Education,

In this, my final President’s Message, I want to extend a heartfelt and warm “Thank You” to the entire membership of PAEA for your trust, support, and cooperation during my leadership. I am proud of the initiatives accomplished and relationships established over the past two years and hope that they will remain a part of PAEA’s future. I am grateful to have met so many gifted and committed teachers, students, and administrators in art education from all across Pennsylvania during my presidency.

In honor of all your dedicated work as art educators, I now want to share with you some thoughts about ethics in art education borne of my thirty-seven years in the middle and high school art classroom. My intention is that some of these ideas might serve as inspiration for our thinking about curriculum, instruction, and how we support student successes in all of our classrooms this fall.

I believe that the paramount responsibility as a teacher of the visual arts is to constantly seek, honor, and draw forth the artist in every child. With this intention, the arts classroom becomes a place where character is built, where excellence is experienced, where the desire to produce what is useful to the community is cultivated, and where perseverance to accomplish what may be difficult is honed.

I believe that to predictably and reliably support and monitor student achievement in any discipline, the teacher must first be inspirational, trustworthy, and connective in her thinking. She must know her subject and how to teach that subject to students. Above all else, she must be committed to students and their learning while thinking reflectively and systematically about her own practice and learn from her own experience. She must work constantly to “recognize that the other person is you”. A teacher must constantly draw upon her own and the students’ creativity, imagination, resourcefulness, and connectivity in developing the structures and tools for student success. I believe that all people are capable of making informed aesthetic judgments and creating aesthetically sound works of art. Every student has the capacity to successfully engage the aesthetic learning process given clear expectations and a collaborative structure for success guided responsively by the teacher.

The art classroom must be designed as a safe haven for risk-taking and as a welcoming community of learning partners. It is a place where the artist in every person can be encouraged to come forth in an atmosphere of respect for creative process and individual expression. In a highly visible way, the classroom can reveal the existence of a comprehensive system of organization and structures for promoting and managing student achievement in a wide variety of artistic areas. The arts classroom can be a home to “forward looking learning” (learning that is focused on finding solutions to problems that do not already exist) where the traditional student and teacher roles are ever-merging via collaborative learning that involves students, teachers, parents, and external evaluators working in partnership to develop skills, attitudes, and sensibilities with a spirit of “can-do” optimism and a respect for others. In this environment students develop valuable life skills and self-confidences in addition to arts training. These skills enable students to creatively take risks to successfully solve problems in the future.