The Art of Art Education

Teaching is a career that can constantly be crafted through research and further education in order to ensure one’s students are reaching their full potential. Through this project I hoped to learn more about advocating for my students, discover what peer-reviewed research had already been conducted to promote the importance of art education and the transfer of skills into adulthood, and how to relay this externally to parents and community members. Technically, this project introduced new design skills necessary to expand my motion graphics animation ability using Adobe After Effects. My process began through the research of peer-reviewed articles highlighting benefits for children in the visual arts classroom when building essential skills and preparing students for college and the working world. Taking my findings from these articles, I completed my own observation of the ways my cooperating teachers encouraged our students and their parents in the arts as I student taught. How did my cooperating teachers advocate for the students, and did they connect with parents on a regular basis? As a final product, I researched various features of Adobe After Effects and kinetic typography through Lynda.com and other resources and created a kinetic typography animation that encourages advocacy for art education and the positive and essential transferable skills students develop when in the art classroom. Throughout the creation of my project, I encountered various artistic decisions that needed to be made and problems resulting from those decisions including making meaningful color choices, choosing a typeface with limited styles, and varying my animations enough to keep the viewer engaged, but keeping them cohesive and easy to understand. In my research I found that art can correlate to success in subjects such as math, science, and reading, but the essential transferable skills that the arts have proven deliver, specifically visual and media arts, are even more meaningful than simply supporting these testable subject areas. A lot of the skills acquired in an arts classroom are habits that will foster critical thinking skills useful in many careers and situations students will face in life. I focused on these ideas throughout my animation, highlighting the Studio Habits of Mind including persistence, expression, observation, envision, and innovation and how these transfer into positive learning. Applying these findings to my observations at Pleasant View Elementary School, Davenport’s Creative Arts Academy, and Davenport Central High School I created a kinetic typography exploration that outlines what I believe to be the true benefits of art education. I determined that the benefits compiled into my animation revolved around two words: art and skill. Throughout my animation I lead the audience through the idea that art is a skill and skill is an art and that participating in artistic ventures lead to a variety of positive skills. I kept the audience intrigued by finding shapes and forms throughout my type that could be accented and bring further meaning to the information. Throughout my research and creation I found myself thinking about the skills I was gaining by creating my animation about art and skill. Animation with After Effects comes with constant problem solving, incorporation of critical thinking, and persistence, which are a few highlights from the arguments made through the statements within my piece. I am pleased with the outcome, but if I were to do this over again I would choose a different typeface with more options to bring more dynamics to the piece. By the time I realized that would have been a smart decision, changing it would mean reconfiguring alignment in all of my key frames. Ten hours into creation, I deemed that not worth it to me. In conclusion I hope to utilize this animation to inspire parents to encourage their children to exercise creative interests and skills and to inspire the community to be involved in educational artistic endeavors.