The last three years have been a blur, juggling family commitments, study and embarking on my first year teaching. Even though I was part- time, it was WAY more challenging than I had anticipated.

I’m pleased with the work the kids created…Looking over the year’s challenges and successes, I think my art teaching philosophy rests firmly in the “teaching for artistic behaviour” realm. This is a paradigm I have only recently started to experiment with in teaching my upper primary school grades. Teaching for ‘artistic behaviour’ basically means that I will give children choices in how they go about producing an artwork, rather than having a step-by-step approach where the children basically produce the same or similar work.

To facilitate independent explorations I provided children with various learning centres, offering different media such as clay, charcoal and objects for a still life, recycled materials, oregami etc that they can freely move between. The overarching objective is that children, as artists in their own right are encouraged to pursue their own ideas.

I am hoping to develop this approach within my own practise as an art teacher next year. There is a ‘Teaching for artistic behaviour’ (TAB) website, which has some great ideas about how to facilitate studio centres, how to assess, and, most important, why it is such a great approach: http://teachingforartisticbehavior.org/