The first time I went to a museum I was probably around ten, as much as my family tried to provide all sorts of experiences for us while growing up it was not always feasible to get all the educational experiences we could while being raised by a young single mother who was trying to build us a better future and put herself through college. However I still vividly remember the first Art Museum we went to, it was a free day hosted by some small Art gallery, they had a children’s section full of puppets and coloring books and I was much more interested in those than looking at old photos and woven baskets. But what is so funny about that is how vivid that memory is, how stuck in my mind those photos are so much so that they have inspired some of the art I have made on my own. These are moments that stood out to me when designing and giving my tours because maybe the Art I show them is not what sticks out to them right now, but someday they may look back at their experiences and remember a piece of Art they passed in the gallery or the experience and it will shape how they perceive or make Art. Hopefully, it will show them that they can understand, and digest visual modes of communication, and they can read a language that is spoken and created by people from all walks of life. I always end the tours with a simple question “what is your favorite piece of art that you saw today, and why?”, because this single question is what shows me what students are interested in, their personal experiences, and what they are responding to. It has led me to use interpretive strategies outside of Brainy and in other teaching or mentoring situations, and these questions make it easy for me to reach and bridge students’ knowledge, it helps me tune into the students who may be more interested in the puppets right now, who do not want to learn how to make a mosaic, and grasp why. And once you reach those students, you can potentially find something that they are interested in, or you can give them enough information that someday they can look back and remember something that you said that interested them or stuck with them through the experience of learning in a Museum. 

The interpretive strategies were crucial in how I designed and executed my tours, mostly because they led me to be more flexible. Every student comes to a table with different experiences, personalities, and perspectives, and being able to think on my feet, and redirect a conversation based on their answers was something that interpretive strategies taught me to do. Specifically, they allowed me to relate better to students, deepen our conversations, and hopefully their understanding of a piece of art, for example, if I am asking about examples of coming of age ceremonies and I am getting no responses back, I can just readjust my conversation to ask a different but the same question like “what are some examples of celebrations that happen when you get older?” or if I notice some kids are more drawn to a piece of art or are talking a lot about the kite and trying to figure out what the picture is that they see, I might spend more time talking about it rather than a piece they seem less drawn to. 

 

I think a lot of it is rooted in similar ways, especially if you are teaching in a choice-based, and student-centered classroom as museums are also student or visitor-focused. However, I think the only difference is not all museum activities teach art-specific skills or have skill-based lessons. For example, we are a no wet space in our museum classroom, so paint-based skills are strictly limited to an actual teaching environment. You can talk about those skills but you cannot 

I think the most challenging part is just making sure that timing is concise and you are not giving students too much knowledge, it is sometimes hard not to give them too much because there is so much information that I think they should know, but finding the line of allowing them to find that information themself can be challenging. The most enjoyable part has to be just hearing their opinions, they teach me so much about themselves and how they can relate it to the art we are looking at is so amazing. They are always so excited and open about learning, and they are always so smart and learn as much from each other as they can from you. 

I definitely saw improvement just in my confidence in speaking and instructing the students, I was able to lead the beginning portion and keep all of my students engaged in the learning and creation processes. Which is not only an improvement from tour one to two but even in the past semester to now I feel more confident in my ability to teach and lead students in different ways and environments. I definitely want to work on timing and questioning to spend more time on our brainstorming the animal and mask since that is our art activity, rather than spending so much time upfront with the two first galleries. 

 

This week I created a small group of honeycomb patterns, for several reasons. Firstly, hexagons are omnipresent in nature and their properties are nothing short of astounding. Families of crystal are hexagonal, as are snowflakes and other naturally occurring geographic phenomena. Yet the most obvious natural hexagon is the honeycomb, the geometrically perfect home for bees and their nectar. Not only is every bee, itself a symbol of love and luck, naturally adept at forming these perfectly structured tessellations, they too are encoded with the shape, the hexagon written into their eyes. Mathematicians and geometry experts believe that the hexagon is the connecting center that ties everything together and links everything back.  It teaches you more the more you look at it and reflect on it. Each cell of the honeycomb is a hexagon. It is the perfect shape, the one that holds together in strength and efficiency. There is no waste in a system of cells that fit together at perfect angles, a necessary consideration when a honeybee must consume about eight ounces of honey to create one ounce of wax. The worker bees create their city of hexagons in tandem, each bee following her inherent plan of geometric repetition.  This creation is something that I associate with brainy, me and the students learning and building their learning and our learning together. It is a symbol of their individuality and yet togetherness as I can lead each student through the same necessary process and tour in different and beautiful ways. However, I chose the color blue as a symbol of open spaces like the sea or sky, allowing students this freedom, imagination, and space to form their own conclusions and ideas in this structured and built environment. 

 

As an educator now it has become abundantly clear that how I endeavor to teach my students comes directly from many of my own experiences. However, I feel as though learning and practicing new skills from issue-based, to skill-based, to TAB-based modes of teaching the more I am able to dig and develop and relate it to my own experiences. Much like we teach students to do in brainy, I can build and relate the skills I want to develop and we are learning to things I can relate to and unsurprisingly when I can connect them to a personal experience it is not only easier to learn that skill but it easier to build it, develop it, and then practice that mode and practice of teaching. Which I am hoping is something that I can continue to do and discover to develop all the tools and skills I can as an educator.