Locating Self as Teacher

The five main focuses of my classroom teaching philosophy, mentioned in my previous post, are collaboration, voice, perspective, risk, and visual culture.  I mostly came up with these ideas from how I was taught and how I was raised.  When I was a child, my parents always supported my artistic personality.  They allowed me to draw, paint and create freely.  They never dictated what I was drawing or how I was drawing it.  They let me create on my own.  This helped me grow as a person and as an artist throughout my years of growing up.  This helped me to take risks because my home was always a judgment-free zone in which I felt safe.  Growing up and being very interested in the arts, I took many art classes from elementary school and continued in high school.  Especially in high school, while I was developing a portfolio to get into school for art, my teachers also encouraged exploration.  They knew how to create a community between art students that made us gain trust in each other and learn how to collaborate with others very well.  I hope to continue to make that happen as well as helping students to gain the understanding of the perspective of others in my future classroom.

My Flash Animation is in the link below, which illustrates my beliefs in collaboration, voice, perspective, risk, and visual culture.
https://youtu.be/5CTS-jM54uk

My animation depicts a red pentagon spinning continuously spinning.  I chose a pentagon in order to represent the five core beliefs of my teaching philosophy.  The pentagon spins in order to show motion and the continuous examples of those five beliefs constantly overlapping and being taught in the lessons that I give.  The first big idea that comes up is collaboration.  Underneath, I have four stick figures that represent the students working together.  The color of the figures change with each slide as a way to show that all children are equal and will learn to work with people of all backgrounds.  The next idea that comes up on the animation is voice.  On these slides, I put a mouth with expression lines changing colors depicting speech.  I want all of my students to feel as though they have a voice and that they can express themselves without judgment in my classroom and I felt that a mouth best represented that idea.  The next idea that appears on the animation is perspective.  I have a set of two eyes -- one blue and one brown.  I wanted to have two different colored eyes on the animation to represent different people seeing eye to eye.  My idea of perspective is that other people will understand the point of view of others in order to respect their beliefs and situations.  The idea that appears next on the animation is risk.  I have a paint brush splattering different colors of paint on the pentagon because I want my students to feel as though they are being constrained as little as possible in my art room.  I want them to feel free to use materials that they have never used before, as well as materials that they have used in ways they have never used them before.  Lastly, I want my students to understand how to read visual culture.  During my class they will be aware of what they are seeing around them as well as how it impacts them, people around them and the entire world, which is why I represented this idea as the Earth.