Nancy is a retired Art Educator with the Virginia Beach City Public Schools system. Having taught art classes from elementary school through university, Nancy offers a wonderful perspective on the daily lesson preparation and career trajectory. Aside from the necessary teaching credentials, Nancy tells us potential teachers must also know how to create a safe space for their students, as art can be a means for children to work through their issues as they grow.
Transcript
My name is Nancy Pritchard, and I am retired from full-time teaching with the Virginia Beach city public schools. I also taught in an off-campus graduate art program that was geared toward art teachers, so I taught art from K through university, but for the most part, it was in the elementary school and then for 20 years, I taught the pull-out program for artistically gifted students, and then taught college, and then also university. One of the things I love about teaching art is that it's open-ended. So what you would do is, you would set up a creative problem, where they would then in turn have to research the topic. They would need to do preliminary sketches, they would need to be able to pull from their previous learning, and they would then synthesize all of that together. And so that's where it became, the real learning took place. Also, rather than just teach a specific process, a particular object that you wanted, or a particular medium, what you want to teach is, you want to teach a process, so that the student can then take that learning and put it into a totally different situation. It's very similar all the way through education in the arts. It's education through the arts. You can teach concepts, you can teach themes to a child in first grade, just like you can to someone that's in high school. And in order to have really meaningful lessons, say on an elementary level, you want to be able to have the students see how a particular idea is used in all their other areas of the curriculum. You also have to take into account SOLs and those types of things. And then you mix it together creatively, and come up with a lesson that packs as much into it as you possibly can. Another important component of art education is evaluation, because you constantly want to be evaluating what the student has learned. But you also want to self-evaluate. You want to look at what you've done, and has it been successful, how can I improve that if I'm going to do that in the future?
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