Hello everyone! I am sorry I have not updated this blog in a while, but I wanted to come back in and share my final thoughts :)
My time as a shadowing teaching artist with Upstream Arts has come to a close! My final class was yesterday, on Wednesday. It has been such an amazing and extremely educational experience. I feel like I came into the classes with technical experience, such as how a classroom generally runs, how to relay information to students and how to make sure everyone is working, sort of basic teacher stuff. I was almost a little worried that some of what I learned might be kind of redundant. However, Upstream Arts taught me so much about other sides of teaching, that I didn’t even expect to learn. In our sessions, the focus was yes, on making art, but even more so, about the process of making art and how that act can help us understand, process and convey our emotions. In a lot of my experience, art making is the end goal, but in this context, art making was a means to an end, which was something totally new and different to me. I’m so used to the product of art classes being something nice to take home to the parents, and the fact that the products of these classes were emotional skills was something totally new and mind blowing to me. I always knew that art was a way to express yourself and process things, but I feel like I didn’t really understand the power of that until lately.
I was so lucky to be in a position where I was, in a way, both a teacher and a student. Because of how precise the curriculum is at Upstream, I was not able to teach my own lesson there, but instead did it outside of class.Because of that, I mostly focused on observing the teachers and assisting with demos. Because I was slightly more in the background, I got to participate in several of the activities as both an instructor and a participant, seeing how class functioned from both sides. I was able to see and feel firsthand how the kind, caring and fun nature of the staff affected the students mood and my own. I got to feel how fun or cathartic the activities were, and also learn from the other teaching artists how they were specifically engineered to be that way.
I am so grateful to have been placed at Upstream Arts. Everyone who I worked with was so wonderful, kind and understanding. It has been a hard year for everyone, and the folks there always made sure to check in with both the students and the other members of the staff to see how they are doing and if they needed anything more today than normal. I felt genuinely supported by everyone who I met there, which was an amazing feeling. I really hope that I have an opportunity to work with everyone again, and I would fully encourage anyone with a similar opportunity as myself to do it. Thank you so much to Julie, Elle, Matt, Christian, Abby, Greg, Akiko, Phyllis and everyone else who I had the opportunity to work with over the course of my stay there. And of course, thank you to my professor Aki, who suggested I work there and continuously supported me throughout the semester :)