If art education is not valued at your school, this post is for you.
If your program is undervalued, this post is for you.
If your colleagues, admin, and students do not see you as critical to their education, This post is for you.
 
I say this with all sincerity, ART is THE MOST important class a child can have in school. (Or at the very least, equal in value) If it is not seen that way, or even you do not believe it, that is the root of your problem.

Studies show that students who have art outscore their non-art peers by HUGE margins. Schools that are underperforming can get back on track by increasing arts education, not cutting it. research shows this to be a FACT. My blog posts HERE, and HERE, and HERE will show you these details and links to that research.
 
What they call you, and how you are treated in comparison to your colleagues, can be an indicator of how your program is viewed. If art is a "PREP" period, that's a bad sign. More about that HERE. If students are always pulled out of art, or your class is overlooked, that too may be a bad sign. If colleagues say, "It must be so fun to teach art!" They might not have a real clue about what you do.
 
If you are in a bad situation where art is not valued, then you have three options. You can look for employment elsewhere, take it and build resentment, or be proactive and advocate for your program.  Before you go saying, "They should already respect me, I have my degree and certification!" Remember that most people have very little idea what is really happening in an art room.

​It's your program, YOU need to be the advocate. ​Here are 10 concrete ways you can elevate the respect of your program.

Partner with a core teacher every quarter or semester to create an innovative cross-curricular lesson and display the results. THIS resource has many core connected art lessons you can pull from. We know lessons like tessellations can connect to geometry. Clay glazes and projects connect to chemistry. There's plenty we can do to connect to history. Story illustrations can connect to literature and English.

​Invite administration into your room when you are doing particularly core-connected lessons. I have little hand-made invitations at the ready to put in my administrator's mailbox. If you only connect via observations, you are not doing enough.

​To always display art, post how these lessons connect to core content, and the value they offer with deeper connections. We often display work. If you don't, you should probably just quit now... Every display I put up has a poster, or writing to explain what people are looking at and how it connects to a core content area. This is how I educate my peer teachers and administration about how valuable and connected my program is. I will also have students write about their art and post that alongside their work, so student literacy connections can be seen.

​Send out press releases and show off every year or semester. I try to do one "big" project a year that can be seen in the community. This might just be your annual art exhibition, but maybe you can do a social learning lesson and display work in a community center. Display altered books in a community library. Do puppets and have students perform for a needy school or for the elderly at a rest home. Whatever you do, let the press know. Your school may have someone designated to do this, but you need to do this. A tip I can give you, is when you send out a press release, write it as if it was the story you want them to publish. 50% of the time newspapers just print what I have written. If you make their job easier, all the better. You can also submit lessons to School Arts Magazine to become a published author. I do several a year, and it really impresses my administration.

​To educate teaching peers on the value of art education in fun "ah-ha" ways. (Sharing data and studies as appropriate) Send out a monthly "Fun Fact" about art. Share new research with the Board of Education. Some studies and information can be found HERE, but new stuff pops up all the time. Set a Google news alert if you like.

​Reach out to parents often with newsletters and blog posts to keep them updated on your awesomeness. Share these with Board of Education members too. 

​Apply for grants, and partner with area museums, galleries, and businesses whenever possible. It's usually free to apply, and you might just get the money you need to create the perfect art room.

​How you talk about art matters. If you use the words FUN and CREATIVE all the time when describing your classes, how will they ever know how connected your explorations are? Speak about the divergent problem solving that happens. Brag about how they really got geometry when they did tessellations. Exclaim how great it was to talk about the renaissance with your students and how they are making inventions like da Vinci to launch marshmallows in class, or experimenting with paper airplanes. 

​Thankful Thursdays: Get in the habit of sending POSTIVE emails home to parents of your students. I highlight their names on my seating chart when I do, so that at the end of a semester or year, every child had an email home. There is always something nice you can say, and it's just 1 email per class a week. If you teach 6 classes in a day, send 6 emails per week so it's not overwhelming. When the crap hits the fan, parents will remember those emails and they will have your back. If they don't know you, you don't matter. We all know, when parents complain, stuff happens. The opposite is true as well.

​...And this may anger some people... if you do cookie-cutter lessons, you may be your own worst enemy. Any sub can watch a Youtube video and figure out how to teach kids to do step-by-step drawings of birch trees, or mini-Monet bridges. If all the projects you create look essentially the same, you are not giving your students a rigorous art experience. All the research that shows how art improves student success do NOT apply to that approach. I have a blog post on that HERE, and another on how I build lessons HERE that you may find helpful. Essentially though, if you are solving all the problems of creating art for your students and helping them step by step to copy your solution, you have eliminated any problem solving value art can have.  A little more food for thought HERE.

When are you going to find time for all of this? Start small.

​The weekly emails and a press release are not all that hard. Many can be integrated into what you already do, like a lesson coordinated with a core teacher. You gotta' teach them something, why not sculptures of virus cells, or drawings of pollen under microscopes! You might even find yourself having fun and the school will begin to respect your program and see it's value!

​Every art 1 and 2 classes do a grid project. I try to vary the exploration so it's not repetitive, but it is an important skill they need to use in future classes. For my Art 1 classes, we did grids based on photos students took holding objects that symbolized their personalities. For art 2 we altered our appearance in various ways. We had flexible mirrors some used, others tied items to their face, or wrapped part of their features in tape, or string. The challenge was to now use the grid technique and apply it to an altered image of ourselves.
 
Art 1 focused on a Renaissance application to the portrait, so to switch things up, we went for a Pop Art connection with simple bold lines, and a patterned background in Art 2. There are many artists that could be used as a reference like Lichtenstein, Warhol, Britto, and more. To ensure a personal connection, student had to include a personally symbolic pattern in the background. This also helped give a little 3-D pop to the work as the patterns went "behind" the face in most cases. Varying the thickness of our markers helped this too.
 
Though I have seen pixilated Post-it murals, students expressed an interest in having their own image they could take home when done. Murals too require a large amount of Post-it notes. Each of our images were 8 x 10 notes, so 80 in all. (Get Super Sticky) That is 2 small packs of Post-it notes with 45 per pack. I found some at a deep discount and used those. The issue however, was how to play with the notes and create a base on which to draw. I solved that by having students put their grid images inside clear pouches, tracing their grid and image with Sharpie markers, and coloring on the back of the pouches with dry markers. By tracing the faces and grids with rulers, it enhanced the lines and made it much easier to do the grid process. The dry markers allowed students to change their color schemes too. Students had to count colors as well; I only allowed them 2 packs of 45. You could let them use more, but as a first time trial, I limited them to 2 colors.

Once the face was traced, and pattern decided, students used 2 large sheets of drawing paper (18 x 24 in.) to tack down their Post-it notes. This paper is perfect size as eight-3 inch notes can fit horizontally. Because of space limitations we did 5 rows of 8 on each page. This helped with storage. 80 inch pages would have just been too large to deal with. As students worked, I gave different "tips of the day" to help them along: Crosshatching tips, line thickness tips, how to draw a nose tutorial, etc. We used oak tag to make tracing templates for the background patterns, though some students worked organically. The drawings were done in pencil, then with various thicknesses of black permanent marker. Some students added some pops of color, but there can be an issue of so much color, it's hard to see the image. Erasing can be a bit problematic as well, so students should work lightly. They were also warned to not touch the sticky portion of the notes as hand oils could make them less sticky.

​As they finished, projects were graded and photographed. Because they can be ephemeral and easily damaged (with regular sticky notes), photographing them was very important and gave them an excuse to use their cell phones. Some were transported to the walls, note by note, row by row. Some worked fine, but others fluttered to the ground. So we switched to just keeping them on our original large papers, joining them on the back with masking tape, and using clear tape to put them on school walls. That seemed to work best. After our display, the artwork returned to the room and a dot of glue was added to the backs of the notes to make it more permanent. Glue stick would work well too. Though some wanted to glue down the entire note, many agreed a little texture made it playful looking and added texture to the work.
 
I don't think I am the first person to approach portraits this way, but I was not able to find examples for my students, so I did one for myself to work out some issues. I think using "Super Sticky" notes would be better than the regular ones, but ours did do fine. I also do not know if they are archival or acid free, but one could cut out acid free construction paper to achieve similar results. Whatever you decide to do, It was a valuable experiment and experience.

Amy Herman, in her TED Talk "A Lesson on Looking," explains that Visual Intelligence is an important skills for many outside the field of art. She explains the 4 A's of Assess, Analyze, Articulate, and Act are important skills for police, parents, Navy Seals, physicians, counter terrorism officials, and anyone where looking carefully at a situation is important.
 
We know that only 1% to 3% of students will enter an art-related career, but we need to connect and teach 100% of our students. This video can be a helpful resource in helping students understand the importance of art. As teachers, we must to be able to articulate that what we do in the art room has far reaching and important connections. For more on this and additional evidence of the critical importance of art education,
​please visit THIS LINK.