Reflection

I played with the Thinker image, mirroring it, because that’s what I’m thinking about right now. The resulting image is even kind of brain-like! I'm working on writing my thesis, which will be a story of Reflective Practice, which to me means thinking about what you do, visualizing it, interpreting it, critiquing it, in order to improve your practice. By documenting what you do and how you think you can become the observer and not just the subject, take a step away from what you do in order to analyze it. By putting it on a blog and sharing with a wider public you create an opportunity to hear criticism, praise, commiseration, and suggestions for an additional outside observer to confirm or deny your perceptions. This also expands your community of practice from the narrow level of fellow teachers in your school, district, or acquaintance to a community that includes the nation and even the globe. Art teachers are often in the minority within a school, and need to find other ways to discover a community of other art teachers. Artists are often isolated in the studio and need to open up to a wider community to share with.

As an artist I think it's great to make art or sketches that document my thinking process as well. Visual Thinking. It's even a newfound research method to document the development of the researcher's ideas. This mirrored image took me less than 2 minutes to make in my laptop's Paint program. It's taken me longer than that to write this description. I wish I could just make a thesis of images and not 50 pages of words!