-: 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?