KORIN HEHN
ART EDUCATOR

Collaboration is important to me because it allows the students to communicate and connect with their peers, as well as learn from each other. My students learn how art affects life, how creating art allows for expression, and how art can be used to communicate. Making art allows my students to have another mode of self-expression and to show what they are learning. Creating starts with an idea that can grow and shift and change, and I encourage my students to challenge everything in life and look at everything from different perspectives. Knowing the foundations is very important to me, but I would also like my students to take risks and experiment in my classroom because sometimes the best work can come from experiments and taking risks.

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As for myself, I am working in equal parts with the students, helping them to expand upon their ideas and guide them in the direction they wish to go. I want to continue to learn as much from my students as they do from me. For me, teaching is a partnership where the student has the freedom to make their own decisions within guiding limitations. This means that I give guidelines that students are allowed to interpret for themselves, within reason. My students are free to expand upon what I give them and try new things with mediums to create artworks that they can truly be proud of and use explain what they learned through the process of creating.

I believe I am meant to be an art teacher because art is a constant in my life and teaching comes naturally to me. Ever since I was young, I would find every opportunity I could to teach someone, children my own age, children younger than me, adults, whoever would let me teach them. My true inspiration comes from my high school photography teacher and her passion to create a space where students can comfortably make art that they are proud of. I feel it is my role as an art teacher to provide this sort of welcoming space to all of my students, and especially to those who do not feel as confident academically, but accel in art, and to help make core academic connections through art. I strive to provide an inclusive, diverse, and always evolving curriculum for the wide range of students I encounter. This means that students have multiple means of creating available to them, projects and artist examples from a magnitude of different backgrounds, and new artworks to create every year.

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It is also a goal of mine to provide a well-rounded art experience to my students because everyone deserves a space where creativity and learning work as one, and students are free to explore new possibilities. In my classroom, the students are the artists. I would like my students to take away from my teaching is that art is in everything we do, and that their ideas are valuable. Any small idea can be transformed into an artwork. Even if my students do not make artwork outside of the classroom, I want to give them the basic skills of problem solving and creativity so that they can use them in their everyday lives. In the future I hope to continue to learn from my students and grow my practice to fit their needs and desires.