Hello! My name is Flo Gidez and I’m an artist and art educator currently working for BRIC, Studio In a School and DreamYard Project. I have worked as a teaching artist in all five boroughs with students in grades K-12, exploring everything from sewing to paper mache to Photoshop GIFs. My own art practice is in printmaking, and I try to teach it whenever I can!
The most formative art experience for me as a young person was working in my university printshop, first as a student and later as a technician. I felt a sense of community in this co-operative space: an environment where a diverse group of people had the shared goal of making art and where everyone depended on one another for help making it. I realized that I felt most at home in a learning environment, and this led me on to the path of teaching.
My first teaching jobs were as staff in middle school after-school programs where we didn’t receive any training. This was also my introduction to NYC Public Schools, and having grown up in a small town in rural Vermont, I felt I had a huge cultural gap to overcome in connecting to my students. But I had very little idea about how to do it.
My education at CCNY, along with working for organizations like DreamYard, has given me a new lens for the importance of building community in your classroom with your students. As I move from working as a teaching artist towards becoming a classroom art teacher, I am particularly interested in how public middle school art teachers build community in their classrooms. Along with the developmental challenges of adolescence, students entering sixth grade are faced with suddenly navigating different teachers and classmates for each subject, increased amounts of homework, and many social pressures. For these reasons I am interested in investigating middle school environments particularly.
Building classroom community is something I aspire to be better at myself, and I want to learn from others about how they help their students access their personal knowledge, identity and interests in the classroom, feel comfortable trying new things, and express their opinions. Are there specific strategies or projects that art teachers have found contribute to a sense of unity and belonging in their classrooms?
