Hi, my name is Sandra. I came to art education late in life, after having worked in Retail at the Whitney Museum from the time I graduated college until just three years ago. During my time at the Whitney, the biggest change in my life was the birth of my son. My experiences of teaching him all the things parents teach their kids, through the various stages of his life, and volunteering at the schools he has attended, made me realize that I my life’s work is actually teaching. Teaching is what I want to be doing all the time. My experience in the arts, from high school at LaGuardia, to college where I majored in stone carving, to working at the Whitney all these years, has primed me to be a visual arts teacher. At City College, I am now pursuing what is most meaningful to me.
Sandra Meadows, self-portrait.
As a parent, I witness teaching at schools through a particular lens. My relationships with the teachers of my son have spanned the spectrum, from warm and communicative, to distant and vague. As a pre-service visual arts teacher, I have experienced much the same, but from the other side of the coin. I have noticed that parents do not come to see the visual arts teacher when parent-teacher conferences roll around. And, as a PTA member at the various schools my son has attended in NYC, I have been active in trying to engage parents, form school community, and increase relationships between parents and teachers. This is why I have focused my Master’s Thesis on the relationships between parents and visual arts teachers; I am trying to find out what people do, both parents and visual arts teachers, to create a more friendly, communicative environment, where the education of the children is everyone’s goal. What is successful and what doesn’t work. During my literary research I came across a study by Rashmi Kumar. She created a project that brought parents and teachers together by involving parents in the art making process. Through my own research I hope to find other ways that people have been successful in bringing the families of students together through visual arts, thereby forming a community through the arts. I am still collecting data, via surveys and interviews, and look forward to finding out what people can do to make schools more inviting for all the people of their community.
Mural project in progress. PS/MS 278 Cafeteria. Organized by Creative Art Works, 2017.
