An Informative Blog on Art Education: A Critique

I am sad to say that while I have read a couple of blogs, and never religiously, they are generally related to my extracurricular interests and not my classroom. I know, I know, there are so many amazing educational blogs out there, however I will cling to my excuses that my free time is greatly limited due to other obligations and the last thing
on my mind (or agenda) while at school is to leisurely peruse blogs on art education.  So therefore this assignment to find and critique a blog in my subject area is a welcome opportunity to learn about some great tools and resources for art educators.  The blog that I found to be the most informative and relevant is The Teaching Palette authored by Theresa McGhee and Hillary Andrlik, but contributed to by hundreds of art educators from around the country (and maybe around the world, but I'm not positive on that).

In starting to sort through the massive collection on the blog, I cannot help but be a little overwhelmed and a lot thrilled by all the information that is available to art educators.  Somethings that I found particularly relevant were the links to lesson plans for middle school and high school art
educators.  For high school, there were a number of excellent plans ranging in complexity from beginning Art I lessons on the Principles of Design and Elements of Art, to the advanced and complex lessons for Advanced Placement (AP) Studio Art.  This is particularly relevant to me since I will be completing AP Studio Art training this summer so that I can start this new class at my high school in 2015.  One AP lesson that I particularly enjoyed was submitted by Lauren Niedergang called "Art Endurance."  It asked students to create a work of art over the span of a month with full dedication to craftsmanship and concept.  She gave a great list of contemporary artists who religiously and methodically promote a similar practice, including two of my favorites, Julia Mehretu and Trenton Doyle Hancock.  I will be interested to see how my future AP students respond to this level of dedication in reference to their own work.

I also found a number of recent posts that also relate to my classroom and school, especially the post titled "16 Ways to add Steam to STEM."  My high school is the only one in the county that has a STEM academy. (Granted we only have two high schools.)  I have personally been very interested in the sciences for years, for artistic and just cool facts reasons, and my dad and grandfather were both engineers (that was my career choice before I feel in love with art), so finding ways to integrate them (science, technology, engineering, and math) into my classroom will be a great opportunity to merge what the general public often view as complete polar opposites and further integrate some great technology options.  I particularly enjoyed the Georgia O'Keeffe inspired car invention, and I hope you do to.  I am very excited to continue to visit this blog in my free time to try to glean a few new gems from this vast resource.