Art-making can be a liberatory process. As cultural inheritors, we also participate in the unfolding of a living culture. Navigating text, history, and experience, art-making can work as an accessible form of controlling space. Artistic-activity is habitual and the classroom is a place to form habit. Practice and repetition are the best tools for training eye-hand- speech brain activity. Productivity fosters production. Students learn the pros and cons of materials and structural integrity. Learning is done through practice, small working groups, experimentation, and application-oriented engagement as students develop ideas from a common conceptual starting point into a sharable form. They build an artistic practice with the language to encapsulate and transport that practice to the public.

My classroom provides a framework for students to learn about themselves. The artistic-act allows us to try the foolish, to fail, to repeatedly try again, and to undermine assumed forms of identification. Providing a space for individual discovery allows students of all backgrounds, skill-levels and educational focus (from Neuroscience to dance) to develop and advance their “creative” output. By shifting perspective, we may see what we have not seen before. Navigating our shared and uncertain future requires standing things on their head.