School­ing with the free­dom of an inquiry project is a con­cept I like very much. All of the things I’ve learned about how to keep stu­dents engaged and how they absorb mate­r­i­al the best loops back to their own inter­ests and pas­sion. Teach­ing in a way that can tie in and con­nect to infor­ma­tion they see as rel­e­vant to them­selves is powerful.

I am famil­iar with the con­cept, but my brain did not have a name for it. My uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion’s lat­er years were self dri­ven. My per­son­al jour­ney with­in free inquiry was­n’t super cross cur­ric­u­lar, but oth­ers in my pro­gram def­i­nite­ly had that expe­ri­ence. One of my fel­low stu­dents dove into engi­neer­ing walk­ing mechan­i­cal legs for one of their final projects. We had a lot of free­dom to dive into any­thing we want­ed with­in an art project. It is some­thing I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed. This project feels similar.

So, giv­en that my teach­ing sub­ject is art and I do con­sid­er myself an artist, I felt like this is a good avenue for explo­ration. Art has a lot and is a lot. I could spend life­times explor­ing and learn­ing and nev­er run out.

In art school we were always pushed to work big; not nec­es­sar­i­ly cost effi­cient, but it was a very com­mon line in a cri­tique. I want to cap­ture the small in a small way. Ok, maybe a still slight­ly larg­er than life way, but just because they are so mini.

Pho­to by Jac­in­to Roman

Bugs. I am going to cre­ate a col­lec­tion of beau­ti­ful­ly coloured bugs. Imag­ine those lit­tle glass shad­ow box­es with a sin­gle bug on a pin in them, but think of them more live­ly and crawl­ing off the page and maybe a bit larg­er than com­fort­able. The plan is to have an entire por­tion of my wall top to bot­tom ded­i­cat­ed to these black frames all land­scape or por­trait with a range of size frames. Right now I’m think­ing 4x6, 5x7, and 8x8, but sub­ject to change.