Identity, magic, and meaning.

The first year I taught art was the toughest of my career, but there were moments of delight that still stand out in my memory. One day, I was holding sheets of red and blue plastic against the window to demonstrate what happened when they overlapped. As soon as I did and the violet color appeared, one little boy in the back of the room cried out, "It's magic!" I suspect that, for most of us, such moments are why we teach art. We still believe in the enchantment of art for our students and ourselves.

My identity as an art teacher has been shaped over more than twenty years as I have taught art to all levels from kindergarten to university. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to teach for five years at an elementary school, and then move to the middle school that served the same students. As a result, I was able to teach many of the same students for up to eight consecutive years and to see firsthand the value of sequential instruction and learning. Both schools were representative of the neighborhood--a very diverse community in terms of cultures and economic levels.

This experience strengthened my beliefs in the meaning and the magic of art education. I believe there are significant benefits to an ongoing, sequential approach to art for students at all grade and ability levels. And I believe art is for and about everyone, and that a diversity of cultures must be included in the curriculum. To me, art seems to provide the best and most meaningful means to honor and learn about the multitude of cultures found in our global community.

I also believe that learning through art provides effective opportunities for creativity and thought, opportunities to which all students are entitled. Creative and critical thinking skills are powerful products and must be recognized as such by the public and education communities if we are to generate the changes necessary in our schools to develop them.

The role of the art teacher has become more exacting than ever before. The challenges I faced in my first teaching position have expanded for teachers today to include issues concerning No Child Left Behind, national and state standards for the visual arts, interdisciplinary connections, art criticism and aesthetics, cultural diversity, visual culture, and rapidly changing technologies.

To meet these increasing demands, I believe that art teachers must be passionately committed to the value of our profession. That commitment also requires us to become outspoken advocates for quality art education--to become "cheerleaders for the art team." Through advocacy, we can emphasize the value of art education as essential and fundamental for all students.

My identity has also been shaped by SchoolArts magazine in ways I could have never imagined when I began teaching. My first published article, "A Guide to Planning an Arts Festival", appeared way back in April of 1989. Eldon Katter invited me to join the SchoolArts Advisory Board when I was project coordinator at an art-education institute in Texas about ten years ago, and I have written a column for the magazine, ArtEd Online, for the past five years. I anticipate many more moments of magic and meaning.

Identity as a Big Idea

Enduring ideas are based on universal human experiences shared by people across time, place, and cultures. They are the big ideas or big questions that artists and other thinkers have pondered over time. They go beyond facts or skills to focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes. Such ideas can serve as overarching guides to align content, units, lessons, instructional activities, and assessment, and provide interdisciplinary connections. Eldon Katter pioneered the use of big ideas as organizing themes for SchoolArts--a tradition we will continue. In this issue, we present a wide variety of concepts, approaches, media, and materials to encourage your students to explore their own identities as they begin the new school year. Look for more Big Ideas to come throughout the year.

Nancy Walkup has taught art to students from kindergarten to college in Louisiana and Texas. She is now an art teacher at W.S. Ryan Elementary in Denton, Texas. Prior to this position, she was a project coordinator for ten years with the North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts (NTIEVA), an art education institute at the University of North Texas. A longtime member of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), Nancy served as the national program coordinator for NAEA's convention held in March 2001 in New York City. She was named Texas Art Educator of the Year in 2001 and Louisiana Art Educator of the Year in 1991.