TEACHING
IS AN ART.
Teaching, like art, must be an intensely personal endeavor. Like art,
teaching demands many skills--but not for their own sake. They both
demand knowledge which must lead to creative action and learning. Art is
an ever-changing
process, as teaching should be. Art is defined as the aesthetic product
of creative thinking and creative action. The art product evolves from a
process of thinking, feeling, and doing which results in a tangible
form. Such is teaching, with the end product being the total growth of
children.
The teacher must be an artist. The creative artist is usually a person
who is self-actualizing, inner-directed, highly imaginative, inventive,
original, and highly sensitive to his experience and his environment.
He is of necessity deeply committed to his art. He is in love with what
he does.
The true artist is also compelled by forces within him to create, to
produce, and to imagine. He is on the creative edge of his environment.
He derives his greatest satisfactions from his involvement in his work.
The teacher must have similar qualities and drives to become a teacher
of quality. He must know, too, that he is unique as a person.
The artist asks himself about his art, "What have I contributed to
the world of art that no one else has given it?" The creative
teacher must ask of his existence, "What have I given to children
that they could not have gotten from someone else?"
The creative teacher, like the artist, must get his primary
satisfaction from his work.
JOSEPH PIZZAT
Chairman, Creative Arts Division
Mercyhurst College
Erie, Pennsylvania
