The Politics of Teaching Finger Painting: A Revisited Look at Contemporary Elementary Education

            The local coffee shop is covered in abstract art depicting nude, Caucasian female bodies in suggestive positions. Full-grown adults order their lattes and vegan scones and, while waiting for their goodies, stare at the paintings and giggle like schoolchildren. I sit in a booth beneath one of the fleshy paint globs and grade papers and think about the nature of writing. A wiry, salt and pepper-haired woman in designer glasses approaches the art display and takes in each piece with a look of awe and puzzlement. She finds the work a flowing homage to human reproduction (probably), and enjoys the way the artist has rendered her subjects both hyper-flexible and ambidextrous. She stares at the peach swirls of entering and takes deep, audible breaths. She is a picture herself, of artistic appreciation and hard-thinking.  I sip my breakfast tea and remember how happy and confused she looked when I raised my hand in her small, stuffy classroom one seemingly long-ago autumn.

            The woman, of course, was my Teaching Elementary School Art instructor from a failed undergraduate education degree life I don’t really like to talk about these days (for fear that the anger I hold towards the current American public education system might boil up from my belly and burn my tongue.) Her course was fantastic: twice a week a handful of potential grade school teachers met in the basement of the university art building and learned how to bring the joys of the visual and plastic arts to kindergarten through sixth grade students. We finger-painted, we sculpted zoo animals out of papier-mâché, we burnt clay pots in the university’s outdated kiln. Our instructor was a neo-Midwestern-hippie who hadn’t succeeded in her attempt to write the next great American novel and had instead decided to try her hand at educating future educators. She was kind and energetic and loved to help us discover the creative selves that hid beneath the surface of our wannabe “professional teacher” veneers. In short, she was the delight of the education department and one of the only reasons I didn’t have a nervous breakdown in the fall of 2007.

            After dropping out of the education program and switching to English (because a teacher had praised my limericks in fourth grade), I loathed seeing my old education professors. For the most part, they were by-the-book, stalwart pedagogues from the American educational old-school. They looked down on innovative teaching techniques and told drawn-out stories in class about the “good ol’ days,” when they could spank mischievous pupils with thick wooden paddles and not worry about jeopardizing their tenure. I struggled in these professor’s courses because they refused to listen to any of my progressive ideas about education (almost all of which were most likely a combination of idealistic, naïve, or impossible-to-execute silly-babble), and I refused to believe that their archaic classroom knowledge (some hadn’t had classroom experience in nearly twenty years) had anything to do with contemporary education. My struggles led to below satisfactory grades until I eventually had to leave the program, not truly knowing if I was a “bad” teacher (do bad grades in poorly facilitated courses actually equal a double negative of academic promise?) For a time I thought my leaving the education department meant the backwards instructors had won, and when seeing them on campus, they often gave me smug, almost pitiful, smiles that I took to mean, “you just couldn’t handle the way things are always going to be when it comes to teaching.”

            Several semesters into the English program, I saw my art teacher walking across the quad, stopping ever twenty or thirty paces to look at a tree or a squirrel eating acorns on top of a university garbage can. She noticed me as I walked by and smiled and stopped to chat. I asked her how she was doing and she gave a misty answer about trying to find meaning in the small things of life or something of that nature. She asked me how I was doing and I had to admit that I had dropped out of the education program and was pursuing a degree in writing instead. Surprisingly, her face lit up when she heard I was no longer working towards a life as a grade school teacher. Her hands when to her rosy wrinkled cheeks and she said, “Oh thank goodness, you would’ve made a terrible teacher! While we [the education faculty] were trying to teach young people about how to best convey material to their students, all you cared about was politics. I remember when you were in my class, I would be talking about how to teach students to paint and all you would talk about was, ‘What does the painting process actually mean?’ and ‘Why should we encourage children to paint?’ and ‘Why should we teach in the first place?’ You were only interested in the politics of it all!”

             I was shocked by her comments (I didn’t know I was so outwardly vocal as an undergraduate), but also felt strangely comforted by her observation. As she so keenly perceived, the reason I struggled in the education program wasn’t, as I had previously and erroneously thought, because I was a bad or inept student. It wasn’t even really because the instructors I had were bad teachers (although, to this day, I still find some of their ideas about education to be misguided and potentially damaging to student development.) I was a poor future-teacher candidate because what I care(d) about when it comes to education is at odds with what many education students and faculty in America care about when it comes to education.

            But, upon seeing my old art instructor at the coffee shop (inquisitive eyes and bright smile still intact), I am reminded of her comment about how I wasn’t a successful education student because I was “only interested in the politics” of teaching and learning. What I took as an attempt to encourage me when it was originally said (“it’s not that you or education are flawed individually, it’s that you don’t make a good match for each other because you have different, and opposing, values”), I now, after having taught college-level writing for the past three semesters, find troubling. What does it mean to “be interested in the politics” of education, and why, in the case of my undergraduate education instructors, is this interest necessarily considered a bad thing? Why is it frowned upon to ask the big questions of “Why does learning matter?” and “How should what we teach students affect them as human beings?”

            Now, after five more years of pedagogy instruction and practice, I find myself at a different place in my understanding of education than when I took my instructor’s Elementary Art Education course back in 2007. Where in the past I might have answered the question, “Why are you so interested in the politics of education?” with a confused smile and nod, I would now respond to the question with the question, “On what level are teaching and learning not overtly political acts?” Furthermore, I would note that it seems troubling not to consider the political ramifications of the educational process, for, at each phase of said process, value, meaning, and power claims are being asserted and exchanged. To ignore these assertions and their consequences is not only academically and politically irresponsible, but potentially harmful to the way we think about education and its value in our globalized human community.

            While I would like to approach my old instructor and inform her of my intellectual and pedagogical growth, she looks too happy observing the nude female bodies in all their twisted eroticism. And why would I want to bother her with something as disconcerting as personal empowerment in her moment of private aesthetic pleasure? I already know how troubling it can be to some teachers to combine the discourses of art, education, and politics.