Carly Benson-Art Education Portfolio

personal statement

My name is Carly Benson and I am an art educator and artist currently residing in Newburyport, Massachusetts. My art and design background is highly multidisciplinary, as is my art and teaching practice. In addition to teaching, I have worked as a designer and artist, with experience in landscape architectural design, 2D art, printmaking, photography, and ceramics. In my teaching career, I have had the opportunity to teach a variety of Foundational Arts, Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media (2D+3D), Graphic Design, and Photography courses. I am constantly seeking out experiences that widening my skill set as an artist to better expand what I can bring into the art room for my students to experience.

In my teaching, I prioritize time for students to experiment with new skills and media, and lead specific skill builders in both concept ideation and technique. I regularly ask students to engage in process, problem solving, and reflection in their art practice.

I am dedicated to the social-emotional development of students and prioritize creating a safe learning environment for those with trauma histories and specific learning needs. I believe that accommodating are most vulnerable students benefits the entire classroom. My goal is to ensure students can authentically explore and express their identities and perspectives while learning to healthily communicate and listen to one another’s perspectives through their artwork and that t art and design education is vital to healthy communities.

Olympic National Park, 2020

philosophy

I believe that as an art educator, it is essential to focus on teaching processes and critical thinking skills that prepare students to deeply engage with themselves and their surrounding worlds. The art room holds a unique opportunity for students to explore intricate and relevant topics of their larger lives in a space without prescribed answers. It is the teacher’s role to create a curriculum that invites students to prioritize questioning, deconstructing, and mindfully reconstructing realities so that they leave school with the tools to navigate the world with critical awareness and to create positive change. In my classroom, the social-emotional wellbeing of my students is paramount. My philosophy emphasizes social-emotional growth for all students, as a larger class community.

I believe it is essential to dedicate time and scaffolding, value diverse creative thinking and material or idea experimentation instead of product fulfillment. In my experience, deeper learning is achieved when students are able to construct their own knowledge through student-led discovery and investigation that generates authentic interest, confidence, and positive relationships with the vulnerable process of learning.

I believe that art is a lens through which the world around us is both reflected and constructed, and by default, helps students make meaningful connections and find value in topics and subjects both within and beyond the art room. In today’s increasingly visual world, it is imperative that students are prepared to consciously consume and critically engage with the world around them. Contemporary topics, artists, and visual culture gives students opportunities and tools to process and reflect upon their visual consumption and relevant issues, and use their voices to create change. A design professor once said to me, “to create is to be an optimist.” This quote has inspired me ever since, and is the backbone to my philosophy. To create something is to physically actualize new ideas and to re envision what has been and could be.

Student Work, Watertown High School, 2022

curriculum vision

Whether to feel the joy from bringing an idea into a realized, physical form, to help scaffold social and emotional skills, to develop creative solutions to real world problems, or to analyze and express current societal issues, art and design’s importance to society only strengthens in our contemporary culture. My curriculum will communicate that art and design education matter because they gives us a medium for discovery and expression, essential cognitive skills, agency, and voice in a world bursting with stimuli and changing fast.

To create with art and design is be an optimist with the agency to create change. To make is also to experience the value of process, and that there is more to learning than a right answer.

My role as an art educator is to guide students though the process of realizing their ideas with enough structure to build upon what they already know and enough freedom that each result is a unique reflection of their own values, interests, and journeys from ideation to creation.

Art curriculum should build upon students’ existing knowledge, interests, cultures, and authentic voices and incite unique outcomes that authentically reflect each student. This level of student voice and real-world applicability is vital for student engagement and a meaningful education.

As an educator, I hold creating a well scaffolded curriculum, differentiated instruction, and heavy emphasis on time for experimentation and skill building to the up-most importance. I am committed to creating an accessible learning environment where students feel that they can explore their authentic interests through art and design through my curriculum planning and implementation.

Art Room Differentiation Plan

Differentiation for students will be implemented throughout the entire classroom. I strongly believe that universally designing for differentiated instruction benefits all students, not just those with documented differentiation requirements.

Learning with…

English Language Learners or students with limited Engliish proficiency

Classroom Strategies

• Provide oral, visual, and written instruction.

• Make any information or handouts and assignments in class electronically available to students.

• Allow phones for translation when needed.

• Allow for student choice for groups or intentional pairing in so that ELL’s may pair up with students that speak English and ELL’s language.

• Label supplies/ organization in multiple languages

• Use student-friendly language, define terms, and use synonyms when needed.

• Provide alternative materials and larger size choice for final product

Students learninng with limited motor skills

Students learninng with attention disorders

• Provide assignment modifications when needed that adhere to the same end learning goal.

• Scaffold large projects into smaller steps with checkpoints.

• Create graphic organizers for all project components

• Dedicate a plan for constructive movement/focus breaks (i.e. reading corner, other materials, visit another artist, etc.).

• Offer multiple modes for student to demonstrate student engagement that day (i.e. eye contact or stillness while teacher is speaking is not used as a way to assess engagement alone).

• Allow students to pick seats so that best support their learning.

• Allow for headphones during studio time to minimize sensory input.

• Post all information online for students to review in their own time

• In reflections activities, give students the option to verbally explain their thought process with the teacher.

Students leearninng with reading and writing difficulties

Students learninng with hearing impairment or auditory proocessing disorders

• Deliver information with visual context (such as video/other visuals) along with oral and written instruction.

• Deliver information with visual and written context along with oral instruction

• Create captions/annotations/a written version of all information delivered verbally (i.e. assignments are provided in writing and slides have annotations).

• Plan for options of where students can go to take space/ breaks feel safe

Students learninng with behavior challenges or emotional disstress

• Create a classroom community guidelines and expectations plan with students and keep it visible to all students.

• Create and maintain classroom routine and consistency.

differentiation plan

I believe that differentiation should be implemented universally, throughout the classroom. Universal design strategies not only facilitate learning for those with documented differentiation requirements, but provide more learning opportunities for everyone in the room. This plan is a list of classroom strategies that can be implemented universally to increase student learning opportunity for all students based on some specific learner needs. Offering student choice and flexibility when possible, consistently reflecting on how I am asking students to reach enduring understandings, and the physical set-up in classroom are all components that are important to me when creating a universally designed space.

Students on the Autism spectrum

Students leearninng with severe learning impairment and have an aide or paraprofessional with them in the art room

• Create and maintain classroom routine and consistency.

• Always have rubrics with clear expectations and grading systems available for student reference throughout the project.

• Provide alternative materials choice as needed (sensory)

• Give time warnings to aid In transition between activities

• Allow students to pick seats so that best support their learning.

• Allow for headphones during studio time to minimize sensory input.

• Create graphic organizers of their projects, including each component that must be turned in and how to turn it in, with check boxes to visualize progress.

• Work with the aide or paraprofessional to come up with strategies that work best for what the student needs.

• Create a schedule with the paraprofessional and student to review student learning experience.

student work

site | Andover High School

classes | Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media, Foundations Studio

The following are samples of final student works from each of the courses I teach at Andover HS. In my teaching, I place large importance on skill building, giving space for low-stakes material exploration, and explicitly teach concept ideation strategies, and structured reflection during and after each project. The final products are a result of equal amounts of time put into building up skills and engaging in thorough process and planning work before approaching the final product.

Drawing

Painting

Mixed Media

Artist Statement: Hurting/Healing

(Depicted Above)

This piece was made to describe the process of pain and healing that occurs in a person by highlighting the duality of these two feelings. The contrasting colors of the fabric used to cast the heads serve to emphasize the two separate states of pain versus healing, though the decision of which head represents which feeling is up to the viewer’s interpretation. The dark head could be interpreted as someone still in the midst of their hurt while the gold thread represents the beginnings of the healing process. How-

ever, it could also be seen as someone but made better by it. Similarly, the one left hollow and broken by their purified by their healing. Additionally, represent healing and pain, respectively, for each head in order to sew them the duality between being broken ning the two heads in both colors can overlap and exist in someone states together and evoking a sense

someone altered by the healing process the light head could be seen as sometheir pain or as someone cleansed and Additionally, the gold and red colored thread respectively, but though one color is used them together (thus also representing broken and whole), the connections spanhighlight the ways healing and hurt simultaneously, thus linking both sense of balance.

Social Issue Printmaking

Techniques learned and options given included: Chine collé, reduction printmaking, and mixed media approaches.

Art Foundations

Printmaking with Patterns

Art Foundations students researched textiles and repeated patterns present in their culture or heritage. Students planned and problem solved how to fill an 12”x18” paper with a repeating design, inspired by their research, with only a 3”x3” linoleum block. Students learned about radial symmetry and printmaking in various cultures throughout history, were given time to practice carving techniques, and practiced building patterns using various types of symmetry before designing and carving their final pieces.

2 Point Perspective / Architectural Design Process

Isometric Perspective / Interior Design using Procreate

Darkroom Photography

Intro

the

and

Digital Photography

Student Work, Watertown High School, 2022

Deconstruct/ Reconstruct

Students use Photoshop to deconstruct and reconstruct their digital photographs to further convey the intended emotion for their study.

“...fun, playful, nostalgic...”

Student Work, Watertown High School, 2022

“When deconstructing these pictures and during the partner critique, I noticed that I could do interesting things with the hands. By the way I positioned the photos, I could line the hands up to show connection, as well as movement.”

“Some emotions that could be conveyed [by ripping paper] are anger, or some sort of freedom.”

Student Work, Watertown

High

School, 2022