Why I Threw Away the Stencils
- hannahcgersh
- Dec 17, 2014
- 2 min read
Being an art educator makes you fiesty. You quickly learn to fight. You fight for your classroom supplies, the importance of art, and to not be left out of faculty meetings. Art and passion go hand in hand. One thing I've found myself fighting for is what constitutes art. Thus, the stencil incident.
As I am a new teacher in a new school, my students often refer to things their old teacher did (which is normal for most new teachers, I suppose) that I do not do. It didn't really bother me until students were asking frequently if they could use the stencils. Stencils that I threw away when I first saw my classroom. There were a whole box of them and, with it, one could trace the outlines of various creatures, vehicles, symbols, and holiday nonsense (most of them were broken and worn out anyway). I threw them out because stencils put students in a box, so to speak, that they cannot think outside of. Also, it's copying someone else's art, which is not okay.
ie., Lucy is drawing a jungle scene. Lucy doesn't know how to draw a tiger, so she reaches for the stencil and traces a tiger. Said tiger is in profile view with one leg and one arm. Is this really what I tiger looks like? Much better would it have been if Lucy had done some artistic research and found a picture of a tiger in a book or online. That way she could make the artisitic decisions of how to draw the tiger on her own. There is so much more Lucy could learn from that than simply using a stencil.
Thus, I threw them away. So that my students can think outside the box. So that my students can practice drawing from life. So that my students can make artistic drawing decisions on their own. So that my students can be creative and original.
Perhaps stencils serve a purpose somewhere and if you have an alternative view, I would love to hear about it.
