Rethinking art wins Chennai teachers award

CHENNAI: Imagine a city through an ant’s eye view. Well, the art teachers of Chennai’s Sir Mutha School managed to get their students to do it, which got them the ‘Art Teacher Excellence’ Award for promoting the ‘Best Artistic Process’ at Indian Art and Design Educators Association’s (IADEA) first national conference.
Held last week, at the Piramal Museum of Art in Mumbai, the two-day IADEA event saw participation from more than 120 art educators from across the country.
The idea behind the conference, says Sara Vetteth, founder of the Chennai-based nonprofit initiative, is to encourage teachers to approach art education in a structured manner like other subjects and to create a vibrant professional community of art teachers.
The ant’s eye view for instance, says Vetteth, in terms of technique is a lesson in radial symmetry and one-point perspective. “Asking children to invent a futuristic city was an innovative way of teaching the technique,” she adds.
While Susan George and Sandra Vincent bagged the prize for Sir Mutha, three other city schools — Sishya, Rainbowfish Studio, and KC High — managed runner-up awards in the ‘Collaboration in the Art Room’, ‘Best Use of Elements of Art’ and ‘Art Teaching Techniques’ categories.
“The event was not just about winning an award,” says George. “It was also a great learning for us. We got to interact with art teachers from different parts of the country and share teaching techniques and methods,” she adds.
Each teacher’s submission included styles of teaching, lesson learning objectives, grade level of the students who did the work, medium used, time taken to complete the project and a minimum of six images of students’ art works. “We also introduced an award for teaching art to children with special needs,” says Vetteth. Judges for the event included R M Palaniappan, former regional secretary, Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai, and Barcelona-based painter and art educator Harry Hancock.