This work is titled Woven Together. This is in relation to the idea of my past, present, and future understandings being connected in a lot of ways. I see the connection between my past, present, and future understandings as being much more fluid and ever-changing than I used to believe. In my piece, I worked to portray the connection between the three, I portrayed how my past has worked to shape the present, and the past and present will work to shape the future. This is important for me, because it allows for me to see everything as a growing process instead of one being negative and one being positive. We want to teach our students to learn from their mistakes, and understand that this is part of the process. I think it is just as important for us as teachers to allow ourselves to take these past experiences as a method for the learning that we have done. My past perspectives are not necessarily negative, they were a means for me to reach where I am today. I think this outlook not only allows for more growth from the teacher, it also lets students know that they can have a change in perspective as well, it is ok for them to make a mistake and then learn from it. The more students realize this the more growth they will achieve. For teachers, reflection and the process of reflecting is one of the most important things we can do, it allows for us to continue to grow and better understand where we are now as compared to getting frustrated with our past perspectives. 

BRAINY helped me to think about teaching in a new way. One of the biggest takeaways I had from both BRAINY and peer teaching is that the role of the teacher is to ask students questions to get them thinking. When we give students the information they aren't doing the learning, so it is important to always ask questions so that the students are thinking and therefore learning. This changed my perspective about teaching in the art classroom significantly. I saw my role shift from transferor of knowledge to a supervisor in learning. My role is to help students learn about a work of art, or about a time period of art through observing and interpreting what they see. This plays a major role in the learning that I had throughout the semester, and therefore is a major part of my piece. There are a couple of pieces of fabric that relate back to this idea of teachers asking questions to get students thinking, observing, and interpreting a work of art. These events led me to think about how my understandings have shifted throughout the semester, alongside where my past perspectives came from and the reasons that led me to change my views. Oftentimes throughout middle and high school, my teachers would show us a work of art, and tell us about the historical context, what it has been interpreted as. This therefore became my perspective on how art should be discussed in the classroom. I see this as leading me towards understanding that students in order to do the learning should interpret the artworks themselves. Since I had those experiences, and understood what it was like to learn in that situation, I was led the idea of questioning students. Through BRAINY I was taught how to do this. Going along with this idea, I learned from the perspectives that I had in the past, and that shapes my perspectives today when combined with my new discoveries. 

When choosing to weave my pieces together, I was thinking about the meaning through my composition. I started by wanting to make it a timeline, however, the more I thought about it, the less that made sense conceptually. Therefore I chose to compose it in a random sense. I wanted to combine all the individual pieces that I've made throughout the semester, because a combination of all those things makes up my perspective today. My past, present, and future ideas are constantly changing, and that is something that is so important in my understandings of art education. The ever-changing perspective on this keeps me growing and thinking about the ways I will continue to learn and understand what I know in new ways. This is part of the reason I want to be an art teacher, it is something that will never stop changing, and that allows for me to continue to grow no matter how far into my career I am.

The materials that I decided to use were the fabric that I've made throughout the semester, and yarn. I feel connected to these materials, because they are materials that I use throughout most of my art practice. I also used all natural materials, because the process of learning and teaching is natural and grows and changes naturally. During the process of making, I followed my plan fairly well, I thought through and tested out the necessary aspects in order to make the piece that I pictured. This allowed for my plan to go smoothly, and it made it so that I didn't need to make any major changes. A lot of times when I was making slight changes it was due to making sure that there wasn't a section that was solid of one color. This was important, because then it doesn't portray my concept as well. 

The process overall was enjoyable. My favorite part of the process is weaving. All aspects of weaving are enjoyable for me, from warping the loom to the actual process of weaving. I am drawn to the repetitive nature of weaving, so that process is always fun for me. The most difficult part of the process for me was  figuring out how I was going to connect all the individual strips of fabric. I had originally thought about overlapping at the end of each strip, like I would do with a more common weft material. After thinking about that however, I thought it might fall apart more easily, so I decided to sew together each of the individual strips on the sewing machine.  

In my future teaching, I want to make sure that I focus on the process of reflection as well as focus on the idea of making necessary changes when needed. I think that sometimes teachers have a plan, and want to continue sticking with it, because it works. However, there are always ways to make it better. If I plan a lesson, I always want to focus on the reflection piece that comes after the lesson, because that can help me to better plan the next lesson as well as future classes. This is one of the main takeaways that I have from the semester of making individual pieces and then combining them in the end. I also think alongside this I find it important to keep up my own art practice. This not only allows for a stronger connection with students because you can relate to their processes, it also helps in the planning of lessons and thinking through of  ideas.