During this past week, I've been thinking about how my perspective on teaching and learning changes gradually, and all the experiences I've ever had layer up to create what I think about in the present moment. Right now I have a perspective and view that includes all my past views as well as my current views. These all come together to shape my understanding of art education, and the ways in which we can teach and learn best. I've thought about how my perspective has gradually changed over time, and how I have been influenced by my past teachers and professors. Every experience that I've had with teaching and learning affects me in some way, whether that experience was a positive one or a negative one.  This idea of layering all my experiences is really important to me, because it allows for me to reflect on what I thought in the past, and how that in some ways connects to what I think and believe now. I also think that in the future this will continue to happen, my beliefs from now will be a part of what I think in the future, but there will be more and more layers as I continue on in my education and career experience. For this reason, in my piece this week I represented the layering of ideas, my past perspective only has one thin layer, because I hadn't had a lot of experience or events that changed my perspective, I was not as educated about teaching and learning, and the best ways we can do that. I then added a second section, which has more of the same color, because I knew some more about art education, but it was still related to what I knew before. After this I started adding more and more layers connecting to the idea of adding to the knowledge that I had in the past, but adding a new experience. This is the present, I have ideas from the past and current experiences combined together. I also am thinking about how my ideas now will soon become my past perspective because I'm learning so much at this point in my life. But no matter what, I will continue to add layers for the rest of my life. Finally in the bottom section I am representing the future, I'm not sure what the future experiences will be, but I do know that knew layers will be added. I am representing this through adding a new layer of color for each section. 

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One of the main experiences when I began to realize this layering of my understanding of art education was last semester when I began to understand how in art education process is more important than product and choice is a huge factor in art education. At this point I was layering information by thinking about lessons that I had in high school and middle school that may have been more choice based. I was also thinking about lessons that I was taught to focus on process. This got me thinking about ways in which my previous knowledge affects how I think today. It makes me want to further explore particular lessons that I had in high school or middle school. On the opposite side, it also gets me thinking about the lessons I had in elementary school. There is one specific lesson that I remember where we were instructed to draw a giraffe in a very specific way, with very little choice. This layering of information allowed for me to think about these lessons in a very different way. 

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I think that fabric is a way for me to represent these changes because it is something that is always changing forms, fabric is something that moves and flows with whatever surface it is placed on. Fabric is not static, it is dynamic in that no matter where it is placed it is going to look different. This is because of the way in which fabric changes its form based on its surroundings. This is something that goes back to this idea of layering because with every experience there is a constant shift in my own understandings, just as fabric has a constant shift based on where it is placed. The dye that I used called fiber reactive dye, also is important to the creation of this piece. Fiber reactive dye makes a chemical bond with the natural fibers. This is to me in relation to the addition of all this new information, it changes the way I think about art education in a deeper way than simply changing my mind, which reminds me of this process of creation. 

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I think that this experience influences my path to becoming an educator because it gets me thinking about my ideas in the past, and how they are layered with my ideas today. I think this is so important for me to realize as an educator because the present soon after becomes the past, and that is something that I find to be exciting. There are always new things to learn, and new ideas and ways to go about teaching. I think that this idea of layers helps me to conceptualize the thoughts I have about art education, and the ways in which I can become a better art educator through my past, present, and future understandings.