Problem of Practice: Material and Supply ManagementWith a multitude of students ranging broadly in grades and ages coming through an art educator’s classroom each day, doing a wide variety of projects using many different mediums, material management obviously plays a huge role in the job. Organizing, keeping inventory, storing, distributing, setting up, taking down and cleaning up materials and supplies can become an overwhelming and challenging task for an individual to bear. For my empathy report, I wanted to find out more about what other art teachers struggle with the most in terms of supply and material management. I created a survey that was sent out to many art educators. I tried my best to get a wide variety of opinions. I hoped for feedback from all grade levels, both genders, many races and across a couple of different districts. However, the survey was done anonymously so I cannot be exactly sure of the makeup. In total, 14 art educators took the survey. A majority were relatively experienced, having between 6-20 years, which I do think made a difference in my results. 93% of these teachers have between 100-200 students that they teach every day. A solid 93% agree or strongly agree that material and supply management require a lot of time and effort on their part to do their job. One of the most interesting pieces of information I received was how many preps these teachers had (see Chart 1). From my experience, teachers with more than 3 preps have a lot of hard work and preparation that is put into lesson planning. 50% of these art teachers had 4 or more different preps (i.e. art projects, classes) that they had to prepare for and teach on a regular school day. That is a great deal of lesson planning and managing materials. Additionally, 79% of those surveyed say they are not using their prep period (conference period) to actually lesson plan but rather take care of materials and supplies. In my opinion, this means that these teachers are lesson planning on their own time either before, after school or even at lunch. Above, Chart 1 demonstrates the amount of preps art educators have on a regular day of school. Something else that took me by surprise was the amount of art educators that felt like they did not have enough storage space for student artwork(See Chart 2). 43% either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement: I have enough space to store student artwork. This is definitely another problem of practice and does effect material and supply management greatly. This was a question that I threw on at the last minute and I’m glad I did. Chart 2 above. Finally, the clearest difficulty demonstrated through my survey (see Chart 3) shows that 64% of the those surveyed disagree or strongly disagree with this statement: there is enough time between classes to get out and arrange necessary materials and supplies for the next class. 72% agree or strongly agree that they could use some help getting out, distributing, setting up, cleaning and taking down materials and supplies. This is exactly how I feel and I would have been entirely thrown off if the results were different from this. Chart 3 above. The last question of the survey was a short answer and said: In your opinion, as an Art educator, what is the toughest part of material and supply management? I copy and pasted all of the short answers to create one large word cloud. Here, you can see which words were most common in each response.
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Can you imagine being five years old again? The world is so big and sometimes, as adults, that can be easy to forget. My elementary Art classroom is very different from a general education elementary classroom in that my room has a wide variety of ages come through on a daily basis. I have students as young as four and as old as eleven. That's a pretty huge difference considering my average four or five year old is about three and a half feet tall and my average eleven year old is over four and a half feet tall. After working in this position for three years, I could see a lot of things that were poorly designed and furniture that was poorly chosen for my younger students... But I didn't realize exactly how big the world was in the Art room until this perspective taking project.
I decided to take on the perspective of one of my younger students by reenacting a series of tasks that I would typically ask my students to perform. The trick is that I did this all on my knees, cutting my height to about four feet tall (which, ironically is still significantly taller than some of my littlest and youngest students). I wanted to make my arm length and my wing span a bit more realistic, as well, so I tried to keep my upper arms a bit more glued to my sides during this recreation.
I reached an understanding that, for my younger kiddos, supplies at our supply table should be pushed forward and items should not be in large buckets or bins. Perhaps where I most experienced empathy the most was when I tried to wash my hands. I quickly realized how difficult this simple task is for my younger students. My sink and counter is much higher than them and it is definitely not safe for them to be standing on chairs in order to wash up. I think a stepping stool would be really beneficial. One last thing I'd like to share is that some of my students are even shorter than the height that I was when I was on my knees. If this was difficult for me at about four feet, I wonder what it is like for my students who are three and a half feet tall...? |
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