Continuing to follow student engagement and the standards content knowledge and learning environment, these standards showed up for me in this early fieldwork experience. An incredibly important aspect of creating a safe and welcoming learning environment is comfortability.

In this after school art fair at Brunswick Junior High School, students would design their own painted rock, using either abstraction or symbolism (or a combination of both!), in their painted imagery, while writing a story of the imagery on the other side. 

Once I showed my group of students the concepts I wanted them to understand and employ, they got into the groove. The artmaking became a relaxing, intuitive process that was not focused on outcome--but rather the experience and the feelings associated with the piece.

This made a comfortable learning environment, both in learning how to use symbolism and abstraction artistically and how to paint on a smaller, uneven surface.