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From Concepts to Kicks: Bringing Art to Life

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Originally published in TEACH Magazine, November/December 2021 Issue

By Ben Salus

As an elementary school art teacher, it is my job to engage my students and get them thinking critically about what and how they create. I believe that students’ ideas and explorations with art-making are more important than their current technical skills. Because of this, I’ve often felt the art room to be an inappropriate place for competitions, which typically reward kids with artistic backgrounds and discourage others.

However, one of my strongest personal artistic influences is hip hop, which actively embraces competition. It’s arguably the most important contemporary arts movement, and I love the idea and spirit of battling. No violence, no contact, yet it’s personal and confrontational. Competitors become both adversaries and allies as they improve each other through challenges and pressure.

Competition in the Classroom

Jesse White Learning Academy, the school where I work in Hazel Crest, IL, has had plenty of its own challenges this past year. After fluctuating between remote and in-person learning over the first several months, we finally settled into a hybrid approach, with half my students in the classroom and half attending remotely. Somehow I was supposed to teach them as if they were a unified class.

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Ben Salus is a teaching artist and author working and living in the south side of the Chicago Metropolitan Area. His work and curricula focus on exploration, meaning-making, and reflective consciousness.

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Ben Salus
Ben Salus
Ben Salus is a teaching artist and author working and living in the south side of the Chicago Metropolitan Area. His work and curricula focus on exploration, meaning-making, and reflective consciousness.

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