ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes to the world. In Canadian education systems, the mandate to move kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum delivery to online platforms was trying for educators, students, and parents. Teachers had to creatively reimagine and combine learner outcomes and the three pillars of education, planning, instruction, and assessment, to deliver programs in virtual environments that supported students learning at home. Numerous questions emerged for high school visual art educators accustomed to instructing hands-on, media-rich disciplines of art, like drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and sculpture. This chapter outlines one visual artist/teacher/researcher’s self-study of obstacles encountered and strategies applied to teaching secondary school visual art courses through an online learning platform. Ensuring access to art materials, synchronously teaching basic skills through a document camera, and suggesting online resources all supported artist-students’ asynchronous art making. Discussing in-process artworks, providing breakout rooms for smaller class critiques, encouraging frequent artwork submissions, and writing detailed feedback resulted in students bettering their work for evaluations. Using the “share” function to view art galleries and historical artworks with students deepened their learning and critiques about art. Completing digital portfolios and posting artwork on publicly viewed digital galleries created a sense of accomplishment for artist-students.
