Teaching Philosophy
“Kat – thanks for being a beacon of light and positive distraction during this difficult time. Your knowledge, teaching style and positive and productive demeanor with the kids were beyond words.”
Kat Chávez teaching a Guided Gallery Visit at the Brooklyn Museum.
Kat Chávez (left) and Mei Kazama (right) facilitating a meeting with teens in the Work Study Program at the Brooklyn Museum.
Kat Chávez facilitating a lesson and discussion with adults in the exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire is Applied to Stone It Cracks at the Brooklyn Museum.
As a teaching artist, I focus on the experiential parts of artistic learning, going beyond a basic accumulation of knowledge. I use the phrase “teaching artist” as opposed to “teacher” or “educator” to frame my experience with students as learning from and with them, as a fellow artist. In teaching about art, I help learners access knowledge that is not just related to art history or cultural history, but also emotional knowledge. Emotional knowledge, in my lessons, involves using the feelings elicited by a work of art as a primary avenue through which to explore it. I work to find a balance in which a learner’s personal life becomes intimately intertwined with cultural history through the process of connecting to art.
Through my emphasis on personal and cultural meaning-making, I undermine master narratives of culture and engage in institutional critique. Using inquiry-based teaching methods, I share information about artworks based on what learners find in the artwork, rather than using art historical information as a starting point. In doing so, I prompt learners to feel strength in their own interpretative abilities, and shift conversations away from interpretations dominated by the institutional voice or the art historical canon. I value both the individual and social experiences of learners in museums, which is why I try to engage learners in group discussion, personal reflection, and collaborative work in every lesson.
I work regularly with teen audiences. I’ve worked specifically with teens engaged in art-making, teens working as artist’s assistants, and teens exploring event-planning, and in each case, I encourage my students to find power in their voices. I create avenues for their ideas to come to fruition, and I demonstrate how an exciting but overly-ambitious idea can shift into a real possibility. Allowing teen audiences to be comfortable with dreaming, while also equipping them with the tools for executing their dreams, is integral to my work.
For me, teaching is about finding ways for art to empower learners, whether that is empowering them to share their thoughts and opinions and/or empowering marginalized communities from which a learner may come. I teach with care at the center of my lessons, and I try to teach predominantly from the work of artists of color, particularly Black and Indigenous artists. Further, I engage histories of colonialism in ways that remind us how these forces are ongoing and residual, and I try to privilege the voices of those who have been marginalized in an effort to restore their authority over their own narratives.