I was completing a reading assignment for my practicum class last week and there was a sentence that stood out to me and I have been thinking about it nonstop. It went, “Perhaps they have never witnessed the discovery of purple.” To give some context, the author was talking about how he set up his middle and high school science classrooms to focus on discovery and exploration. Letting students follow their own curiosities – think a scientific TAB classroom. He goes on to talk about how his fellow teachers didn’t understand his classroom setup and why he would bother going off on what they assumed were wild tangents with the students. Throughout the chapter, he explains to the reader that discovery and exploration are vital to learning and understanding the concepts in anything, not just science. How if we just give them the answer, we are treating their education as passive and doing them a great disservice.

This brought up such a vivid memory I didn’t know I had. I was in the kindergarten classroom, during some free play time. Painting on paper and mixing colors around when I made the most incredible discovery, pink! I was astonished, gathered around all the classmates who listened and told them how I can paint with such a pretty color, a color I made because we didn’t have the color pink in the paint tubes. I owe a lot to that moment. The ability to make something new accidentally and that leading to future and specific exploration. That is how I fell in love with art and the making process. How I was able to get through nearly a decade of hating almost everything I produced. I was learning and discovering and perfecting. I was discovering pink and I still am.

The teacher could have sat us down and taught us about the color wheel, had us mix all the secondary and tertiary colors, and taught us about shade and tint. I’m glad she didn’t because I would have been bored. It wouldn’t have been fun and exciting just to know all of these things, I would have added it to the list of all the other things I had to know. There is so much value in figuring it out for yourself, even if you struggle. Especially if you struggle. You feel so accomplished and proud of yourself after completing it. Something that would have been taken away from you if an adult or an expert had swooped in and completed it for you. For this reason, I believe it is immeasurably more important to build up self-efficacy in students and then let them explore and struggle than it is to treat them like a passive vessels for knowledge to be poured into. Especially in art. There is no other place where I feel most students already feel that they can’t do it.