By: Adam Simmons

 

As a classroom full of students watch, Aubrey Park takes two handfuls of charcoal and passionately smears it across a canvas. In doing so, Park shows the class how to put emotion into their artwork to create something with aesthetic value and meaning while paying specific attention to the course rubric. These are some of the core values in Park’s advanced art class at Sunset High School in Portland, Oregon. Park’s course aims to challenge her students to be creative, follow guidelines, and know exactly what they are doing and why. From smearing charcoal, painting, mind mapping, ceramics, and even graphic design, her class challenges students academically and helps them relieve their everyday stress.

Park has not always wanted to be an art teacher. In college, Park found her passion to be literature and wanted to do nothing more than write novels and perhaps even be a professor. Park attended Arizona State University, and after one year she decided she would study abroad in the Czech Republic for her junior year. During that year, she went from learning literature to teaching it to small Czech communities, which gave her some insight into the importance of education. “I knew I wanted to make a difference through education,” Park said. However, the way she wanted to make that difference drastically changed from literature to art when she lost her close friend.

Park’s friend had been simultaneously teaching art and developing a water well system that gave thousands of people clean water in small Argentinian villages. “Witnessing what my friend had done and all the people she had helped changed me and gave me insight on the amount of change I could do, too,” Park said. After seeing her friend’s legacy, Park knew she wanted to leave a legacy of her own based on art education. Park was now driven to live on her friend’s legacy through art.

To this day, Park strives to make a difference every day at work. Anne Goodrich, Park’s colleague, can attest to Park’s aspirations because she shares them. They share this goal of making a difference for their students and more, such as developing a well-structured and demanding course schedule, constructive outlets for stress, and a place where the atypical student can thrive and even derive a sense of guidance towards college or a long-term career. Together, they have changed the way art is taught in their workplace. Park and Goodrich have taught the importance of art academically because their curriculum teaches history, aesthetic value, and requires attention to detail for both the rubric and the art itself, much like a college course would. Park now demonstrates the importance of art funding every day by showing how it can truly make a difference in a student’s life.