Thank you for stopping by my art education blog. I hope you’ll find things here that will be helpful to your art teaching.
My name is Anita Sagastegui, and I’m a K-8 art educator with an MA in Art Education. As I have so often gotten ideas from fellow art teachers, both in person and online, I wanted to give back to the art education community by creating this blog and hopefully helping other art teachers in return. I find enormous joy in teaching the visual arts, as I design curricula to promote deep, lasting understanding of concepts, ideas, processes and techniques while guiding students to cultivate visual literacy and their own expressive style. I also strive to work with our core-subject teachers to develop an interdisciplinary curriculum that helps authentically connect the arts with concepts and themes students are exploring in other subjects. My art classes are designed around units of inquiry, in which I unite concepts, art history and particular techniques into lessons that usually span anywhere from four to eight art class periods of about an hour each. What you will see in each lesson therefore is a snapshot of the way I organize each unit. Guiding all of my art lessons is a sense of play and an invitation to all students to invite delight and surprise into their art-making process. In the end, this is what art education is all about: the process, not the product.
I practice different media at home, my favorites being drawing in watercolor pencil, mixed media collage and printmaking. However, my primary art form is photography, which I have practiced since my teens and has always been driven by my own sense of play and curiosity. You can visit my photography site here: www.anitasagasteguiphotography.com
An advocate for the arts, I also serve on my city’s arts commission. I live in California with my family. To all art educators out there, thank you for doing what you do!
In the K-8 Art Studio with Anita Sagastegui 