"I am a practicing artist and passionate art educator. I value art making as a gift to be shared with the world. One of my most important objectives as an art teacher is creating lesson plans that enable students to explore and express their personal memories and cultural histories through the creation of art images and ideas. Communication through the visual arts unifies and fosters positive relationships among students, which constitutes a social practice that encourages a sense of community. I value the concentration that is required when creating a work of art and my curriculum encourages students to become engaged in a process of making sense of their world. I approach curriculum development as an interdisciplinary practice through which students learn to make connections between images and ideas across the school curriculum as well as within the visual arts. My teaching strategies accommodate different learning styles in which I have experimentally created adaptive art lessons to allow every student to participate in the engagement of art making. While I am a teacher, I also consider myself as a learner in my exchange of ideas with my students in a mutual process of exploration and discovery."