The school year was quickly drawing to a close. The calendar became filled with the usual assortment of performances, picnics and closing ceremonies. No more Friday afternoons were available for Big Paintings Club. The students requested that I offer the club the following year and I told them that I would do my best to accommodate their wishes.

I learned a lot by watching how the students interacted within a creative studio space when they were allowed to be in control of their learning. They were not required to watch demonstrations, follow templates, adhere to predetermined methodologies, create on demand, or become apprehensive about hierarchical assessment tools. The most striking insight for me as a teacher was the similarities between the working processes of my students with those of contemporary artists. Like adult artists, the students enjoyed creating according to their own schedules (White, 1995) and working at their own pace (Kent, 2011; Myers, 2010). They developed new techniques by considering commonplace materials in novel ways (Kent, 2011; Mendelsohn, 2010; Milliard, 2010; Myers, 2010). Surprise and serendipity was part of their creative processes (Milliard, 2010). They were not afraid to work and rework their paintings to “create surfaces of wondrous nuance and complexity” (Myers, 2010, p.72).

The act of making art necessitates individual and collective agency. Big Painting Club gave students a chance to direct their own creative learning. A “learner-directed classroom” (Jaquith & Hathaway, 2012, p. 127) encourages student-initiated creative endeavors whereas the School Art Style merely promotes “an orderly, systematic agenda for the production of objects” (Thompson, 1987, p. 19). Authentic art instruction “ties art to real life and the real life practices of the contemporary artworld” (Anderson & Milbrandt, 1998, p.13) but this type of instruction is missing from our classrooms. There remains a disconnect between the way art is taught in schools and the way it is practiced by working adult artists (Herrmann, 2005).

So why then does the school art style continue to hold sway? I believe the School Art Style is indicative of the “dynamic conservatism” (Schon, 1973, p. 48) entrenched within the American schooling system. Dynamic conservatism is a phrase coined by the organizational theorist Donald Schon (Bonnyman, 2004) and refers to the way in which social systems resist change. In a school environment it is easy to remain within the status quo but difficult to elicit change. In my teaching experience I have seen teachers celebrated for having their students produce appealing and familiar school products while others were vilified for daring to propose truly transformative initiatives. Yet transformation requires innovation and innovation often happens through serendipitous occurrences. We need to rethink the role of creativity in our classrooms.

The educative opportunities in Big Paintings Club went beyond what traditional curricular approaches can offer because the students were empowered to take control of every facet of their learning. Students directed the process and were able to work according to their own timelines, desires and needs. Their creative journeys were wholly dependent upon the context of the situation and the personal and collective experiences of the students within the space. They had time to discover, test, reflect, collaborate, appropriate, converse, and revise.

The participants of Big Paintings Club were allowed to examine the act of painting in fresh and surprising ways. The abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell once said, “there is no one way to paint” (Albers, 2011, p. 104). My students and I agree.