Raising her hand and weaving imaginary circles in the air, Ukiah Hoy asks her beginning arts students to close their eyes and draw a continuous line.
Silently, she adds.
Hoy tells the Cholla High students to focus on their drawing hand and nothing else around them. Just move your hand around the paper, let it flow, she says. “It will be the longest three minutes of your life,” she jokes.
The exercise helps the students reset their focus.
And while the exercise might appear meaningless, something deeper occurs when the class of about 30 students makes their squiggly lines: They’ve completed a process where there is no right or wrong, nor judgment of the outcome. It is a moment of mindfulness.
Welcome to Miss Hoy’s classroom in Cholla’s Pod K. It’s a place where students find equality, shared values, inspiration and meaning in their art projects. Art is “finding a way to break down walls,” says Hoy, a second-year teacher at the west-side school.
Recognition has already reached Hoy, a 2016 graduate of the University of Arizona.
The Women’s Caucus of the National Art Education Association awarded the 32-year-old Hoy its Carrie Nordlund pre-K-12 Feminist Pedagogy Award. The award honors an educator for making a “special effort to incorporate feminist pedagogy into her or his pre-K-12 teaching, and which pre-K-12 art educators, peers, and administrators have recognized as inclusive.”
“Feminism is an ideology that values equality regardless of gender,” said Hoy, who grew up in Catalina, north of Tucson, and graduated from Canyon del Oro High School in 2004.
Treating her students equally and helping them learn to treat each other the same way is a key tenet in Hoy’s teaching philosophy. She wants the classroom to be a secure place where the students can learn, grow and create.
At the beginning of the school year, Hoy recounted, she led the students in a discussion of pronouns beyond “he” and “she.” The students, more so today than yesterday, have become aware of our fluid gender identifications. More students know fellow students who are undergoing gender change and transformation.
“You’re failing students if you’re not creating a safe space,” said Hoy who teaches five classes with a total of about 140 students, in all four grade levels.
In this safe space art is the focus of her teaching and their learning. And art is the vehicle they use to make life’s connections.
“It’s a language,” Hoy said. “It helps develop a voice. It gives students a way to express themselves.”
In her application for the award, Hoy wrote: “I view Art and Visual Cultural Education as a fundamental subject of study. It is comparable in importance to core curricula and is a facet of language, science, history, geography and math. Being able to think critically is essential to thriving as an individual, and I have confidence that art education is the conduit that can facilitate this process.”
In her spare time, Hoy is working on large steel sculptures. They are skeletal, biological figures. A Santa Fe, New Mexico, gallery owner has invited her to create some sculptures to sell.
But the students are her joyful focus.
In her third-period class last week, students were working on a project that evoked dreams. Not necessarily their own dreams but the universal concept of dreams. Some students found inspiration in rap song by Tupac Shakur. The process included sketching out their project idea then working on it. And if they made mistakes or the idea didn’t work out, Hoy said, the students went at it again.
Failing and then trying again is part of the art process, just like life, the students learn, Hoy said.
“It’s a learned skill,” she said.
In addition to using art to learn a key lifelong lesson, Hoy finds that her teenage students lean on her art class to bolster their lives. Art builds them up, and their artwork expresses their lives and dreams, she said.
“They’re hungry for independence,” said Hoy.
Hoy had fiddled with art in her youth but by the time she enrolled in the UA, several years after graduating from high school, Hoy decided to focus on a fine-arts career. Subsequently she decided to shift to arts education.
Teaching, she believes, is a noble calling even if educators are not valued like they once were. And teaching art, its history, its place in our lives, makes her job even that more important despite a wide societal indifference to art.
“Some in society see arts as disposable,” Hoy said.
But just as art elevates her Cholla students, it elevates all of us.
“To be a well-rounded, holistic human being, you need to have a general knowledge of art,” said Hoy, who has taught at the Tucson Museum of Art. “Every civilization has revered art.”
