Place as Inspiration

An art classroom should be a place that inspires the students to be creative. Students should feel like they belong there, that it is a special place where they can take time out to create, learn and express themselves. I think the ideal art classroom would be full of interesting prints and objects for the students to feel inspired in the subject and the classroom should have lots of images made by the students themselves so the students can experience a sense of ownership and pride in their art classroom.
Not all students will be creative and not all students will perform to the same level but in the ideal classroom all students will feel they belong and that they can achieve to the best of their abilities.

The following site discusses an Australian sense of place:
http://www.deh.gov.au/soe/2001/heritage/introduction-2.html#asenseofplace

The following paper can be found at: http://www.aare.edu.au/05pap/abs05.htm#G
AARE Conference Paper Abstracts - 2005ISSN 1324-9339
My place: The remaking of images of country and belonging in Australian youth
Judith Gill and Sue Howard, University of South Australia
In recent years Australian society has been undergoing major revision in terms of a vastly expanded immigration program. Currently one in five Australians has been born overseas. For the school population the numbers of newcomers to the country is even higher and their distribution is not evenly spread throughout the population.
These developments pose significant issues for education, its form and content, not the least of which is the ways in which the school works to fulfil its traditional function of inculcating an understanding of Australian law and political systems, a respect for its leaders and a sense of belonging.
The study reported on in this paper described the responses from some 400 young South Australian schoolchildren to questions about their feelings for the country in which they live. These responses showed a ready and genuine engagement with questions of the current social mix, an acceptance and pride in being a new society, a positive response to indigenous issues along with some idiosyncratic comment about the country which provides further evidence of the ways in which young people are accurate deconstructors of the manifold media messages about place and belonging.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 16 GIL05257 Youth and nation: The reworking of identity and place in multicultural societies
Keywords: Comparative and International Education