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Visual Arts Education ACCREDITATIONS The University of St. Francis is accredited by both the Higher Learning Commission (hlcommission.org) and the Illinois Board of Higher Education (ibhe.org). College of Education programs are accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (ncate.org).
As a Visual Arts Education major, you’ll take stimulating and engaging classes with experienced professors who model best practices in teaching. Your learning experiences will be directly applicable to visual arts classrooms. You will also receive personal attention in small classes held at the university’s Center for Art & Design, and will be guided by two advisors—one from visual arts and one from education. You will work in a variety of classroom settings at different schools, providing a wide range of opportunities for collaboration, mentoring and networking with teaching professionals and school districts in the immediate Joliet area. To further increase your marketability, you can easily add an endorsement in Special Education Bilingual Education, or English as a Second Language (ESL) to your program of study. Additionally, the College of Education has many years of experience preparing teacher candidates to successfully complete the edTPA, a national assessment that helps to guarantee that new teachers are the best that they can possibly be. Most impressively, you’ll benefit from USF’s excellent reputation with area schools and will be highly employable after graduation.
Visual Arts Education
Why St. Francis? Every school is going to teach you to write lesson plans and implement them, but no other school is going to do it with the zeal of St. Francis. Here you do not simply learn methodology, you learn to cultivate the whole person. I learned to view teaching as more than a profession and a class as more than a group of students. A classroom of 30 kids is actually a room of 30 unique and special individuals, each capable of changing the world. Ashley Sichak ’15
W H AT C A N YO U D O W I T H THIS DEGREE?
G R O W T H R O U G H R E A L- W O R L D EXPERIENCE
The Visual Arts Education degree at USF will prepare you to teach elementary through high school visual arts students. However, there is a lot more you will be able to do than take attendance, plan lessons, and grade projects. With both the skills and heart of an excellent teacher, you will also improve communication, develop creativity, introduce exciting new ideas, inspire minds, mentor others, instill a sense of value and purpose in your students, initiate positive change, and shape the future of our communities and our world.
Field experience begins the second semester of freshman year, giving you the opportunity to teach in a classroom every semester and develop cultural awareness while working in the community. You may then continue in a practicum each semester, providing more practical experience than traditional student teaching. You will broaden your skill-set and experiences while working with individual students and small groups, assessing student work, supporting the classroom environment, and even teaching whole class lessons. Finally, in senioryear Internships I and II, you will spend two semesters in a visual arts classroom applying what you have learned and further developing your teaching skills in a supervised setting.
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