So I thought of another unholy union, this time for an assignment. For an internship seminar we are to begin by defining the ideals we would like see in an educator. Characteristics that define a good educator, so to speak. Oddly, what came to my mind are the laws of robotics by Isaac Asimov. Just as to why these came to mind, I don’t know. There’s something about their directness and stability in referring to one another. I realize that what I’m doing takes a fictional premise and applies it to a a very real and serious situation, so my ‘translations’ into educator characteristics may seem ridiculous. I don’t mean to cheapen an educator by stating them this way, and my focus is mainly on an art educator. Nor do I intend the educator to be an automaton in any sense of the word (or even according to Asimov’s word, for that matter). What I’ve done here is to simply apply my opinions via a literary vehicle that matches my intention. The key here is that the 3 laws of robotics by Asimov are the inspiration for these initial laws. Unlike the robots of Asimov’s fictional worlds, we humans are not strictly confined to just these 3.
The 3 laws are as follows:
(more…)
Learning art is a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is something that, when left to itself, becomes more orderly. This is, in general, a counter-intuitive property. When a system is left to itself, we expect order to decline, almost along the lines of entropy. Entropy, however, deals with a closed system. Learning art is not a closed system as it is interconnected in many ways and on many levels to systems that surround it. In this way we deal with two other principles that may seem to be outside of the education realm: complexity and chaos. 
