Hello!  My name is Keara Connor and I am an art educator currently living in Santa Cruz, CA.  I believe great ideas develop alongside feelings of freedom and joy.  As a teacher, I give students the freedom to express their creativity, ingenuity, and joy as an emergent process.  I develop projects that respect the intelligence and autonomy of children to make their own decisions, while exposing them to new knowledge of the world and artistic tools and techniques that inspire growth.  I believe in pushing students ever further through dialogue and moments of shared laughter and awe.

 

I received my Master's of Art Education with GA Teacher Certification from the University of Georgia in Summer 2014.  As the former Art Education Director of the Greensboro Children's Museum, as well as an educator in multiple community settings in Athens, GA, I have extensive experience in developing and teaching curricula for community programs from infancy through adolescence.  For example, at the Greensboro Children's Museum, I taught up to 500 children a week, serving school groups of all ages daily during the school year.  Projects revolved around artistic movements, world history, science, literature, and different cultures.  At the Lyndon House Art Center in Athens, GA, I taught art classes throughout the year, as well as over 30 summer camps each culminating in a large-scale exhibition.  As a temporary outreach coordinator through an NAEA grant, I taught at multiple community centers serving low-income populations, which culminated in an exhibition of my students' work at a festival.  As a highlight of my 3 year teaching at Treehouse Kid and Craft, I taught an “Inventor Camp” where my students created their own arcade and “operated” it for the customers at a local Farmer's Market.

I recently embarked on the most exciting and large-scale project of my career.  During my student teaching at a middle school, I designed and facilitated a 2-month collaborative project with the 6th graders where they worked in teams to brainstorm, research, design, prototype, and build 12 6'x6' exhibits on themes of their choice that together formed a “traveling museum.”  I transported the museum in a U-Haul over 20 miles to the Lyndon House Art Center for a community exhibition.  The students came up with and voted on the name “Cardboard Wonders” for the title of the exhibition.  I collaborated with Double Helix Academy, a STEAM middle school in Athens, to help install the exhibits- an exciting and educational “field trip” for these children. We installed the exhibition in 6 hours, just in time for the opening reception.  It was an inexpressible joy as the culmination of this project to see the faces of the small children who attended as they sat in kid-made cardboard chairs, went “under the sea,” opened small doors into candy houses, spun records on a kid-designed DJ turntable, and played with ceramic animals.  The project is documented here: Cardboard Wonders.

 

This experience has left me eager to organize more community experiences that empower children and create magical, unexpected interactions between different groups.  I wish to continue the exploration of what is possible when children and adults collaborate to learn and create together, wherever this takes me.

About Me