Jan Wiesner
Lower School Art teacher

Animated art teacher Jan Wiesner sculpts the air with her hands, framing her thoughts through gestures that illustrate the stories she tells. “Storytelling is important to learning,” she says, “because it helps children remember.” She teaches her students to tell stories too. “What is unusual at this level is that I have the students doing art criticism, learning to look critically at a piece of art work,” she says. “Art criticism asks that you slow that down and that you look at all the parts and pieces and you try to see what the artist has to say.” Her students have swept state art criticism contests for the past few years in their age group. “Art criticism gives them a way of expressing something that they don’t always have the words to fully express,” she says. “Now, when you talk to the kids, they will often say, ‘Well, what I’m trying to say is’ -- which is a big cognitive leap.”

Mrs. Wiesner believes art allows children to become more flexible as thinkers and shows them they can approach a problem from a variety of angles. “Art asks you to do several things. It asks you to look at all the individual pieces, but it also asks you to look at the big picture. How are you going to put these pieces together? What’s the big picture about? What are you going for? I think those are skills of analyzing and exploring possibilities that only aids the regular classroom.”

Her students put their skills to work doing service to the community in projects she develops. One year, her students sold “chicken art” at the Hyde Park Art Show which raised money to buy books for a South African village school. An ongoing project is the Garden for Good, a sculptural container garden she developed with science teacher Patricia E. Seta. The harvest is earmarked for a fund-raising dinner.

Mrs. Wiesner is proud of her student’s art contest awards and community, but she’s thrilled when she hears they impress adults with their knowledge. She tells a story about a first grader who surprised his uncle by recognizing the glass sculpture in his house as being created by Dale Chihuly. And she tells the story of a student who enthralled a crowd gathered around a Wassily Kandinsky painting at The Tate in London. A visitor asked if she was a junior docent at the art museum, says Mrs. Wiesner, and the mother answered: “No, she’s a Summit second grader.”