This post is part of a series beginning with Tales of a Sabbatical: On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 1. For February and March 2026, I was a student in CDSR 100 Introduction to Drawing (Continuing Studies) at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Throughout, I kept and analyzed a journal, in preparation for a Scholarly Personal Narrative (Ng & Carney, 2017) paper. The question guiding my research is: What are my lived experiences of being a student in a new (to me) discipline? What follows is part of my preparation, a narrative portrait (Rodríguez-Dorans & Jacobs, 2020) with reflection in the style of Brookfield (2017, Chapter 9).
Practice for Purpose
I chose to take an art class at Emily Carr Continuing Studies, I had hoped to take Watercolour Painting, after informally dabbling in that medium a couple of years earlier. Introduction to Drawing was the prerequisite, so I enrolled here instead. After class #3, I wrote: “Wow what a roller coaster of emotions. All week I’ve felt frustrated in my practice, like nothing I was making was any good, feeling like I didn’t even want to practice because why bother. In those moments, I thought of my students. They are the deeper reason why I’m doing any of this. So I didn’t try to dismiss or minimize my feelings, but I practiced anyway. Even when it made me want to cry in frustration. My husband said “but you practiced, and that’s what matters.” And I recalled my teacher had said “the only way to get better at drawing is to DRAW.”
A few days later, after a stressful event, I “found myself compelled to draw. I spent almost half an hour with [oil] pastels, drawing flowers not from still life but just for the pleasure of it. What I created isn’t pretty per se, but it’s also not black-and-white which is what all the mediums are in this course…. What matters for here is that I stripped away the homework and discipline just went back to the thing that I started with. Playing around drawing flowers. The technicality of drawing is intense, as I learned on Friday, and to get good at it will require loads of dedicated time on task. No surprise there — it’s a discipline like any other. But giving in to the urge to play in this medium this morning, without rules, helped me reclaim my sense of self, not so much escaping the [stressful] problem, but freeing my mind from it, relegating it appropriately into the background. I felt more me.”
What I drew that Monday morning (Feb 23). Oil pastels.
A portion of time-limited “gesture sketch” drills from Friday’s class #3 (as referenced). Various charcoals.
| Impact on my understanding of teaching and learning.After a week of being frustrated but encouraged with my practice, there appears an appreciation that deliberate practice over the long term is essential to improving in this discipline. This suggestion of increased patience with or resignation to the process contrasts with intense emotions earlier, and perhaps was enabled by an awareness that choosing to go off-curriculum (oil pastels for fun) can rekindle joy.
To this same reflection after oil pastels, I added: “Taking this drawing class is building my skills in sometimes boring and frustrating ways… but I’ll be able to use these skills to help me explore God’s creation and myself through artistic expression with more depth and beauty…. What I’m appreciating here is that class-based learning is fundamentally instrumental. It’s in service of greater growth potential. And I can’t dictate for any student what that growth potential will be… and they might not either.” Two people’s encouraging words helped me persist, as did reminding myself of my bigger reason for doing this work: to be a better teacher for my students. This reminder underscores how important it is to help my students consider their deeper reasons for learning, to help sustain them when it is (perhaps inevitably) frustrating. Coupled with the invocation of my students as my reason for persisting through frustration, I’m reminded of the differences between intrinsic motivation (for the pleasure) and internalized extrinsic motivation (see Organismic Integration Theory, The Theory – selfdeterminationtheory.org and Regulatory Styles). Extrinsically motivated actions can be “integrated” such that people feel good doing them because they know it leads to an outcome they value, even if that action isn’t intrinsically enjoyable. I didn’t make that theoretical connection during the course, but I see it now as I piece together these vignettes. |
| Meaning for my Practice. That same week of reflection, I wrote, “I wonder if there’s a practice that psychology majors can engage in to bring them back to the things about humans that interested them in the first place. I’m reminded of artistic expressions of data. I wonder about incorporating an opportunity to reconnect with who they are.” I’ve already been working on that in some ways with my Researcher Identity Development optional project in PSYC 217 Research Methods.
What I had been thinking in this quote was attempting to tap into intrinsic motivation, but perhaps there is a deliberate harnessing of integrated regulation (or in that direction). Integrated regulation requires self-knowledge of one’s why, so maybe I can work to support my students in developing that why. My PSYC 203 course seems particularly appropriate for that self-knowledge work. How might I bring that into my statistics course? |
Follow