Karilee Park in front of the former Provo High School, which has been renovated by Brigham Young University to house their art programs.

Karilee Park was frustrated with teaching art. Everything in the field seemed to be lacking: funding, engagement from students, respect from peers, personal enjoyment. All of which made her career choice unsatisfying—a career she hadn’t even planned on entering.

Becoming a teacher was a matter of necessity for Park. She had begun her undergraduate degree studying art, though in a rather scattershot manner, with no specific emphasis. When she became pregnant with her first child, she dropped out; and when she returned to school after a divorce, she had to be strategic: now the sole earner for herself and two children, she looked over her transcript and realized she could sooner finish an art education degree than a BFA. Which she did, at BYU Idaho, before getting a job teaching art in Mesa, Arizona. It was a necessary, if not a happy move. “I felt like I was giving up my identity as an artist,” she reflects on why she was hesitant to enter the field.

Teaching art was paying the bills, but Park was unsatisfied. She wasn’t seeing much benefit for her or for her students. To her artistic peers, she says, she wasn’t a real artist, and to her teaching peers, not a real teacher. Her art classes were often filled with students who, not having gotten into their preferred electives, had been “dumped” into her class. And of course, there was the lack of funding: even when government funding increased, she says the money was often mismanaged by school districts and didn’t reach the teachers. In the end, she didn’t feel much like a teacher or an artist. More like a babysitter. “And babysitters get paid more,” she points out.

Disheartened by her experiences and spurred by the changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, she left education, and Arizona. She moved to Utah, where she began working in customer service, until a call from Dr. Mark Graham at BYU’s art education department rekindled her academic aspirations. “I got a call in the summer of 2021, inviting me to apply for the master’s program,” she recalls. She hesitated. “I thought I was done with art education, and BYU is such an academic school, I thought there wouldn’t be any art involved, it would just be academic. But I did want to change art education.”

An exhibition of works created by Park as data visualizations of her students progress.

Three years later, she has finished her master’s degree at the Y, and is more invested in art education than ever—though she says she doesn’t have plans to return to a K-12 classroom. Reflecting on her years teaching high school art, she acknowledges that her introverted nature and her social anxiety were additional challenges in large classroom settings. The hundreds of students who might pass through her classroom every week were too much for her. She prefers to work in smaller settings. And she would like to help alter the system rather than fight against it as an individual cog. “I would not mind working as an arts education administrator to help all the art teachers … also teaching at the university level, teaching these undergrads to prepare them to be the most successful teachers they can be.”

While at university, an elementary education major might take one art class out of their 40 or so required credit hours. Many will have little additional art experience, their own pre-college art education having been minimal. Yet, as fewer and fewer schools provide a dedicated art teacher, these elementary school teachers are expected to integrate art into their classrooms. “Art strengthens and deepens learning,” Park says.

Even if she has only one semester class to do it in, Park’s main objective is to help these future teachers see themselves as artists. “I’ve been helping them develop an artistic identity so that they would naturally integrate the arts into their classroom because it’s part of who they are. … If they see themselves as artists, they’ll want to pursue art and will train themselves … and then they’ll utilize that in class.”

To accomplish this, she has focused on three elements to build artistic confidence. The first is central to any field: consistent practice. “I had them draw, simple drawings, doodles, or cartoons and had them practice them every day. … Some started very fearful of that, but by the end, it was just, ‘This is what we do.’ And they even developed their own stylistic approach.”

She has also emphasized experimenting with different media. She says many teachers have the misconception that art is all about the European masters, who were dedicated to realistic drawing and painting and sculpting the human form. But the art world has expanded far beyond that, and she thinks it’s important to experiment with different media. One student teacher might respond to painting, another to ceramics or fiber art. If guided, they could use any of these media to emphasize a principle in math or science or history.

Finally, she has instituted a practice of peer review, where the student teachers share their work with each other. “It’s much easier to see value in somebody else’s art,” she says, “but it’s also hard to show your art to somebody else because you’re afraid of the judgment. But to actively show it and to have people talk about it and what they like about it can give you a little more confidence.”

For her thesis project, Park has created pottery, risographs and mixed media paintings.

Her three-pronged approach informs her thesis exhibition, which has been part of an exhibit she curated at BYU’s department of art featuring recent graduates in the art education program. Influenced by artists like Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, who have transformed our concept of data visualization, she has created evaluations of the progress of five students in her art studio class in the form of artworks.

She sorted the students’ progress by three criteria or data: general observations of behavior and attitude; the student’s responses on weekly “reflections” answering the question, “Am I an artist?”; and finally, their development of artistic voice and potential. She has interpreted these in the form of pottery, risographs, and mixed media paintings, where colors (pink, yellow, and blue) perform the visualization for the latter two, and form, embellishment, and glaze for the former. The exhibition is an embodiment of what she is trying to show her students—that they can incorporate principles like analysis and data interpretation with art pieces.

She leaves BYU with a lot more hope than when she entered it. ”A lot of people see the problem and are trying to change it,” she says. “It’s a process that goes district by district. … I’ve seen that all of my cohort are incredible artists … and my professors are fantastic artists and they’re all focusing on art education and wanting to change the way art is used in schools.” She wants to be part of that. “I want to influence these future teachers to go on and be something so much better than I was because I wasn’t necessarily sufficiently prepared in that way.”

note: during her time at BYU, Karilee Park has moonlighted as an arts writer for 15 Bytes.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.