Fingerpaint in Middle School? Or, How to Get Beyond "I Hate Art!"

By middle school, it's sad to say, a lot of students hate art. They also hate math, but that's another story. Or, maybe it isn't. I hated math. It was hard for me. I didn't get it. It made me feel lonely. Alienated. I loved art. I got it. I wasn't necessarily great at it, but it was a language I understood. It made me feel part of something.
Middle school kids just want to belong. (Don't we all, really?) They want to be in a place where they speak the language. Math does it for some kids. Art does it for others. But any teacher can create a place where kids feel like they belong and the first step is to remove FEAR.
At the beginning of each term a kid or two announces, "I hate art." They speak for a silent group who enter the art room with the kind of dread I felt walking into math class. Art, they've learned, is all about those who can draw and those who can't.
But how did they come to this misunderstanding? Visit a preschool during art time and you will find the children happily up to their elbows in glue or paint or messy mounds of clay, confidently pursuing their vision. But as they progress through school students learn not only what they can do, but what they can not do, easily or as well as they'd like, and fear soon replaces self-assurance.
So I spend the first week of the term helping students unlearn fear. I help them learn to go back to the confidence of preschool. I assign my students a color theory activity that involves tempera paint and four pairs of hands. The only rule: no face painting.
Working together removes the pressure to perform 'artistically' and painting without brushes? Well, finger painting is just plain fun at any age. Occasionally, I'll have a student who really can't stand to have messy hands. Rubber gloves usually solves that problem.
Soon students learn what they can do, and learn, in an environment of trust, to tackle what they think they can not do. When those same students who entered my class proclaiming, "I hate art." leave saying, "I'll be back" then I know I've done a good job sharing the language I love and creating a place where students feel like they belong.