Innovative pottery throwing methods come with new ceramics teacher at TJ.
Photo by Katie Boyer
The new 2010-2011 school year brings Doris Bauerlein to the Thomas Jefferson faculty as the new ceramics teacher where she plans to show off her skill and enthusiasm.
Following in the footsteps of the much-loved previous ceramics teacher, Catherine Salazar, who is no longer a Spartan staff member due to retirement, Bauerlein hopes to bring new ideas to the table. With 17 years of teaching experience overall, 12 of them at DPS, she comes to TJ excited to share her experience with her students.
Bauerlein carries a Bachelor of Science in Art education that she received from Ohio State University. She not only studied ceramics in college, but also metalsmithing and jewelry design at the University of Guam, where she dug her own clay, mixed it, purified it and made pottery from it. “It was a really informing process. Not only that, but it was fun and gave me an appreciation for Native Americans that had to go through that to make pottery. I felt a connection to my ancestors,” Bauerlein said. Aside from that, she’s also done some bookbinding and Native American beading. But don’t think she only likes intricate forms of art; she appreciates the simplicity of drawing and painting. “Art is a nonverbal language,” Bauerlein says, and that’s why she likes music and dance as well.
Bauerlein divides her time between teaching at TJ part time from first period to fourth period at TJ, and then heading over to Denison Montessori, a once private, now public, elementary school where she does arts and crafts with smaller kids. Bauerlein says, “I don’t go into detail with them like I do with high school kids. I just give them materials, paper and paints, and let them go.” She says this is to encourage creative freedom in the younger students, and she’s also hoping they just have fun.
For TJ students, however, she has a syllabus packed with projects she wants to do, including the Chalk Gallery Art Festival for “Day of the Dead” sculptures, available to both her ceramics one and two curriculum. For ceramics one, Bauerlein hopes to familiarize her students with basic archetypal symbolism and critical thinking skills, and to teach them to create pinched, coil, slab, sculpted and thrown forms of pottery. “What many people don’t notice is that even just color can symbolize feelings or the meaning of a piece. It’s one of the many universal symbols,” Bauerlein says.
For ceramics two, Bauerlein wants to do sprigged decoration (pressing a molded shape into the pot), make puzzle mugs, usable musical instruments, and much more. She also mentions that she’s considering a guest artist and/or a field trip to a pit firing, where pots are placed in a pit in the ground and covered with flammable materials such as wood shavings or sawdust, then set on fire. “There’s a difference between convenient electric kiln firing and actually setting the pots in the middle of a fire. This first hand knowledge can only come from experience and it gets them [students] in touch with the history of art. It’s also just an exciting experience!” Bauerlein said of her plans. With these ideas, she offers her students the chance to deepen their knowledge and appreciate the history of art and artists.
Available during the mornings and Excel period, Bauerlein is accessible for questions and open for suggestions on her new plans. She says a quote she lives by is, “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it,” said by Michelangelo. She hopes to hang up more inspirational quotes from artists in her classroom, such as another she likes by Pablo Picasso, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
