Every year, I’d get a couple of students who would start out nervous. They were scared they would make a mistake and didn’t know what to expect. After a few weeks, these students would become more confident, and start telling me stories about old art teachers that had them still on edge. Most of what I heard was about teachers who cared more about what the students made than the process of making it. Some just told students that they “did it wrong”, or otherwise criticized their work, but I had more than one student tell me that their teacher took their art and threw it in the trash. Something like that sticks with a child, it’s a clear message that art and crafting aren’t for them.
Craft and art are skills, like so many other things. Many people, including students, have been conditioned to believe that you either have “talent” or you don’t. That’s not how it works at all! It’s practice, just like playing a musical instrument or playing a sport. The trick is that students will only practice if they are having fun doing it. Stressing about a painting not looking “right” is not fun. Besides, what’s right for the teacher may not be what’s right in the eye of the student.
Inevitably, there would be students who are negative about what they are working on. My rule was that they could only criticize their work if they said something specific, not “it’s bad!”. That’s not useful. What is useful is for them to learn how to figure out what specifically they aren’t happy with. Maybe it’s as simple as the color? This teaches students to look critically at their work and to think rather than react. That’s the road to deeper understanding.
Art and craft projects can exist on their own, for their own sake. But, connecting curricula across subjects is a powerful way to enrich their experiences. In some ways it’s an easier approach, the subject matter is already there, the only job will be tying it together. This can look like making field studies when studying fish, plants, or animals in biology. If studying Africa, relief printing is a great way to study art and textile techniques. The options are limitless.