Jennifer Combe, Visiting Assistant Professor
Art Education & Foundations
email: jennifer.combe@umontana.edu
phone: 406.243.4208
office: Fine Arts Bldg 102
website: www.jennifercombe.com/
Bio
My interest in pedagogy increased as an undergraduate where I was first introduced to Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which gives voice to many unaddressed learning styles in contemporary classroom environments. In 1997 I began teaching for Washington State Public Schools, with a repertoire including teaching K-3 multi-age general education and K-12 visual art. My personal education experience ranges from traditional public, Catholic private, to alternative undergraduate and graduate schools. My visual work has been exhibited nationally, and I’ve had the privilege to study at The New York Studio School, Vermont Studio Center, and for ten years of private instruction with artist Simon Kogan. I was raised in various places along the I-5 corridor from Portland, OR to Seattle, WA.
Artist Statement
I am interested investigating the cultural contexts of how meaning is derived from semiotic forms. I wonder about the role context plays as individuals construct schema – specifically around classifying and sorting. How does this compartmentalizing, which is an essential process needed for developing meaning, play out in the role of making sense of the world around us? And how, once we grasp a pattern, do we, as agents of change, encourage the constructed boundaries to loosen? My work often emerges as an extreme reduction of forms that interrogate systems of order, disorder, democracy, and universal assumptions around aesthetics.
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching is a political act. My objective is to encourage students to see the water in which we swim as educators and image-makers – to expose the hidden curriculum behind both the classroom community and the lessons received and given. Through democratic classroom practices, play, open-ended image making and thinking, looking, and interaction, I encourage critical thinking around identity, community, difference, and communication. Working from theory to practice and practice to theory, I see the classroom as a lab in which to continually construct and deconstruct pedagogy and the art objects created.
Education
2009 Master in Fine Art, The Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpellier, VT
1997 Master in Teaching, The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA
1995 Bachelor of Arts: The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA
Teaching Certificates: K – 12 visual art, K – 5 self-contained, 9 – 12 English
