Steve Rueckert, a RISD graduate who teaches art in Washington DC, came up to me at a US Department of Transportation event recently to share an interesting teaching story. Many alums come up to me to share stories about RISD, but Steve was different as he wanted to share his recent teaching epiphany, and wanted me to share this epiphany with others. Steve spoke about how for many years as an art teacher he would tell his students, “You need to figure out what you want to say,” and to mobilize all the skills they had learned to express and critique their own work. In other words, it was important for the students to find inside themselves the core thing they wanted to say, and to *make* art to get it out into the world.

Fast forward to the present, Steve was reviewing his own portfolio recently and tried to suss out the particular pieces of his work that were the most successful. He realized that it wasn’t necessarily the work that spoke of an idea he had to broadcast that often succeeded — it was the work that he made as an effort to know something. So now instead of telling his students to answer the question, “What do I want to say?” he tells his students to answer a different question: “What do I want to know?” So he asks his students to make work that takes them along that path to knowing, and to make art that helps them know, and to share it with the rest of the world. He said this is something he had originally learned at RISD, and somehow had forgotten — and he wanted to let me know that it’s changed his entire teaching perspective.

Steve made me think about a post I made about a year ago — about how the director of Glee accepted an Emmy, and did so in the name of art teachers in America. We all know why. Thanks, Steve — you taught me one of many important lessons I’ve learned from our RISD alums — another reason I’m honored to be part of this unique community. -JM