Stefan Cummings

MA in Art Education · University of Florida

Art education is a studio practice.

I teach, paint, and research in the same rooms — and this portfolio is the notebook where the three meet.

Featured work · 2026 capstone thesis

Drawing Attention: Sketchbook Practice as Reflective Studio Pedagogy
Artist's hands sketching in a notebook in warm studio light
Begin with the thesis
No. 01

Featured capstone

Art classroom with students' paintings and works in progress

Drawing Attention: Sketchbook Practice as Reflective Studio Pedagogy

2026Studio pedagogy · Reflective practice

This thesis asks what happens when the sketchbook moves from assignment to practice. Over one school year, I kept a studio journal alongside my students and studied what daily drawing did to our attention, our willingness to revise, and our language for talking about work in progress. Drawing from studio-based research and reflective pedagogy, it argues that the sketchbook is not preparation for art making — it is the classroom itself.

read this one first

Papers & projects

An index, in the order I made them. Each entry is a question I carried into the classroom and tried to answer with the work itself.

Papers

  1. 01

    Sketching as Slow Seeing

    What nine weeks of daily drawing taught my students about attention — and taught me about waiting.

    Studio research
  2. 02

    Curriculum as Collage

    Layering found materials, personal history, and state standards into a secondary art curriculum that holds all three.

    Curriculum inquiry
  3. 03

    Notes from the Margin of the Lesson Plan

    How marginalia became the most honest record of my teaching.

    Reflective practice

Studio projects

  1. 04

    Open Studio Nights

    A monthly invitation for families to make alongside their students — and what the mess taught me about welcome.

    Community practice
  2. 05

    The Sketchbook Exchange

    Two schools, forty sketchbooks, one traveling conversation in drawing.

    Collaboration
  3. 06

    Process Walls

    Turning the classroom wall into a public record of revision, failure, and second attempts.

    Documentation
Open journal with sketches and handwritten notes on a wooden studio desk

About the practice

I came to teaching by way of the studio, and I have never fully separated the two. The habits I learned at an easel — looking longer than is comfortable, revising in public, trusting the messy middle — are the same habits I try to hand my students.

My graduate work at the University of Florida is an attempt to study that overlap seriously: to treat the art classroom as a site of research, and research as something you can hold in your hands. The papers and projects here are the record of that attempt — honest, unfinished in places, and mine.

— Stefan

The work continues in the studio.

If you are here to read the thesis, start there. If you want to talk about sketchbooks, curriculum, or the strange, wonderful work of teaching art — I would love the conversation.