By Dr. Ilayda Altuntas
(Editor’s note: Reflecting on the Saturday Art School as a dynamic site of learning, mentorship and community, Altuntas first published this essay in the National Art Education Association’s Spring 2026 newsletter. An assistant professor in Art & Visual Culture Education for the School of Art, she is chair of the Seminar for Research in Art Education, or SRAE.)
On Saturdays, our campus at the University of Arizona feels unfinished. The lights are on, but the energy hasn’t arrived yet. The roads are empty, the air still. Opening the art studio at 7:30 a.m., there’s always a split second of doubt—and then the day begins. For years, Saturday Art School has been part of my professional life—I’ve moved through Saturday Art School in stages—first as a preservice teacher, then as a classroom instructor, later as a supervisor, and now as program coordinator.
Each role changed what I paid attention to, and in doing so, changed how I understand art education. As a teacher, my focus was the child in front of me. As a supervisor, I listened for how others were learning to teach. Now, as coordinator, I hold the broader structure: I oversee curriculum, supervise preservice teachers, teach when needed, manage enrollment, coordinate events, place students in classes, and handle the logistics that make the program function. What might be several positions elsewhere converges here, requiring both pedagogical vision and sustaining the program’s structure.
I still remember the early mornings as a beginning teacher: tables waiting, art materials untouched, fluorescent light pooling in the corners of the room. Then the shift—conversations, laughter, footsteps, the sound of paint lids popping open. I didn’t yet have the language for what I was experiencing, but I felt it: Teaching was not simply delivery of content. It was relational. Sensory. Affective.
Over time, I began to understand what many of us in art education come to realize: The classroom is not static. It breathes. It absorbs. It echoes. Teaching requires attention not only to curriculum, but to atmosphere—to the subtle shifts in energy, the quiet pause before a student shares, the vulnerability embedded in making.
Years later, when I returned as a supervisor, the space felt familiar, yet my role had changed. I stood at the back of the room listening. The rhythm was different: preservice teachers navigating uncertainty, children responding in unpredictable ways. Supervision became its own form of practice—less about directing, more about attuning. Feedback required resonance rather than authority.
Now, as coordinator, I encounter Saturday Art School as both program and archive. Shelves hold years of student work. Lesson plans evolve. Cohorts shift. But what persists is harder to document. The archive lives in gesture—in the way teachers lean toward a child’s drawing, in the instinct to offer “You can start over,” in the quiet choreography of care that unfolds each week.
Saturday programs occupy a unique place in our field. They exist between university and community, between child and teacher education, between structure and improvisation. They are voluntary spaces. Chosen spaces—and I think that difference matters.
Without the urgency of weekday systems, experimentation feels possible. Preservice teachers try, adjust, and reflect. Children encounter art as process rather than performance. Families enter university spaces not as observers, but as participants in a shared learning ecology.
For those of us in SRAE, programs like Saturday Art School invite us to reconsider where research happens. Not all inquiry begins in a journal. Some of it unfolds in repetition—returning to the same studio each week, noticing how bodies remember, how community forms through rhythm.
As I revisit my own years within this program, I see Saturday not as a side project, but as a living continuum of practice. A place where teaching is rehearsed, revised, and remembered. A site where care accumulates quietly.
Sometimes the most enduring archives in art education are not stored in boxes or databases. They are carried in posture, in listening habits, in the shared tempo of a room that gathers again and again.
And on Saturdays, that gathering continues.
Wildcat Saturday Art School
- About: Wildcat Saturday Art School is a hands-on art education program designed for K–6 students. Courses are led by pre-service teachers in the School of Art’s Art & Visual Culture Education program, each bringing their own artistic perspective and teaching approach.
- Open Studios: On the final day, April 25, 2026, families are invited to a special event from noon to 2 p.m. at the University of Arizona School of Art.
- Website: wildcat.art.arizona.edu/
