I attended the Teacher's Salon at the MCA yesterday and had the sincere privledge of hearing Theaster Gates and Kerry James Marshall in coversatoin wiht each other. I was especially exciting to hear directly from contemporary artists on how they view education and how they view our role as educators. I was really impressed with how candidly both artists spoke. They were interesting, engaging, and most of all honest. I am still digesting all the thoughts that they shared, but I need to emphasize again how exciting it was to hear them speak. I specifically was drawn to their emphasis on educational theory. Marshall spoke so much about complex issues in art education. I appreciated that he took this venue to get those topics out, now it is our responsibility to work through them and identify how to apply these theories in practice. In particular he spoke about repositioning our definition of passive learners, specifically that we don't think about people as passive because they only listen to conversations. Instead he encouraged us to consider that the act of listening can be a very active education. The listening can make a student hungry and "hunger moves one quickly from mimicry to internalization." With my own research being so focused on talk- I was particularly excited to be reminded of the other learning ways that are embedded in talk. Talk is not only about verbalizing but rather is half speaking and half listening. Also the educators expressed on and on how much we love Marshall's paintings. LOVE THEM.