Memory, Animation Making, and Art Education

As part of the Honors Program it is required that you do a thesis project that relates your perspective major. I have been aware of this for some time and am drawing towards the end of this process; hopefully completing it before I start student teaching. When deciding what exactly I was going to do for this project, as being an art major I have more liberties than those who are succumbed to writing a twenty page paper, I reflected on my work throughout my college career. One particular project that I learned the most from was my stop-motion animation project I did in my freshman year Drawing II class. This project was intensive in documenting process, researching, and investing time in a specific thematic focus. So, what if I created another stop-motion animation? This time is would be on my terms. It would be on a theme I was particularly interested in. And I would then reflect on how I could use this in my practice as a teacher.
Currently I am a weekend away from completing the animation which I have been working on since the beginning of this summer. Developing a theme for this animation came when I was working in my thematic drawing class last semester. For a "Cabinet of Curiosities" project I chose to explore memories of not only myself but various people in my life and take specific imagery from the memories they described. In thinking about this I began to collect symbols from my own life and memory. What were reoccurring images?  How could I develop these images into an animation?
I researched memory. What were the processes? How does it work? I learned about storage, encoding, and recall. I developed an understanding of how memory works in layers, of how things enter the memory one way but can come out skewed. How could I consider this in my making? How could I use layering?
I layered text from letters, song lyrics, and quotes from books down on the paper. I drew on top of it. I photographed. I picked specific imagery from memories, certain symbols that spring up strong memory for me and that have stuck with me from early childhood to more recent occurrences. I did a number of scenes. I wrote about those scenes, why those symbols? Why that text? I brought the images into photoshop and layered them, sped them up, slowed them down, and created breaks between them. I developed my animation.
Now how does this relate to teaching? How as a practicing artist can we allow that work to influence our teaching? If I was going to create a curriculum based off of this practice what would be important? Memory? Process? Documentation? Photoshop? What do I want my students to learn.
By this thinking and researching through art education literature I have developed an idea of what is important in being a teaching artist. Allowing your practice to integrate into your classroom can make a stronger connection between yourself, the curriculum you are creating, and your students.
Below are some stills from my animation.