For Maud Morgan Arts teacher Alice Turkel, the ideal class size is large enough so that students “can’t get quite as much help as they want.” Turkel offers plenty of instruction and guidance to her students, but she finds that sometimes when she’s helping one student, another student who thought she needed help will end up solving a problem for herself, and that’s when the most valuable learning can occur. This fall, Maud Morgan Arts classes provide students with a cornucopia of opportunities to discover how good they are at responding to their own artistic challenges.

“Little kids doing woodworking…they think everything is about nails,” says Turkel who has taught woodworking and crafts to students of all ages and who has also served on the Cambridge School Committee for six terms. She shows children that woodworking is more than pounding boards together; it’s also about learning to use a variety of techniques and tools to make objects of their own design.

In Turkel’s weaving class, students begin by constructing a backstrap loom, and building their own loom gives students a deeper understanding of the mechanics of weaving.

“I am interested in teaching my students to express their individual styles and preferences visually,” says Maud Morgan Arts teacher Annie Zeybekoglu. “Not to do artwork that looks like mine.” Her class is geared toward adults who have never done serious drawing and who may be frightened to try, and Zeybekoglu is eager to guide them: “I like to teach by asking questions, posing visual problems to solve, rather than prescribing solutions. Learning different techniques empowers students to find their own solutions, each as unique as the person addressing the visual problem.”

Zeybekoglu’s own mixed media work is in collections in Boston, New York, Hungary and Japan, and she has taught art classes for over twenty years. Of course, at Maud Morgan Arts, learning is not just for the students, but also for the teachers. Says Zeybekoglu: “I like nothing more than being asked a question I don’t know the answer to.”

Maud Morgan Arts fall classes in ceramics, printmaking, painting and other visual arts for all ages begin September 29th. Register online at www.maudmorganarts.org.