Rose Honey is an educator, linguaphile, visual artist, and designer who teaches studio art and graphic design at West Valley High School. A Spokane Valley native, Honey, 34, began her career in education in 2013 as a sign language interpreter, a role she held with Central Valley School District for eight years.

Early in her career, Honey worked with preschool-age deaf and hard-of-hearing students on a one-on-one basis and recognized a need for visual learning tools for her students. Wanting to affect more change by running her own classroom, Honey went back to school for a degree in teaching English as a second language. She graduated from Grand Canyon University in 2020 and began teaching art at West Valley High School soon after.

As an art teacher, Honey builds a curriculum centered on real industry experience. She has developed and piloted a mural apprenticeship program in Spokane's Hillyard neighborhood and incorporates American Sign Language into her classroom by occasionally teaching sign language to students. Someday, she says she'd like to offer a class on ASL. 

Outside of teaching, Honey has co-launched Creative Mornings Spokane, a free program that hosts monthly gatherings for creatives in the community.

How did you transition from teaching language to teaching art? I graduated in 2020 and the pandemic happened and made it hard at the time to find a job, so I just focused on my art career while doing sign language interpretation on the side. Then, I just got lucky. The assistant principal at West Valley High School contacted me online and asked me if I wanted to teach art for a year while the art teacher transitions into retirement.

My 10-year plan was going to school to be an English language learner teacher. I wanted to work with different languages and multilingual learners to help fill in these gaps. I really didn’t think about merging my art career with my education career. I got my art endorsement, and I was offered the position. This is my sixth year, and I’ve loved being an art and design teacher ever since.

Don’t get me wrong, this has been one of the most challenging and draining jobs I’ve ever had. But, it’s also the most rewarding and impactful.

What have been some of the challenges? When I started teaching, it was hard because I had a combined class of studio art where we are learning ceramics, painting, and drawing, but it was combined with a graphic design class. I had no technology (tools), so I couldn’t teach them graphic design.

After a year, I started writing grants and teamed up with a program called Gear Up. I worked with them on a grant to be able to get iPads for the classroom and this made a big difference, having industry-standard technology. At first, I had only 10 for a classroom of 30. It was really hard for me as a teacher to teach a strong curriculum with the lack of tools and access to them. After a few more years of grant writing, we finally built technology and worked with Numerica Credit Union who donated computers to us.

The programs ended up getting large enough that I have two separate classrooms now; I have a graphic design program and a studio arts program.

How are you helping students apply their skills in the real world? After the program started growing, I’m realizing these students were kind of getting stagnant. They learned their skills in the classroom but, outside the community, there is no sense of community space for them to connect with the industry or professionals.

Then, I met this amazing person one night, Darya Pilram, founding executive director of the Hillyard Creative District, and we got to talking about how we need a space for students and creatives to cultivate this community. We decided to bring a Creative Mornings chapter here to Spokane, which is a free, monthly breakfast lecture series and global community for creative people.

My whole goal with Creative Mornings was to create opportunities for students to connect to public art and with artists and creatives. While building the creative community is nice, I also wanted a chance for them to have an apprenticeship.

This summer, Darya and I piloted the mural apprenticeship program in Hillyard, where we took six students and teach them mural skills. Watching the impact, not just on their skills and confidence but, watching them interact with businesses and each other, has been the biggest takeaway for me. We need more of this.

What are your future career goals? In public schools, we really focus on sports and not art, and that’s hard for me. So, it’s my goal to either cultivate or help find programs and clubs for students to make them feel seen and to grow their community and artist skills, in a way that they are not ... with their high school peers.

What advice would you give others? Creativity and community is truly what feeds our soul. Maybe some people find community in going to a sporting game or going to church. If you just find community in one place, I think you realize we are not meant to do things on our own.

Many times we also equate creativity with artistic talent. Maybe you can’t shade a tree to make it look like a realistic tree. That’s OK. That doesn’t mean you’re not creative. Do you like cooking? Do you like setting up your dining room table in a fun way? Do you like organizing your closet by color? There is creativity all around us.