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In a room at North Battleford Comprehensive High School, colour lives everywhere.
Tall canvases lean against walls filled with murals. Doors bloom with student-painted scenes. Pottery wheels sit ready on one side of the space, while brushes, clay tools and half-finished projects quietly wait on tables.
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It looks like a classroom, yes, but it feels like a place where students come to understand who they are and that is exactly the point.
For more than a decade, visual arts teacher Becky Tucker has helped shape this room into something more than a space where assignments are completed and marked. It has become a place where young people learn to take risks, explore, trust themselves — and be seen.
“I think that students have to feel really comfortable in an art space, because they have to really look inside themselves,” Tucker said.
“They need to know that what they’re trying will be accepted and validated, that we aren’t all going to make the exact same thing, and this is the way it should look … Of course, there’s always like expectations and a rubric that we’re following, but our products will all look diverse, just as we are all diverse people.”
For Tucker, though, the real story is not the equipment or even the assignments. The true impact lives in the students themselves.
“My goal is never that I’m going to turn out an amazing artist, but I want students to leave this program feeling empowered, so that whatever life choices they make, those skills help them in the next part of their life,” she said.
(L-R): Von Slater, Berk Iverson, and Coleby Yuzicappi – Art 20 Creation of a mural that beautifies NBCHS and represents the many classes, clubs, sports, events, and opportunities that students have to take part in at NBCHS. (Becky Tucker/Submitted)
She remembers a parent emailing her last year to thank her because their child was finally creating art confidently at home and learning to love who they were. She has also watched quiet students discover new versions of themselves when they create.
“I think that, like the arts, can make or give the opportunities for students to just become other versions of themselves that will help them in the next part of their life.”
The visual arts program is part of a broader wave of momentum in the school’s creative community, alongside drama, music, and cosmetology.
“For me, I think it’s about all students seeing themselves in one of the art streams, maybe all of them,” she said.
(L-R): Nakaya Moyah, Nicole Allen, Braxton Swiftwolfe, Akina Lonesinger, Gloria Mosquito. Pottery 10 – functional hand-build pottery in NBCHS pottery studio. (Becky Tucker/Submitted)
“Seeing that they can also enter one of those classes, even if they think like, oh, I don’t fit in there, or that’s not for me.”
Inside the art room, past work remains on the walls as a living record of the students who have passed through. Soon, more art will join it as another group of students builds, paints, sculpts and discovers what they are capable of.
Because here, art is not just something students make. It is something they grow through.
