“The essential contribution that arts education can make to our students and to our communities is to teach skills and concepts while creating opportunities to investigate and represent one’s own experiences-generating personal and shared meaning. Quality arts curriculum is thus rooted in belief in the transformative power of art and critical inquiry”
Elements and Principles of Art and Design; color wheels and the like do NOT a lesson plan make!
“Indeed, it is difficult to find support in serious academic writing (as opposed to commercial textbooks) for using the elements and principles of design as a curriculum structure.”
Playing: what is it and why does it matter?
Students who are taught to access the creative unconscious don’t drive teachers mad complaining, “I don’t have an idea:’ These students have learned the important artistic lesson that artists do not know the outcomes of their works before they begin.
Forming Self: identity formation is an ongoing process, not over til you are dead.
Through a repertoire of projects in which students use diverse styles of representation and various symbol systems to explore various aspects of experience, students become awareof the self as shaped in multiple discourses, giving students more choices about consciously shaping self.
Investigating Community Themes
Students identify themes, pose problems, consider barriers to change and then create positive actions to alter circumstances
Encountering Difference
Ensure respectful representation of difference by utilizing guest visits, videos, or written materials to include the first-person voices of the artists talking about the reasons they make their art, how they developed their working methods, the relationship between innovation and tradition, and how they judge the aesthetic quality of completed works. The goal of good multicultural curriculum is to effectively encounter other points of view in order to question the centrality or normativeness of one’s own (also culturally specific) point of view.
Attentive Living
Attuning students to vitally experiencing everyday life should be a goal of any systematic art education.
Empowered Experiencing
A quality art curriculum gives students the knowledge they need to notice and interpret a wide range of visual practices. Students in a democratic society need to be able to understand and participate in important cultural conversations generated by the visual arts, film, and other imagemaking practices.
Empowered Making
Introduce students to methods used by contemporary artists in conceiving and constructing artworks, rather than continue to teach outmoded paradigms
Deconstructing Culture
to examine the construction of meaning and to empower students to generate alternative meanings.
Reconstructing Social Spaces
Working collectively, students and teachers can literally reshape their schools and communities through creating murals, mosaics, sculptures, pavements, and seating installations.” Such projects also reshape the image of youth in the public imagination.
Not Knowing
Through a quality art curriculum, students will learn that they do not know many things that they once thought were certain.
Believing
These Principles of Possibility emphasize developing students’ abilities to engage in sustained inquiry without requiring a clear right answer and enable students to utilize a number of approaches to interpret meaning in a wide variety of visual and verbal texts. These qualities are characteristic of exemplary students in all disciplines-qualities that will be noticed by administrators, families, and students