Visual Arts in Education
What we don't see
Visual arts in education is a crucial facet of a well-rounded learning environment and curriculum. Outside of nurturing active learning and divergent thinking through art production, art criticism, aesthetics, and art history, the visual arts curriculum provides a wealth of invisible learning processes that are even more real and enduring than the works students create. Here are the invisible realities and hidden forces of learning through the visual arts:
What We Don't See...
1. The thoughtful judgments made by students about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that triumph.
2. How students learn that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The multiple perspectives celebrated through art. One of the biggest lessons being that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. How students learn that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.
5. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
6. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know and express. The limits of language do not define the limits of student cognition.
7. How the arts enable all human beings to experience what we can only experience through creative, imaginative and innovative thinking - helping students to discover the range and variety of what they are capable of feeling.
8. How students learn through the arts that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
9. How students learn to think through and within a material - Because all art forms employ some means through which images become real.
10. The ways that the arts have affected children and youth the world over and through many generations - opening their eyes, their minds and their hearts to perspectives that complement and often range far beyond learning in other core subjects.
11. The arts nurture unique ways for all of us to think and work together, try new ideas, and assess our risks on investments. And these are the exact skills that business and workforce development leaders are calling for in graduates.
It is vital that we invest in models of teaching and learning that fully develop the promise of human potential offered by our nation’s youngest citizens - The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to students what adults believe is important. And what is important for our children as they prepare to enter the collegiate world and then their adult lives? What is important is that they are exposed to as many avenues to success as possible, utilizing multiple intelligences to experiencing learning through a variety of platforms and fostering creative and critical thinking which will be their means to achieving the richest life possible.
(Edited and adapted from Deborah B. Reeve Alliance for Young Artists and Writers Exhibit Opening US Department of Education Remarks October 12, 2012)
What we don't see
Visual arts in education is a crucial facet of a well-rounded learning environment and curriculum. Outside of nurturing active learning and divergent thinking through art production, art criticism, aesthetics, and art history, the visual arts curriculum provides a wealth of invisible learning processes that are even more real and enduring than the works students create. Here are the invisible realities and hidden forces of learning through the visual arts:
What We Don't See...
1. The thoughtful judgments made by students about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that triumph.
2. How students learn that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The multiple perspectives celebrated through art. One of the biggest lessons being that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. How students learn that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.
5. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
6. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know and express. The limits of language do not define the limits of student cognition.
7. How the arts enable all human beings to experience what we can only experience through creative, imaginative and innovative thinking - helping students to discover the range and variety of what they are capable of feeling.
8. How students learn through the arts that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
9. How students learn to think through and within a material - Because all art forms employ some means through which images become real.
10. The ways that the arts have affected children and youth the world over and through many generations - opening their eyes, their minds and their hearts to perspectives that complement and often range far beyond learning in other core subjects.
11. The arts nurture unique ways for all of us to think and work together, try new ideas, and assess our risks on investments. And these are the exact skills that business and workforce development leaders are calling for in graduates.
It is vital that we invest in models of teaching and learning that fully develop the promise of human potential offered by our nation’s youngest citizens - The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to students what adults believe is important. And what is important for our children as they prepare to enter the collegiate world and then their adult lives? What is important is that they are exposed to as many avenues to success as possible, utilizing multiple intelligences to experiencing learning through a variety of platforms and fostering creative and critical thinking which will be their means to achieving the richest life possible.
(Edited and adapted from Deborah B. Reeve Alliance for Young Artists and Writers Exhibit Opening US Department of Education Remarks October 12, 2012)