This afternoon I read the greatest art advocacy article in the latest issue of School Arts magazine. Written by Rama Hughes, this article about the importance of art as a life skill and visual language struck a chord in me, and I hope every art educator uses it as an advocacy tool. Read it for yourself here: On Art and Art Education
Advocacy
Wish Tree Project Update
I am getting our wishes from our Wish Tree packed up and ready to send off. While I was checking out the mailing info for sending our wishes to the Imagine Peace project in Iceland I was poking around their website and I discovered this:
My principal blogged about our wish tree close to the end of the year when the project was in full swing. The Imagine Peace website picked it up and posted it on their website. So exciting!
Also, I noticed that this post on their site had been retweeted, so check this out:
How cool is it to have your school tweeted about by Yoko Ono?
Advocacy: RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U]
I heard this speech in the form of a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, and recently a few educators I know and love have brought this RSA Animate video to my attention. It is a great graphic that illustrates Robinson’s concerns for changing educational concepts and it highlights what I think great arts education should be trying to do. Every day preparing my students for the 21st century is at the heart of what I do, and some of the ideas I hold true as an educator are well illustrated and described in this video.
To learn more about the RSA, check out their website.
Advocacy: National Arts in Education Week p.4
Advocacy: National Arts in Education Week p.3 Why Visual Arts Education?
What is Visual Literacy? How does your child benefit from a Visual Art Education? What 21st Century Skills does your child learn in the art room?
Check out this great handout from the National Art Education Association:
Download these flyers to share with administration, parents, political representatives and more at the NAEA website.
Advocacy: National Arts in Education Week p.2 10 Lessons the Arts Teach
I thought this was a great time to share “10 Lessons the Arts Teach” by Elliot Eisner as distributed by the National Art Education Association. I am a proud representative of these ten lessons and I do my best to impart these ideas to my students throughout every art lesson.
10 Lessons the Arts Teach by Elliot Eisner
10 LESSONS THE ARTS TEACH(via http://www.naea-reston.org)
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments 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 prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.