What the Visual Arts Offer

The Visual Arts offer students opportunities for rich and deep experiences within a progressive, scaffolded curriculum framework, the making of art becomes the embodiment of the search for a deeper understanding of Self – a process, that in the first instance engages the physical, but carries a great deal more in its potential.  In the end, artmaking provides access to myriad levels of realisation if you chose to engage fully with the opportunities.

Art, like science and play, engages the whole being and through connection, leads to a rich and creative sense of Self within Place.

V S. Ramachandran MD, PhD, who, in the 2003 BBC Reith Lectures, explored the ‘Science of Art’ is involved in ongoing studies in neurology to explore how the brain creates and responds to art.  His findings suggest what art educators already know – Visual Art; artmaking and art gazing, is a timeless, whole Being experience that allows full concepts to be grasped in an instant.

Visual and Media Literacies are essential building blocks in education and citizenry for the 21st Century

“….personal development is based on what happens to us in the two worlds in which we live.  One is the external physical world of things and events; the other is the inner world of senses, feelings and meanings.  Art activities are important because they form a bridge of communication and interaction between these two worlds.  (Czurles 1977, p.5). 

Creating is the most sophisticated expression of cognitive, aesthetic and experiential skills. The Visual Art subject encourages and teaches the creative process and invites the development of an authentic personal aesthetic. In our world of increasing visual communication, a knowledge and understanding of how meanings are constructed and ‘read’ is fundamental to becoming a knowledgeable citizen and a critical consumer of information.
‘… artists create a language of symbols for things for which there are yet to be words … radical innovations of art embody the preverbal stages of new concepts that will eventually change a civilisation. Whether for an infant or a society on the verge of change, a new way to think about reality begins with the assimilation of unfamiliar images. This collation leads to abstract ideas that only later give rise to a descriptive language.’
(L. Shlain, www.artandphysics.com/chapters.html )

We use an inquiry-learning model, enabling individual responses to concept-based tasks. Through making and appraising, resolution and display, students:
•    Define and solve visual problems by using visual language and expression
•    Study a diverse range of artworks and philosophies from various social, cultural and historical contexts
•    Translate and interpret ideas through media manipulation to invent images and objects
•    Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of artworks in contexts that relate to concepts, focuses, contexts and media




Resources

Arts in Education   http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/arts/front_arts.htm

Arts, Neuroscience, and Learning (http://www.newhorizons.org/neuro/zull_2.htm )
by James E. Zull

What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?
http://www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_of_education.htm
Elliot Eisner

Learning in a Visual Age 


10 Lessons the Arts Teach


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.