MZ ALEXANDER

Education is an opportunity to begin a complex dialogue between students and the world in which they live.  It requires active, physical participation and emotional, aesthetic response.  It presents itself in interactions between teacher and student, between the students themselves, and between the student’s life and the page, table, canvas, or screen.  Hetland, Winner, Veenema, and Sheridan (2013) assert that the “arts are another way of knowing the world;” the key to education lies in the creation and exploration of an environment that honors complexity and inculcates creativity, curiosity, and interaction of the abstract (thought) and the actual (visual).

 

Exchanges between the experiential and the theoretical lead to personal and communal growth. If the center of learning exists within an individual student and is measured in the accumulation of their experiences, we can look at learning as an ecosystem of interconnected parts. Individual potential compounds exponentially in a classroom where there are multiple participants interacting and cross-pollinating these “ecosystems of knowledge.” The visual arts present a unique forum to generate and increase many of these connections.

 

Education should show each child the interconnectedness of life and learning, and the depth that each subject holds. Experiential learning in art and design has the power to promote a greater sense of self while enhancing feelings of connectedness to school, neighborhood, and global community. New national standards delineate broad artistic goals that encourage authentic artistic thinking and push students to experience the art world beyond making pretty things. Here, the teacher is required to provide “opportunity-to-learn conditions that create a rigorous and supportive learning environment” which allows for learning events that progress across a student’s career (“National Core Art Standards: A Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning,” 2016, p. 7).  By investigating and interpreting the human experience through art production, presentation, response, and connection-seeking, everyone participates in and contributes to group identity within a classroom. This is particularly instrumental in the middle-grade years where students are hyper-developmental beings doing the work of placing themselves both within and among others. 

 

Teachers must urge students beyond being “right” or “done,” by intentionally causing students to struggle. It is the role of an educator to guide student development of specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that will increase their success within the classroom and in the broader world. Their responsibility is to present the possibilities that a subject encompasses and to facilitate learners through deeper engagement and understanding with the content matter. Persisting through learning and its inherent struggle leads to heightened self-awareness and self-esteem, as well as the building of resilience in the face of ambiguity.  This is vital in an environment that demands differentiation and the development of critical thinking skills. 

 

Art and design education is possibility. It does not require expertise on the part of students, but rather openness and an orientation toward wonder. It provides the chance to get tuned into something that excites, questions, interests, and envelops.  It cultivates innate human curiosity into a lifelong cycle of seeking new knowledge and understanding alongside the revelation of new, more complex questions--a necessary lifelong skill in the 21st century. 

Citations

 

Hetland, L., Winner, E., Veenema, S., & Sheridan, K.M. (2013). Studio Thinking 2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education. New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press.

 

National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (2016). “National Core Art Standards: A Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning.” Retrieved from https://www.nationalartsstandards.org/content/national-core-arts-standards

 

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