Why Art?

I realized while reviewing my previous post that half of it did not publish! Many apologies. I didn't intend to just trail off like that. I wrote the original post and saved it as a draft. I added to the draft later, and tried to publish it all - but I guess to no avail.

In my research lately for homeschool students, I have been unable to come across a unifying reason for homeschooling. I am becoming a bit overwhelmed and frustrated by the process of researching this. On the one hand, I need this data in order to be a better educator and to help those who homeschool. On the other hand, I don't want to intrude upon people's personal lives and beliefs. Until I am able to actively participate in the homeschool arena, I will have to put some of my questions on hold, and approach the subject with an open mind.

Certainly public schooling is not a perfect system. One way could never work best for everyone - that is true of most matters. I would like to know what works best in homeschooling education. I will write a curriculum for the Arts in homeschooling. I am doing this for a few reasons:

1. I firmly believe in the arts and visual language as a multi-cultural and multi-dimensional means of communication.
   
2. I believe in serving a community which has been underserved and underrecognized in the realm of education and in the arts.
3. I predict that standards-based education and accountability will extend to the admissions offices of universities - which means that the tests, the transcripts, and the overall rounded-ness of the potential college student will be held to higher standards than they have before. More testing = more data to make a selection from. This may leave many students behind - no matter where or how they learned.
4. The technological world that envelopes us, and cradles us, makes our globe smaller and smaller everyday, it will rely upon a foundation of multiculturaliusm in order to compete in business/trade/economy/travel/etc. An education in the visual arts fosters this understanding, and along with it includes a bit of every other subject area - even the big ones with the bubble-in tests.
   

How do the arts fit in to this equation? Check out this link, I think I discussed it briefly in last week's blog. It's the SAT scores for all entering freshmen to my university, divided by college:
http://sas-web.ir.csulb.edu/IRpdfreports/satwebcomb.pdf

Also of note: Edutopia has plenty of articles on the value of Project-based Learning.

www.edutopia.org

Project based learning raises test-scores, and learning abilities. It requires higher level thought-processes and encourages inquiry-based learning. This is what we do in Art Education, everyday. We ARE project-based learning, and inquiry-based learning.

The thinking and multi-level processing that is required to do art; to talk about art, to think about art, to relate an object to a historical time period, to think about the aesthetic philosophy of how you see and experience a work of art - that is what raises test scores. I have a dozen other links to demonstrate it. Comment or message me if you want to view the data.

Certainly, no one answer appeals to all: but my concern is that homeschooled students will be ripped off in the long run when it comes time to apply to college. We can work together on closing the gaps. You have your resources: your support groups, your curriculum plans, your local library/university/museum, art educators like myself.

Elementary and middle school teachers have even more resources: you have dedicated Art content area consultants in every district to help you include the arts in every lesson. With the resources and backing of your school, you should have no problem finding the help: but finding where to look can sometimes be daunting.

We can go to a question and answer forum, if you like:

Location:
Ages taught:
# of students:
Goal:
Question (50 words or less) :

I know you have questions that you want answered. Now is the time to ask.

Note: ALL information and links provided from this blog and subsequent issues are for educational purposes only. Please do not use copyrighted imagery without the consent of the image owner.
All lesson plans authored by Mrs. B are the expressed intellectual property of Stephanie T. Butler unless otherwise noted. Use of Mrs. B's lesson plans without Stephanie T. Butler's permission or failure of citation is considered intellectual theft and constitutes academic fraud.
Plaigarism is theft: what lessons will you teach our students?

Time in Art, in Learning, in Life

An assignment I had this week was to create a 30-second lesson using a popular movie-creating software program. Most of the week I spent trying to figure out what to teach in merely thirty seconds! Any demonstration in the Arts would certainly take more time. I thought about teaching how to make a great peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, but realized my tiny "vintage" kitchen would be the back-drop. After becoming so overwhelmed with the assignment, I cracked open the planner/calendar that I carry with me, and I reorganized my time. I have some major events approaching soon: my portfolio will be reviewed by my professors and by local community Art Educators. If the work, and my panel-interview, does not measure up, I do not get the opportunity to work for free as a student-teacher in the spring. The calendar is my life line now, keeping me on-task and at a steady pace. I also have a wind-up timer. My tasks are too enormous to tackle all at once. The timer gets set for twenty minutes at a time. I work on one thing for twenty minutes, and break for twenty minutes. Things get done - bit by bit - on time, and I get to keep most of my remaining sanity. FlyLadies will recognize my pattern here. For those interested in Fly Lady, check out this site: http://www.flylady.net

Would you care to guess what my 30-second lesson will be on? I am going to teach time-management for the college student. Working on my project for twenty minutes at a time, I will demonstrate (in thirty seconds) how I keep my studies, family life, work schedule, and bank account all in order. Me - organized. Me - the artist, the 'free-spirit', knowing where I'm supposed to be, what is expected of me, and what's coming up next. I even have prepared for the unexpected, which I have come to expect. Cars require maintenance, people require doctor visits, and we all have to fly by the seats of our pants sometimes - and improvise.

Time has played a central role in my life this week. I have been waiting for a response from a gallery. I have been waiting for a few major deadlines to be secured. I'm still waiting for a paycheck to arrive. I have taken tests that have required a lapse of time to compare results. Because of the CHAOS surrounding me before becoming re-organized, I did not have any time to myself, and I certainly wasn't setting aside time to create any new art.

Art takes time. It takes more time than most other classes in school. My college Art courses were typically six hours in class each week. That did not include homework. The other subject courses typically spent ninety minutes in the classroom per week. Art is labor-intensive, and theory-intensive, and reading-intensive, and writing-intensive, and history-intensive, and philosophy-intensive, and multi-culturally-intensive, and scientifically-intensive, and mathematically-intensive.

ALL core subject areas are inherently a part of most lessons in the visual arts, and in every medium. There is a different way of thinking and seeing that is used when learning 2-D media than there is when learning 3-D media. The brain works differently to process the information you receive. However, with the inclusion of the other core subject areas in art lessons, the information is processed better, retained longer, and the lesson becomes personalized and more meaningful to the individual student. From my own observations and the data I have collected, it seems that Art majors are very capable learners. SAT scores of students attending at the College of The Arts at CSULB are consistently the highest in the university - rivaling only the College of Engineering with the Math section. I wonder if this is true at other universities, too. It was easy data to find: I went to the university's main web page, and typed 'SAT scores by college' in the search field. Usually the data is a year behind. It takes a while to collect and process the data. Might it go faster if the Art majors were processing it?

Digitizing a Portfolio: Taking the Next Step With Technology

I'm taking this weekend as an opportunity to digitally photograph my portfolio. I have all my works on slide film, which is absolutely necessary for my field and for publishing images. However, I mistakenly elected not to pay the extra ten bucks a roll to have my slides burned on a disk when I had them developed. Hear me slap my forehead. It's okay. It will take a while, and a bit of work, but this is providing me an opportunity to revisit old ideas, and familiar works of mine. The new technology I've acquired recently will help me to re-examine and revision old works, and present them in a new way. After all, I spent the time and money in order to make the works: they deserve to look great.

One of the classes I'm enrolled in now prepares future teachers for the changes that will come as new technology develops and is integrated into teaching and daily life. It is helping me learn how to build a website for my classroom. I can post lesson plans, student grades (anonymously), project rubric, and even links to websites for my students to explore in accordance with the current lesson. One of the features allows me to digitally catalogue my own portfolio, and then burn it to DVD. I'm looking forward to learning and using all these new skills. I hope to incorporate them in with this blog, and build wonderful interactive art lessons with them.

Something I've been astonished at ever since the first day of this particular class is the importance of technology and information processing in the future. We teachers are preparing our students for jobs that don't even exist yet. Yet we need to prepare them to be able to learn those skills - whatever they will be. So, we're focusing on learning technology in a holistic manner. We're recognizing how systems work, and not getting hung up on brand-names. It helps to keep from being too overwhelmed most of the time. We're learning better ways to use the tools that are already available to us.

In my own art, I have used technology. Most of the artists in my generation are learning to rely upon the new tools available to us. Some artists are doing incredible things with it. But there are still some artists who are not taking advantage of the tools. Some of my own teachers in studio arts are sharply divided on this issue: one recently asked the department assistant to send an e-mail out for him. Another professor has a virtual-reality program in which she creates three-dimensional art environments. What a stark contrast!

That leads us to our lesson/activity for the week: search online for art and artists who use technology in their works. A great place to start is the medium of sculpture. Try looking up installation art, video art, and keep looking. Save sme of your favorite links and images, and send them to me. While you're searching, think about the methods that artists use to create when using technologies. Think about the possibilities that they may not have though of yet. How could you use their methods? What would you create? Try answering this question (which seems to stump many of my prof's): is it still art if you don't create something tangible? This is highly appropriate since we're currently using technology to enable this blog. I already know you can do it since you've found this small little corner of the web. I am here to help if you need it, though. Start you search. Send me an e-mail. Let's see what we can find!


Note: ALL information and links provided from this blog and subsequent issues are for educational purposes only. Please do not use copyrighted imagery without the consent of the image owner.
All lesson plans authored by Mrs. B are the expressed intellectual property of Stephanie T. Butler unless otherwise noted. Use of Mrs. B's lesson plans without Stephanie T. Butler's permission or failure of citation is considered intellectual theft and constitutes academic fraud.
Plaigarism is theft: what lessons will you teach our students?