DAY 1 Curriculum in Art Education

As Eisner said “It is from surprise that we are most likely to learn something”(Esner, 8), Freedman and Eisner’s articles totally surprised me and I felt I learnt something new and useful.

The first chapter in Teaching Visual Culture and The Arts and the Creation of Mind have some similar statements about education and identity. “Education, in turn, is the process of learning to create ourselves.” (Eisner, 3) “Education is a process of identity formation because we change as we learn: our learning changes our subjective selves.” (Freedman, 2) I think it is a great explanation to response why it is so important for human beings to receive education. But why art education is essential? “Work in arts is not only a way of creating performances and products; it is a way of creating out lives by expanding our consciousness, shaping our dispositions, satisfying our quest for meaning, establishing contact with others, and sharing a culture.” All of these make us human beings distinguished from others and keep our society developing.

A good art curriculum should help students develop their mind, so art here has critical cognitive functions such as sensibility, imagination and representation. For example, representation often does begin with an elusive and sometimes evanescent idea or image. “I found I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way----things I had no words for.”(Georgia O’Keeffe) I think it is only possible for art to make just this meaningful moment to permanent. Art not only help people preserve things in a durable way (painting, poem, music), it also help communication through the artworks. When someone looking at a painting, even if the artist is dead, they can still communicate. People also transmit personal ideas to public in this way. And as Freedman said: “They ways we represent through the realm of visual culture shapes people’s thinking.” (Freedman, 14)

“Seeing is an achievement, not merely a task.”(Eisner, 12) Learning to see is primary in studying visual culture.  It is the result of making sense of a part of the world. In Freedman’s statement, the content we should teach students to see should challenge several boundaries. He indicates the following concepts as foundations of teaching visual culture: Reconceptualizing the field, Meaningful aesthetics, Social perspective,

Interactive cognition, Cultural response, Interdisciplinary interpretation, Technological experience, Constructive critique. I agree with these aspects are important for teaching visual culture, because it can alter students’ minds and let them look at the world in a different way.

“The curriculum is a mind-altering device. And it should be.” One of the crucial purposes of designing art curriculum is to improve the way in which students think. The art medium is a great example. When we teach drawing, there are a couple of tools we can use: graphic pencils, charcoal pencils, ink and so on. When we drawing a same thing with graphic pencils, maybe we do not need to think too much, because it is very easy to erase. When it comes to charcoal pencils, we may think for a while before we draw, because it is not so easy to erase, and if we push a little hard, a permanent spot would be left. Then it comes to ink, we should take a long time think about all the proportion, the power we should use, how to start and so on. Because ink is an unforgiving tool, once we mess up, it can hardly make up. From this, we can easily to see how different medium of art change the way people thinking.

In the Eric Liu and Scott Noppe-Brandon’s “Imagination first”, I am very interested in the Spark “Finishing the Story”. The artworks below are from a Taiwanese artist. Every image presents a famous fairy tale that every student will be easy to recognize, but the main characters are disappeared. All these artworks selected the most important moments in this whole story, I will ask students: “If at that moment, the main characters changed their mind, what will happen?” And they will draw a picture to express their own endings of the stories. I think it will be interesting if they finishing these stories in their own way. And it will definitely explore their imagination.