Day 3 -Curriculum

Freedman’s chapter 3 made me rethink about art history as an art history student. I am always thinking about how to create a curriculum for K-12 kids to learn art history, this chapter gave me some new perspectives and clues. Since I was learning art history in an academic way, using time as a line, and actually spent a lot of time to memory movements and details. I think it maybe useful for an art historian, but do little help for younger students. Today’s art history curriculum should be different, time should be represented as a multidimensional space, rather than a line. It makes me think about the way ART21 website made. It organizes the artists based on what big idea the artists explore, rather than time or area. I think it is a more meaningful strategy to order. And today’s art curriculum should be visual culture study, not just fine art. “The fact is that not all art is good for us—or rather, any type of art may be good or bad for us—and the bad qualities of art should be addressed in school.” (Freedman, 53) In the past days, art is always related with good and beauty, but in today’s visual culture have a broader social context related culture and social issues. When we teach, we should blur the boundaries of fine arts and popular culture, opening up more possibilities for discussions connected with past, present and future.

Freedman’s chapter 4 is discussing about a topic I always care about—art and cognition. There are always some people come to me and ask how to interpret contemporary artworks since I was as art history major student. They always told me that every time they came to a contemporary art museum, they had no clue to understand it and felt frustrated. As Robert Solso said, “we are only able to understand the visual arts because of the information we have previously stored about visual features and meanings.” So when it comes to our younger students, we should care about what they are learning on an emotional level. And Freedman announced five general principles of constructivist conception learning:

1.     Learning is not the result of development; learning is development

2.     Disequilibrium facilitates learning.

3.     Reflective abstraction is the driving force of learning.

4.     Dialogue within a community engenders further thinking.

5.     Learning proceeds toward the development of structures.

Semali’s transmediation article discusses how to improve students’ communication ability to response to culture and social context using a range of sign systems. It is a fresh view to think about art curriculum. Educational equity is provided not merely by opening the doors of the school to the child, but by providing opportunities to the child to succeed once he or she arrives.

Serra’s art is about the basic stuff of sculpture, isolated and recast: mass, weight, volume, material. It is the situation talked about in Freedman’s chapter 4 that people had no previous visual knowledge of this kind of art would be afraid of. “There’s no coy narrative, no insider joke or historical allusion or meta-art theme.”” What matters in the end are your own reactions while moving through the sculptures, at a given moment, the works being Rorschachs of indeterminate meaning.”