Art Works for Schools:
A Curriculum for Teaching Thinking In and Through the Arts
Contents
- About Art Works for Schools
- Collaborating Partners and Program Authors
- Intended Users
- The Roles of Visual Arts and Theater
- Benefits of Teaching Thinking through Art
- Connections to Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks
- Other Connections
- Images
- Sample Lesson
- Ordering Information.
About Art Works for Schools
Bring art into the classroom and help students sharpen their analytical and creative abilities! Inspired by art and informed by up-to-date educational research, this innovative curriculum is the result of a five-year collaboration between DeCordova Museum, Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Underground Railway Theater, and six Boston-area urban and suburban schools.
Art Works for Schools teaches high-level thinking by looking at visual art and engaging in theater activities. The purpose of the program is to help teachers and students discover the power of the arts to enrich thinking across school subjects. Designed primarily for grades 3-8, but used by teachers of younger and older students as well, Art Works for Schools has been created for classroom teachers to use in conjunction with their regular curriculum. Art specialists will find that it adds credibility and a new dimension to the study of art. Find out more about the intended users of Art Works for Schools.
No art experience is necessary to use this innovative program. Teachers can integrate the Art Works for Schools curriculum directly into their existing curriculum to create customized transfer lessons. This program directly addresses many goals of the Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks.
The process of responding to visual art naturally engages students and stimulates their critical faculties, making learning even more meaningful and enjoyable. In Art Works for Schools, the use of brings kinesthetic learning into the classroom. More details about the role of visual art, the role of theater, and the benefits of teaching thinking through art are available on this site.
The program focuses on four powerful forms of critical and creative thinking that can enhance learning in many other areas of the school curriculum:
Perspective-taking
Perspective-taking encourages students to see things from multiple vantage points. It is a key component of creativity and problem-solving.
Problem-finding
The skills used in problem-finding cultivate a sensitivity to notice puzzles and formulate problems to be solved. This form of thinking has been linked to breakthrough achievements in science and art.
Reasoning
Reasoning, the heart of critical thinking, focuses on looking for evidence to support or argue against interpretations.
Making metaphors
The ability to make connections between disparate subjects through making metaphors is central to all the arts and creative thinking.
Written and designed with classroom teachers in mind, the Art Works for Schools curriculum package includes everything a teacher needs to start incorporating higher-level thinking skills into his or her classroom: a curriculum guide featuring 32 lessons, a 30-minute introductory video, and slides of contemporary art from DeCordova Museum's Permanent Collection to accompany the lessons. The curriculum guide also offers tips for teaching each lesson, indicators for student assessment, additional lesson ideas, pictures of practice, and advice for making the most of field trips to the art museum or theater.
About the Art Works for Schools Collaborating Partners and Program Authors
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, located 16 miles from Boston, is the only major art museum in New England dedicated exclusively to the exhibition, interpretation, and collection of modern and contemporary American art. DeCordova presents as many as 16 groundbreaking individual and group exhibitions a year, with a special emphasis on the work of New England artists. The surrounding 35-acre Sculpture Park exhibits over 80 artworks and is the only year-round venue for ongoing exhibition of large-scale, contemporary American outdoor sculpture in New England. Education is a top priority at DeCordova Museum, and the public can enjoy tours, lectures, family days, and a vast array of classes in many media for adults and children. In addition, the Museum supports outreach programs for schools and community centers.
Art Works for Schools author Laura Howick, Manager of Outreach Programs, has 15 years of experience producing educational programs, interactive exhibitions, and written materials for teachers and school programs.
Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a research organization at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Beginning with early studies into the cognitive nature of artistic work, Project Zero has been investigating learning processes in children, adults, and organizations for over 30 years. It has gradually expanded its concerns to include not just the arts but education across all disciplines. Project Zero is an umbrella research institution, within which a variety of research projects are carried out simultaneously. While each project has its own focus, all projects share in a broad mission: to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as in humanistic and scientific disciplines, at individual and institutional levels.
Art Works for Schools authors Tina Grotzer and Shari Tishman are Principal Investigators and Research Associates at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Patricia Palmer, who helped edit the curriculum, is a Research Associate at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a visual artist.
Underground Railway Theater is a professional, non-profit theater based in the Boston area. For 25 years, URT has been creating, commissioning, and presenting new theater works both at its home theater and on national tours. URT specializes in combining acting, puppetry, and music to engage diverse audiences in theater that provokes discussion in a spirit of celebration. The company produces a full repertoire for young people, families, and adults, and performs in venues ranging from fine arts centers to public schools. The company also creates puppet spectacles that have been performed with most of the nation's major symphony orchestras. Along with their professional work in theaters, URT artists offer residencies at community settings; for instance, besides its work with DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, URT created a play for the Boston Museum of Science and enlivens Boston's Museum of Fine Arts family program. The company's educational work with teachers and students of all ages is focused on using theater as a window on the world-a tool for investigation, understanding, and building community.
Art Works for Schools author Debra Wise is Underground Railway Theater's Co-founder and Artistic Director, as well as an accomplished actor and playwright.
The Intended Users of Art Works for Schools
Art Works for Schools is written primarily for classroom teachers who are not art specialists. It does not require prior experience using art in the classroom nor any special background in art, although teachers who enjoy the arts are naturally drawn to the program. With minor adaptations, the program can also be used by art teachers, museum educators, and theater educators.
The lessons are written to be used directly with grades 3-8. Many of the lessons are easily adaptable to younger grades and older grades. Lessons have been taught at kindergarten through college level and proven to be successful.
The Role of Visual Art
The approach of Art Works for Schools differs from most museum or art history lessons. Instead of focusing on understanding the artist's intention, the time period or culture of the artwork, or the artist's technique, Art Works for Schools focuses on teaching thinking through looking at art. The art is interpreted and understood through reasoning, perspective-taking, problem-finding, and making metaphors. After being engaged deeply in the artworks through the Art Works for Schools lessons, students have been inspired to research background information about artworks on their own.
The Role of Theater
Theater techniques are used in Art Works for Schools primarily as a tool for enhancing and enacting thinking, rather than as a topic of study itself. Theater is usually introduced as a tool for deepening understanding about a work of visual art and is then transferred as a tool for deepening understanding about literature, science, history, or any other topic of study. For example, several Art Works for Schools lessons use theater techniques such as improvisation, monologue, and dialogue as vehicles for engaging students in thinking through a topic, whether the topic is a work of visual art or something drawn from the regular curriculum. Theater is used as a tool in part because children's natural affinity for dramatic play makes theater an especially powerful vehicle for exploring topics across the curriculum. But the larger reason is practical. In visual art, students can easily explore a variety of artworks right in their own classroom simply by viewing reproductions of them. Providing students with comparable theater experience is much more difficult, since it would mean mounting a full-scale dramatic production every time theater was the topic of a lesson. That said, Art Works for Schools strongly encourages teachers to find ways to expose their students to theater performances and to use Art Works for Schools techniques to explore these performances just as they do when exploring visual art.
The Benefits of Teaching Thinking Through Art
Most educators believe that it is important to teach students to think critically and creatively. Why? Because doing so helps students do a better job of constructing and interpreting the meaning of things, which is what, sooner or later, all learning is about. Here are four reasons why art makes a particularly good starting point for teaching thinking.
- Art invites thinking. Responding to art is about constructing and interpreting meaning. This is perfectly obvious to children, whose first response to a work of art is typically either to invent a story about it or guess at what it means. Because art is multi-layered and complex, because it is metaphorical and ambiguous, it naturally invites, and rewards, critical and creative thought.
- Thinking about art encourages visual literacy. Our culture is increasingly visual. From computer and TV screens to newspapers and billboards, we are bombarded by visual images that need decoding and interpretation. Increasingly, students need to be able to probe and interpret visual images thoughtfully, critically, and creatively. Because works of art are complex visual objects that invite multiple interpretations, thinking about art is a great way to develop visual learning skills.
- Thinking about art draws on different learning modalities. Thinking and talking about art naturally brings together multiple modes of perception and cognition. When children talk about works of art they freely refer to a variety of senses-they talk about what they see, feel, think, hear, and so on. And they naturally use all of this information cognitively. That is, they use information from all of their senses to make meaning out of works of art. Consequently, emphasizing the cognitive dimension of responding to art helps children develop an integrative rather than a "dry" concept of thinking-one that includes emotions and perceptions and any other faculties that contribute to insight and understanding. Also, because art invites multiple modes of perception, it is accessible to children with a range of different thinking styles.
- Forms of thinking that are central to art are also important in other disciplines. The forms of thinking emphasized in this curriculum-reasoning, perspective-taking, problem-finding and metaphor-making-have been chosen because of their centrality to thinking about art and their centrality to thinking in other domains. For example, reasoning thoughtfully about interpretations is important in art, and it is equally important in science, history, and other subjects. Similarly, adopting multiple perspectives is a powerful way to explore an artwork, just as it is a powerful way to explore historical events, scientific phenomena, and social issues. Metaphor-making and problem-finding have the same kind of cross-domain relevance.
Connections to the Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks
Through its focus on thinking skills and interdisciplinary learning, Art Works for Schools directly addresses many goals of the Massachusetts state curriculum frameworks. For example, the Massachusetts Common Core of Learning states that students should be able, among other things, to "read and listen critically, write and speak clearly, factually, persuasively, and creatively,…distinguish fact from opinion, and recognize bias." It also states that students need to "make careful observations and ask pertinent questions, analyze, interpret, and evaluate information…make reasoned inferences and construct logical arguments and develop, test, and evaluate possible solutions." All of these goals require the thinking skills and dispositions of the four areas of thinking that Art Works for Schools focuses on-reasoning, perspective-taking, problem-finding, and metaphor-making.
Art Works for Schools was developed in Massachusetts, so the program package contains an appendix detailing several specific connections between the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks and this program. Since state frameworks across the country have many similarities, educators in other states will also find this a useful resource.
Connections to Other Areas of the School Curriculum
English Language Arts
Using Art Works for Schools, students hone their reasoning skills in order to comprehend, construct, and convey meaning about artworks through writing and discussion. Other lessons then transfer the process of reasoning to the understanding of literature and drama. Students also learn to assess and modify their perceptions and hypotheses about an artwork as they look at it and discuss it in a group. They learn strategies for making metaphors both verbally and visually, thus enriching their capacities for creative expression.
Mathematics
Art Works for Schools helps students become more adept at posing questions based on close observation, arriving at informed and logical conclusions, and sharing and justifying their ideas in discussion.
Science and Technology
Art Works for Schools instills students with a respect for evidence by giving them practice in observing, describing, and making predictions and analyses based on evidence. Students are encouraged to inquire and investigate; identifying puzzles around them promotes their ability to frame questions and deepen understanding.
History and Social Science
Art Works for Schools helps students take into consideration various viewpoints. Learning "how to gather, interpret, and assess evidence from multiple sources, how to distinguish various forms of opinion, and how to identify and avoid bias and prejudice," students become more flexible and open-minded. Transfer lessons allow students to then apply different perspectives to historical and social events.
Images
The following images from DeCordova Museum's Permanent Collection represent a few of the artworks used in Art Works for Schools.
Journey's End by Candace Walters What does this mean? What's the picture all about? From the "Artful Reasoning" chapter |
Island Man, Monhegan Island by Martin Ahearn What might the person pictured be thinking about? From "The Power of Perspective-Taking" chapter |
This Is Jane's Room by Merle Perlmutter Is that a window or just the light from a window? From the "Problem-Finding" chapter |
Untitled by William Remick If this artwork were a person, what would its occupation be? From "The Magic of Making Metaphors" chapter |
Sample Lesson
View a sample lesson online in PDF format. (To view a PDF file, you may need the free download Adobe Acrobat® Reader®.)
Ordering Information
To order the Art Works for Schools kit, contact DeCordova's Education Department at 781/259-0505. Staff is available to receive calls Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm ET. Each kit costs $150, plus $10.00 per kit for shipping and handling. Additionally, orders shipped within Massachusetts must add $7.50 to cover the 5% state sales tax. Accepted forms of payment include VISA, MasterCard, and personal check.
