Can reading skills be enhanced by instruction in the visual arts? Arts education researchers have sometimes made this claim and have argued that the visual arts can play a strong role in the teaching of basic skills in the kindergarten and elementary school years. There are two possible mechanisms by which visual arts instruction might enhance reading ability, one cognitive, one motivational. The cognitive mechanism would involve transfer of skill. Perhaps visual arts training strengthens visual perception skills that can be deployed in reading.
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Kristin BurgerEllen WinnerUniversity of Illinois
The contemporary approach to art education focuses on content that is derived from a broad range of the visual arts with an emphasis on what can be learned from works of art. This is a significant departure from earlier aesthetic approaches which led to purely formalist criticism in the classroom. Based on the work of Arthur Danto, the author proposes that teachers develop student abilities to go beyond the visual level of artworks and enable them to gain access to the complexity of meanings that works of art possess. To exemplify this practice, an analysis of Adrian Piper's work entitled I
How can you carve out a museum space that’s less authoritative? And how you can make work that is smaller, more intimate in that same space? Kio Stark and Mark Allen discuss Machine Project, the Echo Park, Los Angeles exhibiting space that doubles as an interactive setting, an alternative performance venue, and an active agent in creating events around the local area, including in museums such as the Hammer.
A youth media program called Youthscapes not only helps participants combat negative stereotypes of urban teens, but also gives them a sense of group solidarity that enables them to function as responsible media producers when they venture out into the community.
In stories about democratic society that take place in a democratically structured environment, Youth Radio walks the fine line between professional journalism and youth development in ways that question the automatic equation between "youth voice" and freedom of expression.
Students will apply themselves to learning if the context interests them. Focusing on a subject close to middle school students' hearts, such as fashion, rather than on specific academic tasks such as writing or researching, builds intrinsic motivation for learning. This article explores the Fabulous Fashions program, which engages students in mathematics and literacy through the context of their interest in fashion.
This article describes the Multimedia Arts Education Program (MAEP), an ongoing, intensive after school computer-mediated art technology program begun in 1996 by the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC) in Tucson, Arizona. This five-semester program targets at-risk middle school youth from disadvantaged families. Students worked with professional artist/teachers, learning to do computer graphics and publishing, language arts and word processing, computer animation and video production.
Community-based arts education serves the best of youth development practices and principles. In an era when school-based outcomes drive much afterschool programming, the value of the arts in building young people’s skills and abilities deserves wide support.
A three-day art project in an afterschool program with no specific arts component illustrates the potential—and the challenges—of engaging children in creating art using recycled materials.
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Angela EckhoffAmy HallenbeckMindy Spearman
Drugs and alcohol, free time and empty houses are readily available in affluent communities. But positive role models and meaningful activities are often in short supply.
In recent years, afterschool programs have come to be envisioned as sites for addressing the failure of urban schools to provide adolescents with the requisite skills and knowledge to participate in a rapidly shifting social, political, and economic landscape. The purpose and nature of such educational endeavors has taken many varied forms, as a growing number of stakeholders become invested in shaping the direction and implementation of afterschool programming. However, youth, as the recipients of these programs, have rarely been looked to as sources of experiential knowledge about the
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Katherine SchultzEdward BrockenbroughJaskiran Dhillon
Dance classes provide a model for afterschool and in-school education where multiple, “embodied” modes of teaching and learning enhance development and where risk-taking is rewarded rather than punished.