Arts Education | NW Education

The Weave of the World, Part 2
ENGAGING MODELS

Bringing the arts into the classroom in an academically rigorous way is becoming a goal in schools across the country. There's no one right way to teach the arts, of course, any more than there's one "best" style of painting or music making. These two approaches to teaching the arts, both being used in the Northwest, offer plenty of room for classroom innovation.

DISCIPLINE-BASED ART EDUCATION. Since its founding in 1982, the Los Angeles-based Getty Education Institute for the Arts has been a leader in developing discipline-based art education (DBAE) as a "holisitic, comprehensive, and multifaceted approach" to learning. Rather than delivering a curriculum, DBAE offers an approach to instruction and learning about the visual arts.

In conducting assessments for the Arts Report Card issued last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress looked for students who were engaged in the processes of creating, performing, and responding to the visual and performing arts. These are similar to the four broad disciplines the Getty Institute describes as central to learning:

Art production, which means students make art themselves

Art criticism, in which they respond to and make judgments about the properties and qualities that exist in visual forms

Art history, which means they acquire knowledge about the contributions artists and art make to culture and society

Aesthetics, which means understanding the nature, meaning, and value of art

Learning in and through Art: A Guide to Discipline-Based Art Education by Stephen Mark Dobbs (The Getty Education Institute for the Arts, 1998) describes the history and theory of this comprehensive approach to teaching the visual arts. Dobbs describes each of the four disciplines in detail, including a discussion of issues students can be expected to explore as a result of art making, art criticism, art history, and aesthetics.

As an open-ended model, DBAE can be tailored to fit such variables as demographics of student population, students' ages and grade levels, access to cultural and community resources, technical support, and budget. A core of basic DBAE characteristics includes: a written plan, systematic organization, engagement with works of art, balanced content from the four art disciplines, and developmentally suitable and age-appropriate activities.

ARTFUL LEARNING. Established in 1990 to carry out the American conductor's vision of education through the arts, the Leonard Bernstein Center, based in Nashville, Tennessee, starts with some basic assumptions: that learning springs from engaging experiences; that children inquire when they are interested; that they start to love learning when they actually create something; that they begin to master subjects when they reflect thoughtfully on what they understand.

Involving students in the activities of hands-on experience, inquiry, creation, and reflection are the cornerstones of the Leonard Bernstein Center's trademarked approach, known as Artful Learning. The strategies of the Bernstein model, incorporated into educational products and adopted by participating schools, include:

Putting the artistic process at the heart of learning, with students actively engaged in encountering masterworks from multiple disciplines and creating original work
Involving teachers in designing a rigorous, challenging curriculum
Assessing student work through a portfolio, evaluated for depth and over time
Using technology as a tool for learning
Engaging students, teachers, and administrators in the practice of reflection so that the entire school becomes a learning community

-S.B.

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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01
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