Thursday 16 February 2012

Investigating the Culture of Curriculum

http://www.uic.edu/classes/ad/ad382/sites/AEA/AEA_01/AAEA01a.html

This is an unedited version of a chapter that appeared as Chapter 9 in
Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professor Never Told You,
edited by Dennis E. Fehr, Kris Fehr, and Karen Keifer-Boyd.
Falmer Press, New York, NY. 2000


At the beginning of the school year, I asked prospective teachers in my Foundations of Art Education class to list areas in the visual arts that they found exciting and related to vital issues of contemporary culture and living. The list included such topics as: controversial art pieces in the news, the meaning and legitimacy of making art from images appropriated from popular culture, the possibility of finding universal values in art, feminist art pieces that utilize media traditionally associated with women, architecture, collaborative community art, outsider or folk art installations, experimental video, the art of altarmaking for such holidays as Dia de los Muertos, and alternative comic books that tell stories about the everyday lives of the comic artists.

A few weeks later, without referring to our earlier exercise, I asked the students to work together to list topics and issues for a curriculum for a beginning art class at the high school level. Their list included such things as: the elements and principles of design, printmaking, colormixing, painting, figure drawing, making art on the computer, Impressionism, Surrealism, and Pop Art

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