What's with the name...

You may be wondering about the name of my blog. For many years the license plate on my car had this message. It was my way to advocate for the teaching of art. Many people would ask me what a t chart was. I would explain that it was an assessment tool but the license plate should say teach art also. The use of the numeric 2 was due to the limitations of characters on a license plate. While it wasn't the greatest way to advocate for my subject, it a least got people thinking and talking about art.

As an art educator I was often confronted with the fact when most people, including most school committee members and administrators, talked about education, they really were only talking about reading, writing, math and science. What they failed to recognize was the importance of an aesthetic education in the development of a child' s learning process. The introduction of "no child left behind" limited the focus even more. Numerous tests for reading and math left little time for art education.

I had spent 13 years volunteering for the Maine Department of Education, working on developing assessments for the state, writing the state standards for arts education, training to be a table leader in teaching other teachers how the tests would be evaluated, and even working with the people who were going to be scoring the tests to ensure that they were looking at the responses for the correct artistic answer not the best writing. I even had the privilege of meeting with members of the State of Maine School Board to look at the arts assessments. What marvelous progress I felt we were making! And then the focus of education went back to looking at only math and reading scores as ways to prove that schools were successful.

Many people didn't have a very successful art experience in school so they fail to see the importance of a good art program. Their image of an art class is one where everyone made the same project. While this may be a fun release from the standard fair of daily ditto sheets and workbooks, it has very little to do with art education. A real art class should help children explore their surroundings, learn about the history of the world, learn to make informed judgments and learn how to question what they see. Many parents were amazed to find out that I used art history as a basis for teaching art skills to my students beginning in kindergarten. We would look at the works of an artist, or a selection of art works on the same topic, and talk about the use of color to convey meaning, how lines help us see the idea,what were the shapes they saw, or what was it that the artist was trying to say. Very often the younger students saw ideas that were new to me as they were looking at the art work with a newer (no preconceived notions) eye.

When I wasn't using reproductions of artists' works, I often used children's books from the school library or my personal collection to show students how the arts influenced idea making. Connecting ideas with words and images is important in a young child's development and literacy.

More about this tomorrow.