Val Anda

Unit Paper 5
April 6, 2017
Unit Paper 5

Structures and systems help make people more responsive to art education. Standards are

one way that help us as teachers ensure that we are covering key concepts through art education.

These concepts not only pertain to art, but a deeper way of thinking and analyzing. Teachers

should want to make sure that their students not only learn art skills, but about ways in which

they can synthesize information and develop good habits that will affect their education and good

judgment. These concepts are universal and can be applied to other subjects and any other

learning that our students go through. Pink (2006) emphasizes that it is important to have the

capacity to synthesize, which is to combine concepts into one whole thought. This skill helps

students relate to, adapt to, and analyze new information and process it using a deeper level of

thinking. This is important in developing a well rounded student that is open to new ideas and

coming up with strategies and different ways to solve problems. Eisner (2002), sums up the

effects of teaching art and backs up his claim with ten lessons that are taught through art. He

show the importance of art and how it can do things such as help our students celebrate new

perspectives, become open to new ideas, be motivated to learn, and discover new emotions

through experiences.

For our chance operations studio, I really liked that we all got the same set of

instructions, but each art piece is so different from one another. This is a great way to show how

things can be interpreted differently by people. I would like to do this with my class, but instead

of providing them the directions, I could split the class into groups and have them write their

own directions. Each small group could come up with a painting and provide written instructions
based on their art piece. They can then hand out their instructions to the rest of the class and have

them follow the directions they wrote, without showing them the original piece. Then, they could

compare and share what they were thinking when they created it, and possibly what inspired

certain decisions. Our co-curated installations studio is also great and something I have enjoyed

working on. Instead of choosing pictures that are pre made and printed off of the internet, I think

it would be great for the students to come up with the artwork that is displayed in the mini

galleries. They could pick a theme and create mini paintings, drawings, and sculptures to include

in their gallery. I feel like this would be a great way to display artwork, and give the students a

chance to not only design the gallery, but base their art pieces off of their theme.

References

Eisner, E. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pink, D. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York, NY: The
Berkeley Group.