While scrolling the Internet I got hit with pop up ads again. This time, the owners of the ad algorithms know I access art education content and plastered my screen with K12 art curriculum deals. Wow! Ok! If I had four thousand bucks I can purchase an art curricula that contains hundreds of lessons!
Considering implementation, all I have to do is repeat lessons over and over until all my classes have participated in them. New lessons and units can be inserted into the classroom over and over throughout the school year. Everything is included! I don’t even have to think about my teaching!
Logistically I have a problem with canned programs like this. Once the lesson is done, the teacher gathers up all their resources and organizing strength and begins another set up for another mass consumption lesson activity. Material acquisition and material distribution to entire grade levels is expensive and time consuming.
Psychologically, the issue is this. How is the content of these lessons connected to the daily lives of the children who participate in them? How are the stories of the children’s lives interwoven into the activity? To what extent in these lessons do the children have opportunity to go beyond the given information?
Furthermore, a fundamental skill in artmaking is based in conceptualization. How are children developing conceptualization skills if they are treated as workers on an assembly line?
For children who have completed the teachers art task early and are asked to wait for slower classmates to finish, precious time is wasted. The cycle is repeated over and over and over. What is learned from such experiences by the children is that their art ideas are not worthy of expression.
A deadening of the creative spirit pervades this type of program because children are considered incapable of expressing time-sensitive, internally generated art ideas.
This coming TAB Institute at MassArt, we are taking a deep dive into the concept of building sustainable studios. Repurposing materials and objects for self-expression is a practice artists have engaged with since prehistoric times. It is my experience that TAB practitioners elevate the practice of sustainability within the framework of K12 art education to the next level.
Thinking about contemporary K12 art programs as a relatively new development in human history, the question of how curriculum is integrated into the learning environment is an important consideration.
Curricula concepts that stimulate the desire of children to pursue independent learning pathways within that subject area is in my mind, self-sustaining. This is a huge consideration when considering educational experience.
The sustainable studio depends greatly on the building of a self-sustaining curricula.
Join us this coming July for a thorough investigation into sustainability as it relates to K12 classroom art studios and K12 art curricula.
https://massart.edu/professional-continuing-education/teaching-for-artistic-behavior/
You won’t be disappointed!