Global pursuits.

I'd like to believe that students in art classes everywhere are learning about themselves, their communities, and their cultures--and how these connect to other people, communities, and cultures around the planet and throughout history.

Discovering these connections is important, simply because we are affected by the multiple art worlds of planet Earth. The art and material culture in the United States, both past and present, influences visual culture around the globe, and the art and artifacts of other nations, both ancient and contemporary, have an impact on visual culture in our own local communities.

Visual culture is becoming more global. People worldwide are traveling and immigrating, communicating, and sending images through c-mail. Movies are produced for worldwide markets. Sitcoms are translated into many languages. Sports are international. Art education must respond to this reality.

Global pursuits give focus to the art curriculum and prepare students to live in a global society, surrounded by an increasingly visual environment. The important thing to remember, however, is that global pursuits are different approaches to teaching about art and visual culture, rather than additions to the curriculum.

Global pursuits can be planned from different, equally valid, perspectives. Some teachers want to make the world a better place in terms of the environment and social justice. Others believe that students need a global perspective if they are to compete in a global world. Still others simply want to promote cross-cultural understanding. As long as teachers emphasize multiple perspectives and global interdependence, the global journey can begin almost anywhere.

Global pursuits often begin where the students are experts--with themselves and their families--and expand to examining visual or material culture within their community and making connections to the rest of the world--researching how people dress, the dwellings they inhabit, the music they listen to, the products they make, and the art they enjoy.

Discovering Multiple Art Worlds

Students need to learn about multiple art worlds and to explore various roles within them. Global pursuits in art have to do with understanding the interconnections of art worlds around the globe, gaining an appreciation of different perspectives, and giving the individual a broad base for making personal choices and planning actions.

Teaching students how an art world influences a person's actions is an important tool for inquiry--allowing students to investigate a variety of perspectives.

Some teachers, fearful of leaving a child behind, may not even venture on a global journey. They are content to teach students the answers they think they should know. Others, seeing value in global pursuits but intimidated by cautions to leave no child behind, provide students with crutches and a narrow perspective of elements and principles. Teaching from such a narrow perspective is limiting.

In addition to teaching students to think about multiple perspectives, global pursuits are natural ways to integrate the curriculum. It can be an interdisciplinary approach that allows an art teacher to teach art in combination with other subjects. Global pursuits across the curriculum can change the context of the subject that's being taught. In math you can have word problems about apples and oranges, or you can do a word problem about tourism in Kenya and Nigeria, while teaching a unit on tourist art in various African nations.

Lessons like the ones in this and next month's issue of SchoolArts help young people recognize that there are multiple art worlds, and make students think about why and how people make art in the ways that they do. I'd like to think that these lessons will help young people learn about what humans go through to create culture--and community.

Global pursuits are a way of studying the way art worlds--and cultures around the world--function and influence one another. We need to draw upon the best of all cultures to have communities, and a world, that will be safe for diversity. The question we must ask is, "What kind of world can it be?"