The Changing Face of Art Education.

Out on the World Wide Web, a large group of midwestern art educators are collectively building a new kind of learner-centered art education. Anytime, day or night, these elementary and secondary teachers log on to the Internet and access a fully searchable, interactive curriculum database.

By typing in a request for a new teaching idea, such as art media, visual thinking skill, multicultural concept, artist, age level, and/or subject matter, each teacher receives access to a suggested group of full lesson plans from among a group of 3000 teacher-designed and classroom-tested strategies. Attached to these lesson plans they also find full-color examples of typical student artwork. Participants are suddenly part of a widespread art faculty collecting and sharing their most successful teaching ideas.

An Art Educator's Network

In recent years many professional presentations, reports, and standards have called for the improvement of art education, as it is currently practiced in K-12 schools. Art teachers are being asked to design new curricula, infuse substantive new art content, and invent original teaching methodologies that lead to accountable learning benchmarks and sequential growth.

How is the individual art educator, or even the art faculty from an entire school district, already burdened with heavy teaching loads and many extracurricular responsibilities, to accomplish this enormously complicated feat of educational reform? One answer may lie in large scale curriculum and staff development networks designed for cooperation and collaboration across school district boundaries.

The New Art Basics (NAB) project is a model of such an art educator network. In continuous operation since 1986, coordinated by the art education faculty of the Department of Art and Design of Iowa State University, NAB provides evidence for the success of teacher directed educational change.

The NAB project is based on the premise that, while the visual arts are not typically valued in American education as a basic discipline, K-12 art teachers can empower themselves collectively to "mine" and share a wealth of teaching ideas, based on solid educational, art historical, and scientific research. In the NAB project, the individual art teacher is the "expert" on how to best adapt this new content for classroom practice.

It is the primary goal of each individual NAB teacher to cooperatively work with other teachers to identify those thinking skills and pluralistic or cross-cultural concepts that are most basic to the production and critical appreciation of the visual arts. In usage, each teacher demonstrates that visual education is vital to all students and is a unique learning discipline whose learning outcomes are not a duplication of those from other school subjects. NAB emphasizes Technology-based Community Building, Curriculum Reform, and Life-Long Teacher Development to accomplish this revitalization and expansion of visual arts education as an educational basic.

Technology-based Community Building

The New Art Basics project interconnects teachers, new teaching ideas, and unique disciplinary content on its public web site at http:// www.design.iastate.edu/ART/NAB. From this site NAB teacher/share owners have access to the two original, password-protected, and interactive databases that connect them to a unique professional community.

Through the NAB teacher database, each participant has immediate access to locating and connecting with all other teacher/ researchers in the program and the additional opportunity to consult directly with university art education faculty and other project consultants. As one art teacher commented, "We have become one large art faculty, continually sharing our best teaching ideas and common concerns."

On the teaching strategy database, called the "Living Curriculum," each teacher is able to search for classroom-tested ideas that best respond to individual local needs, view examples of student artwork, file professional classroom testing evaluations, and submit new teaching strategy ideas to be reviewed for inclusion in the curriculum database. After initial approval, only those strategies that continue to prove valuable and effective.in K-12 artrooms are allowed to remain in this ever-growing "living" curriculum resource.

Curriculum Reform

Technology has proven to be an effective tool, but New Art Basics is much more. It is a body of exciting content for deepening the instruction of art. There is a great deal of knowledge about what is basic to the multi-leveled appreciation of visual thought and communication that has never been adapted for use in public school art programs.

Included in NAB curricular content are resources for visual and creative thinking, graphic ideation, a global approach to multicultural, non-sexist education, and the in-depth study of inclusive art history.

Using a common lesson planning (strategy) format, cooperatively developed between university art education faculty and classroom art teachers, NAB participants are building a curriculum focused on: 1. Graphic Ideation (the generation of visual ideas), 2. Relational and Contextual Thinking Skills, and 3. Pluralistic and Global Approaches to art instruction.

Graphic Ideation

Understanding of graphic ideation (the ability to identify and develop inspirational creative ideas), gained from the disciplines of psychology and art history, comprises a group of identifiable, teachable, and accountable thinking skills. This is a disciplined focus within all NAB content areas. The NAB curriculum stresses this complex of relational and contextual thinking within which art is produced and understood. The complexity of how art relates to its human, cultural, and historic contexts also has a need for explicit instruction and emphasis.

Multicultural Art

The rich multicultural heritage of the world's visual arts contributes to all aspects of the NAB curriculum. In this pluralistic approach, art teachers seek to promote balance in the many art forms and aesthetic traditions representing the world's rich human diversity and seek to encourage the students to respond with personal authenticity. NAB strategies for exploring these content topics are grouped into seven areas.

1. Getting Ready for Visual Thinking: In this area students are taught the skills of visualization, relaxed attention, part and whole thinking, and mental rehearsal skills that are necessary for productive visual thought. Getting Ready activities have been shown to result in heightened imaginative skills and greater motivation for art activities.

2. Basics of Visual Thinking: Visual thinking strategies are designed to increase students' ability to think in configurational terms, increase both flexibility and fluidity in generating visual ideas, teach combinative thinking, and promote reflection throughout the course of graphic ideation. Activities in this area have been shown to promote joyful participation in the formation process of art, rather than focus on a product-centered approach.

3. Metaphoric Thinking: Strategies in this area teach students the thinking skills of physiognomic perception, association, and visual analogy, for the creation of rich visual meaning. To see connections where others have not is a productive thinking skill of great creative importance and one that is uniquely suited to visual arts instruction.

4. Visual Logic: A developed internal sense of cohesiveness, comprehensibility, integrity, and elegance is necessary to guide original thinkers to a sense of completion and visual understanding. Strategies in the visual logic area teach students to understand the functions of their perceptual system as the basis for developing visually logical designs, designs that "work."

5. Human Context: The purpose of this area is exploration of important cross-cultural functions and benefits of art, such as recording experience, communicating information, contemplating and renewing life, and providing continuity. All of the strategies developed in this area contribute to the sense of art as an inner necessity, basic to human development and socialization.

6. Cultural Context: Activities in this area are designed to speak to the myriad group of identities expressed through objects, ceremonies, and celebrations. Students learn that art is integral to everyday existence with no separation from the rest of life. Moving beyond imitative cultural projects, these activities are designed to both connect to the individual student's experience, and to make each aware of the visual and creative glue that binds a culture together.

7. Historical Context: Strategies in this area help students place themselves within an interwoven web of visual histories. Study of the past is meant to empower those living in the present. Conscientious use of visual and material resources helps preserve this past. Analytical and reflective thinking within studio-based experiential learning bring world art to life.

Life-Long Teacher Development

New Art Basics is about teaching that makes a difference in students' lives and continues to serve the teachers who make the difference. The project is dedicated to developing practitioners with a commitment to life-long learning.

Initial training in NAB philosophy, content, and classroom practice is available through a graduate level art education course conducted over the Web. In addition, an original multimedia CD-ROM is provided to participants for more interactive learning opportunities.

Additional professional development activities and resources are continually available to all NAB teachers/researchers: a lending library of videotaped lectures and workshops; professional literature related to NAB concepts and thinking skills; and free on-line short courses on themes such as interdisciplinary learning through visual arts, brain-compatible visual education, and multi-cultural art education.

NAB-based teacher education has proven to be an extremely effective method of introducing new educators to the teaching profession and a lifetime network of colleagues.

Conclusion

In the New Art Basics project, teachers from many school districts have created a network which allows them to break out of the academic isolation imposed by artificial geographic and bureaucratic boundaries.

The project empowers participating teachers to use their own creativity and organizational skills to implement curriculum and to become visual learning specialists in their local schools.

The New Art Basics project is demonstrating that a learner-centered, content-rich curriculum can make a substantial difference in the lives of students.

Dennis M. Dake, professor, and Barbara A. Caldwell, assistant professor, are co-directors of the New Art Basics Project at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.