Tag Archive for 'art education'

Literacy, Numeracy…Visuacy??

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2008 in Curriculum. 8 Comments

An Australian federal government report argues for visual education, or “visuacy”, to take its place alongside literacy and numeracy as a fundamental part of the country’s curriculum. The National Review of Visual Education calls for “a rethinking of arts education in schools to end the distinction between art and other images.”  

“In much the same way that one might conceptualise a continuum of texts in the context of the English classroom, one might similarly do so in relation to a continuum of images from the most banal to the most aesthetically complex and challenging,” the report says.  Translation?  The newspaper the Australian says: students should study Picasso alongside pictures of Elle Macpherson’s underwear as part of a recasting of visual arts education away from traditional forms to include images of all kinds.

[The report] cites the example of scrutinising the “conditions of value and meaning” in images as diverse as Macpherson’s bras and briefs on the back of a bus or on a billboard, a blood-strewn road safety advertisement on television, Picasso’s Guernica reproduced in the pages of a book of 20th century European art and the television transmission of a collapsing World Trade Center.

Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools chair Su Baker is already playing defense, arguing images are words in a visual language that have to be taught in the same way as English or any other language. “This report isn’t about dumbing down, it isn’t about trivialising things.  It’s about the breadth of visual imagery we are confronted with and engaging with in the world we live in, which is heavily saturated with images. It’s about teaching kids to navigate, interpret and control those images.” she tells the Australian.

Art for Art’s Sake

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 28, 2008 in Curriculum. 0 Comments

“If arts education stakes its claim to students’ time and schools’ money on some unproven power to push standardized test scores upward, its position in American schools is bound to be precarious,” notes Ann Hulbert in the New York Times Magazine. She was responding to a claim made by Barack Obama on the campaign trail that “children who learn music actually do better in math, children whose imaginations are sparked by the arts are more engaged in school.”

A direct link between arts education and higher test scores is elusive, Hulbert notes, but that’s not a reason to ignore the arts in school. Citing research by Ellen Winner, a Boston College professor of psychology, and Lois Hetland, who teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she notes evidence that engaging in in art and music in school helps students develop “persistence in tackling problems, observational acuity, expressive clarity, reflective capacity to question and judge, ability to envision alternative possibilities and openness to exploration.”