The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
Art is a verb.
Excellent visual arts teaching helps learners navigate through our visual world using two qualitative and interlinked experiential processes: creative expression and critical response.
The goal is to get students to behave as artists behave. This comprehensive coverage of habits and standards means the order in which the projects are presented is interchangeable. I have my students select by consensus the order of the projects based on their interests to set the content of a given course.
The quality of learning sustained rather than the number of projects completed drives the class. Broad exposure to many concepts or techniques in a course does not offset what a student will learn through the focus and investigation necessary to achieve a deep understanding of a fewer number of topics. Professional judgment as the teacher on the level of learning taking place in the classroom should determine when to move on to the next project, not some arbitrary schedule in a curriculum map.
Most of your students will not go on to pursue art at the university or professional art school level, but having an authentic art experience benefits all students who take art.
A look at art history and contemporary art practice shows that there is virtually no issue from the humanities or social sciences that has not also been addressed by visual artists. Because these trends have developed from the Zeitgeist, they provide a rich source of motifs for identifying themes that artists explore. Connecting these themes to the lives of contemporary students requires the mining of the essential drivers of these motifs.
By designing projects that integrate art history and studio practice students learn about how artists think and approach the big questions of being human. Each student can approach these questions in a way that is relevant to their lives.
Since the projects in this site are designed around themes from historical and contemporary art practice, it seems evident that giving art students context for what they are doing enhances their understanding of the project’s objectives. While it is possible to use only the studio portion of each project, I believe that for a fully authentic experience the art history and theory portion is a critical component.
Effectively analyzing works of art takes a strategy. The foundation for the strategy in these projects is Dr. Renee Sandell’s FTC Palette. It is a very useful tool for getting students to decode a work of art, analyze the elements from which it is constructed, and synthesize that analysis in a way that helps them arrive at how meaning is made in the artwork.
some of my recent writing
books
sample presentations from workshops
For sixteen of his over thirty years in education, Brian Reverman taught high school and middle school art at the International School of Beijing, The American School of Bombay, and the Casablanca American School. He is currently the Artist-in-Residence at HKUGA College in Hong Kong.
© Brian Reverman 2019