Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, September 26, 2007

September 27, 2007 at 3:14 pm | In Minutes |

Summary:

Meeting adjourned at 2:40. Next meeting: Wednesday, Oct. 11 at 1:40 in Room 140.

We began a discussion of the questions:

• Why is Art important to teach/study/learn?
• Why is an Arts Academy a good idea?
• What makes an Arts Academy student different from another student?

We discussed the word “art” vs. “creativity”, the difficulty of assessing creativity but of its importance in the curriculum. We talked about teaching other subjects in the context of the arts. (See full notes for details).

Tom left us with 4 questions for creating our vision statement:

1. To what extent do we (our team, school, district, community) share a common vision?
2. What educational beliefs about teaching and learning do we all hold, if any? What do the answers imply?
3. What assumptions about learning guide our instructional and assessment practices? To what extent do our policies, priorities, and actions reflect these beliefs?
4. How might we better actualize our beliefs?

Present:

• Vicky Stubbs
• Phil Divinsky
• Dave Beane
• Val Green
• Jane Krasnow
• Lisa Hicks
• Tom Lafavore

Full Notes:

We had homework from the last meeting to think about the following:

• Why is Art important to teach/study/learn?
• Why is an Arts Academy a good idea?
• What makes an Arts Academy student different from another student?

Vicky mentioned that the University of the Arts presentation today had a great video about “Why Art?”

V icky also had some quotes from students, who answered one of the 3 questions above as a writing prompt. She read some of them.

For students, most of all, art is a way to respect/respond to the world around them. Dave mentioned that a lot of his students don’t think of themselves as artists, and he doesn’t even really think of himself as an artist. We talked about how some people do art and are artists, but don’t think of themselves as being artists. There is art in reflection and in problem solving.

We talked about lesson plans and parts of lesson plans that are creative, and discussed what it is like to study the arts and not study creativity (for example, just get technically better at playing the piano). The difference could be “meeting a benchmark” vs. “expressing myself”. You need certain skills in order to express your creativity.

“Art” and “creativity” are different, but we’ve been using them interchangeably sometimes. Technical artists are artists even if they’re not creative. We’re not making value judgments on whether an artist is better with more creativity. Artists definitely need creative tools if they’re making their livings creating things for other people.

Do our standards include creativity or not?

Tom: What is art? What is creativity? Those questions should go in our vision, but we don’t need to define them.

It’s important to teach creativity, even though we can’t measure it. And that’s one problem that we have: justifying the need to teach something that is hard/impossible to assess.

How do you talk about creativity and give constructive feedback? What is “acceptable” writing? What is the creative piece of the writing? Students need to know how to write “acceptable” writing and also be creative.

As we’re thinking of these things, we’re coming up with teaching standards that are important to us, and that’s what we’ll become known for. We can talk about the standards and also talk about the importance of creativity and how to integrate and separate those 2 things.

Boston Arts Academy takes performing and arts courses as more important and academics as less important. You could really get a sense of that when visiting. We don’t want to be doing it that way. At Maine College of Art, students are shocked when they realize that they have to take Math.

It would be nice to have other subjects taught in relation to what we’re doing artistically. History of Dance, of Music, of Fashion…of Web Design? (Val: how about “History of Advertising”, propaganda, etc.–we’re doing that this year). Studying History becomes studying History with a team of teachers all teaching (together or separately) history as it relates to the arts.

This is personalization of curricula also.

What’s the difference between “art is important” to individuals vs. “art is important” to society? Val did an exercise years ago where students rated different things (power, fame, money, etc.) in two different lists: one that was for the student personally, and one that the student believed was for the nation. The funny thing was that in most cases, the 2 lists were opposites of each other for all students.

How is our student different from other students? She thinks about the world around her, can collaborate with other areas, can communicate with different people.

Tom shared 4 questions for visioning from a book he has:

1. To what extent do we (our team, school, district, community) share a common vision?
2. What educational beliefs about teaching and learning do we all hold, if any? What do the answers imply?
3. What assumptions about learning guide our instructional and assessment practices? To what extent do our policies, priorities, and actions reflect these beliefs?
4. How might we better actualize our beliefs?

Meeting adjourned at 2:40.

Our next meeting will be in 2 weeks, on October 11, at 1:40 in Room 140.