Thursday, August 27, 2009

Arts Education

Through suggestions from another site I have been reading material about and by Elliot W. Eisner. I have included links in the 'links of interest' to the right, which give more information and further reading. Below is 'Ten lessons The Arts Teach'.

  • The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
     

  • The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
     

  • The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
     

  • The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem-solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
     

  • The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
     

  • The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
     

  • The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
     

  • The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
     

  • 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.
     

  •  The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
Elliott Eisner, in Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. Getty Center for Education in the Arts. 1985 p. 69.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Exhibition Photographs 4





Exhibition Photographs 3





Exhibition Photographs 2





Exhibition Photographs





Exhibition

We have just finished putting up, well when we left it was still up, the display of the students work in town. The McKay Family kindly donated the use of an empty shop, so we could display some of the work and lots of photographs from the ten week project.

It was good opportunity to go over what the students have done and get printed some of the many 1000's of photographs printed. When the exhibition is finished the students will get to keep the photographs of their work and we will also start putting up their work in sites around the school.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Dargaville High School Colour Charts



Update

Over past few weeks I have been going through the students projects and getting work finished or looking for further funding to complete their projects.

We have been kindly given the use of an empty shop in town for a week. So we are going to put all the students stenciled bags on display as well as photographs over showing their work. I will post some pictures when the show has been put up.

I have also been doing work with some of the 1000's of photographs we took over the 10 weeks and I will add these as I complete them.