Lessons from Art

Art is a class that truly takes kids from where they are and lets them experience success on their own level.  Does every project come out they way they want it?  No, and that’s okay.  In real life, things don’t always come out as we expect.  The important thing is that we learn something, which will help us on future endeavors.  Learning something regardless of its outcome…priceless!

Having the opportunity to sit down with a child who feels they “can’t” draw (2-D) or build (3-D) and revisiting the process of how to break the subject into simple shapes is assisting discovery.  Watching them begin to smile as they make connections …priceless!

Sometimes art is one of the few classes that motivates a child to come to school.  I have kids every year that I stop and talk with when I notice they’ve been missing school frequently.  Their reasons vary, but I always let them know I notice when they are not a part of my class.  They are important and I want them to be there as their time with me is limited.  It’s not long before I see their smiling face at my door when class is ready to begin.  We celebrate the fact that they made it and we create!  Seeing the child in school and successful…priceless!

I could go on and on about the great things that art does for a child and I probably will in future posts, but for now, I leave you with this.

10 Lessons the Arts Teach

1. 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.

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

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

4. 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 a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

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

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

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.


SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.