Arts & Aesthetics

The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education

Many children in the United States have little or no opportunity for formal arts instruction, and access to arts learning experiences remains a critical national challenge. In addition, the quality of arts learning opportunities that are available to young people is a serious concern. Understanding this second challenge: the challenge of creating and sustaining high quality formal arts learning experiences for K12 youth, inside and outside of school is the focus of our recent research initiative, The Qualities of Quality, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and conducted by Project Zero. The study focuses on the character of excellence itself and asks three core questions:

How do arts educators in the United States including leading practitioners, theorists, and administrators conceive of and define high quality arts learning and teaching?

What markers of excellence do educators and administrators look for in the actual activities of arts learning and teaching as they unfold in the classroom?

How do a programs foundational decisions, as well as its ongoing day-to-day decisions, affect the pursuit and achievement of quality?

Works Of Art Are Good Things To Think About

Works of art are good things to think about. This simple premise underlies Artful Thinking, a program that helps teachers regularly use works of art in their curriculum in ways that strengthen student thinking and learning. Developed between 2004-2006 by Harvard Project Zero in collaboration with the Traverse City Area Public schools, the program is being used by K-12 classroom teachers as well as art specialists in several schools in the Unites States and Europe. It focuses on looking at and interpreting art, rather than making art, and its goals are twofold: To help teachers create rich connections between works of art and topics they are teaching; and to use the power of art as a force for developing students’ thinking dispositions.

This article provides highlights from the findings of two research studies conducted during the development of the Artful Thinking program. The first is a study of the effect of the program on students’ and teachers’ ideas about art. The second is a study of the effects of the program on students’ ideas about thinking and learning in general. The investigations were framed as design research (Brown, 1992; Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003). This means that the procedures developed to explore program participants’ concepts of art and concepts of thinking were designed to be learning-centered practices, integral to the spirit and goals of the program, rather than “add-on” evaluations.

Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education

Many people believe that arts education is important, but few can say exactly why. Here at last are the results of the first in-depth research on the habits of mind that are instilled by studying visual art habits, the authors argue, that could have positive impacts on student learning across the curriculum. Studio Thinking provides art teachers with a research-based language for describing what they intend to teach and what students actually learn. This language will help advocates explain arts education to policymakers, help art teachers develop and refine their teaching and assessment practices, and help educators in other disciplines learn from existing practices in arts education. ISBN: 978-0807748183

Study Center Learning

Final Report: Artful Thinking