me arts ed

SEPTEMBER 12-18, 2010

In honor of this initiative arts educators are encouraged to promote the good work that is done in arts education across the state each and every day in Maine schools, PreK-grade 12. Communicate to your communities and beyond by posting an announcement in your school newsletter, websites, school board members, parents, students, school staff members.

We are well aware of the benefits of arts education to prepare young people with skills they need to be successful in this century. Here are 10 lessons the arts teach by Elliot Eisner:

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.

So much of what arts educators do each contributes to students development and future….

• The arts provide jobs. 1.25 million Americans currently work in the visual arts.
  Jobs for artists and designers are predicted to increase by 43% by 2016.
• Art education equips students to form mental images, which can be used to
  solve problems—an ability that chemists, engineers, and architects use to
  create models and that inventors use to think up new ideas.
• Arts education requires students to use their eyes and hands to give form to
  ideas generated in the brain—a discipline that Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel
  proved boosts brain power.
• Research also indicates that high school art programs engage students and
  keep in school those at-risk of dropping out.

Available on the National Association for Music Educators website and at the National Art Educators Association website are downloadable resources to help you celebrate this week!