News
Frameworks for Music and Visual Arts Education
Date: 08/27/2009
Since the summer of 2004, Arts Education Collaborative (AEC) has been working with experienced music and visual arts educators to write two separate frameworks; one for the visual arts and one for music. This spring, AEC will publish both frameworks under the titles of Lessons in Symphony: When Music Content, Standards, Essential Questions, Teacher Learning, and Design Thinking Come Together and Lessons in Imagination: When Visual Arts Content, Standards, Essential Questions, Teacher Learning, and Design Thinking Come Together.
These frameworks are a direct response to a need expressed by area arts educators for a comprehensive map leading to a sequential pattern of learning in music and in the visual arts for K-12 education that considers the elements that must be addressed to ensure quality arts education. “To the design team, the idea of a framework was, at first, an interesting and novel idea,” stated AEC director, Sarah Tambucci, reflecting on the initial reaction that the design team had to the idea of writing music and visual arts frameworks. She went on to clarify the importance of these frameworks by saying: Dedicated undergraduates often spend hours hard at work developing the studio skills necessary to teach but little time, if any, focused on the pedagogy of teaching and learning. The curriculum is simply too crowded – the malady that echoes the experience of school children everywhere. But when the basic skills of how to structure and evaluate learning experiences that can be translated to all learning are minimized, the result is students who are also limited in asking essential questions and getting the ‘big ideas’. Both frameworks make use of an “essential question” that guides the progression of units and shapes the content. In describing the initial stages of the process, Tambucci recalled that: “Visual arts educators began with the essential question, ‘What is real?’. By asking this question, the team looked to embed critical and aesthetic response along with the process of production. Music educators began with an essential question, ‘How does structure change perception?’. This lead them to consider a new notion of music education that includes, but is not limited to, holiday and spring performances.”
Making use of age appropriate concepts and scaffolding content, the units in each framework channel the teaching of the Pennsylvania Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities in music and visual art through recommended process and content indicators. Also included are suggestions for special needs instruction, together with supplemental and enrichment assignments. In addition, units provide examples of formative and summative assessments aligned to the content and the Standards.Finally, the frameworks carefully trace the design process engaged in by each creative team as a model for other groups of educators to develop their own customized structures to meet institutional and district goals.
AEC would like to thank the many individuals who put in countless hours of time and effort to bring both of these projects to fruition. These individuals represented every level of K-12 education in a range of schools found in urban, suburban, and rural areas of the state. We could not have done it without your generous gifts of time and talent.
A range of engaging workshops based on the units in the frameworks and the teams’ experiences are in the planning process and the frameworks will be made available only through participation in these upcoming professional development workshops. Times and dates for workshops will be announced in the near future. To view excerpts from each of the frameworks, visit: http://www.artsedcollaborative.org/educator.html. For more information, please contact AEC at info@artsedcollaborative.org or 412-201-7405.
