The Middle School Approach With a Focus on Visual Arts - Essay Example

THE MIDDLE SCHOOL APPROACH WITH A FOCUS ON VISUAL ARTS: FOR THE REENGAGEMENT OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN Introduction Middle school normally comprises of grades between four and eight, between elementary and high school and is a special time in the life of a child. The environment and the middle school curriculum should be able to facilitate the growth of the child to change with ease and to be ready for high school, mentally, emotionally, socially and physically. Art education in the middle school helps children to express themselves aesthetically and provides learning opportunities in organized knowledge, basic skills and personal development (Glenn, 1986: 5). The art teacher is in a position to help the students’ development, especially children who may be disadvantaged due to any of several causes such as those from poorer socio-economic groups, the disabled, or children from diverse cultures with communication and language difficulties. Learning and working on visual arts help disadvantaged children to overcome psychological limitations or barriers, and grow to their full potential. The purpose of this paper is to determine the middle school approach to visual arts education with a focus on disadvantaged children and those from diverse cultures. Discussion The middle school child from ten through fourteen years of age, is in transescence, which is a period in human development that begins with late childhood and continues through the early stages of adolescence. During this time of rapid but irregular growth, most children develop to physical maturity. In the middle school years, teachers and students are involved with each other, the curriculum meets the needs of the students’ stage of development, education is exciting and enables the students to prepare for more advanced courses that will need to be tackled in high school (Glenn, 1986: 6, 5). In the case of disadvantaged children, the opportunities for communication and self-expression are crucial in engaging them towards improvement in their self-concept and a better quality of life. The school reform movement termed as multiculturalism requires changes to some extent in the roles of art instructors for middle school children. It is important to understand culture and cultural diversity because “culture provides beliefs, values, and the patterns that give meaning and structure to life” (Ballengee-Morris & Stuhr, 2001: 6). Such an understanding allows individuals belonging to multiple social groups to function effectively in their constantly changing social and cultural environments. Since education is part of cultural experience, it does not comprise only of the various disciplines, but includes concepts of history and self-identity. For the effective development of a sense of identity, the middle school visual arts education plays a crucial part, especially for disadvantaged and culturally diverse students. The rationale for learning in middle schools is through organized knowledge, basic skills and personal development. These form the foundation for reengaging students for adequate life skills. The Organization of Knowledge of Visual Art Elements and Principles: This is done through interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and through the concepts of line, shape, colour, texture, form, space, light and motion which are taught in art. The organizing of these concepts involve balance, emphasis, continuity, proportion, and patterning. In the interdisciplinary setting of the middle school, these terms need to be organized in the framework of a larger unit of the art curriculum, by which the terms can be understood with meaning and depth. For example, the concept of line can be understood by seeing its meaning in nature as well as in the structural qualities in architectural history and design, in architects’ blueprints, drawings and city planning. This integrates sociology, language arts, economics as well as maths. The middle school child can be taught to use the integrated knowledge of how lines are used, to create space in perspective in the visual arts (Glenn, 1985: 5). Similarly the element of shape is another concept that can be used from an interrelation of the biomorphic or organic shapes in biology, geometric shapes in maths; also essays have shape as do stanzas of poetry. In art, shapes in the environment are both orgnic and geometric. Basic Skills: Exploration of media is developed through an integration of art and all disciplines, by prioritizing objectives of students’ learning outcomes. The transescent student needs to develop some essential skills during middle school. Communication skills both visual as well as vocabulary are essential as are analytical and technical skills, and these can be developed in art as well as in areas of the languages. “In an integrated middle school program, art can become an important tool in the inquiry process for solving problems” (Glenn, 1985: 5). Vocabulary development is a vital part of learning any discipline, and visual communication of ideas is necessary when a problem cannot easily be solved by any other means. Analytical skills are required in logic and thought processes and in collecting and evaluating data. In art this applies to selecting subject matter, comparing sizes, planning compositions, extracting meaning, and evaluating visual art. Analytical skills can also be accomplished by learning criteria to critique one’s own work and also peer student work, and that of professional artists and craftspersons. Technical skills in art involve developing psychomotor skills in perfecting craftsmanship. “This also involves using and caring for tools, media and equipment pertaining to producing art” (Glenn, 1985: 5). Personal Development through Art: Awareness of career options and aptitudes, development of visual perceptions, and art appreciation are areas which are areas in which art can contribute to the personal development of the middle school child. Art offers choices of teaching profession, commercial design, interior design, about which middle school children can be given information. Visual perceptual growth is important, and should be taught to middle school children. During the time of the development of visual perception skills, at different stages for each child, thinking undergoes dramatic changes in the child. With a decrease in fantasy, middle school children see details clearly and draw more realistically, and understand spatial relationships. They give importance to proportion, and parts of objects in relation to the whole, should appear right to them. This understanding can carry over to awareness of details and realistic reasoning in other areas. “By learning to see and understand relationships, analogies between nature and architecture, colours and their sources in science, and textures in nature and industry, the student grows visually” (Glenn, 1985: 6). Art appreciation adds meaning to events through history. The middle school child needs to see and understand the background to artists’ work at a particular period in history: the social influences, the technical expertise that was available at that time, the events in science that took place at that time, and the interrelationship between these events and the art of the particular period of time. The personal development of the middle school child is enhanced during these years, when art subjects lose their separate identities and combine into relationships. Students’ prior knowledge of art making processes should be used as an avenue to introduce historical contexts to young learners. When teachers plan developmentally appropriate art curricula that present art works to middle school children, the results of the following research studies can prove to be useful. Middle school level art curriculum might effectively include an introduction of historical events and cultures as avenues to broader art historical understanding (Eisner & Day, 2004: 472). Chanda & Basinger (2000: 67) conducted an ethnographic study of third-grade children’s abilities to construct culturally relevant understandings of artworks made by Kuba artists in what is presently the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The researchers found that students as young as third grade were capable of interpreting art works culturally if engaged in a curriculum that uses a constructivist inquiry approach. Erikson & Young (2002: 27) also studied the effectiveness of a curriculum unit built around the concept of art worlds. Activities in the art unit presented the concept of art worlds as a subculture centred on art. The importance of people, places, activities and ideas to art worlds was taught to the students, with parallels to students’ own art experiences as a basis for introducing these multicultural art worlds. The results showed a significant understanding by the students of all the four art world characteristics, measured before and after teaching them the concepts. Other research studies have shown that two different art museum tours, one taking the form of a lecture and the other the form of a lecture-cum-discussion were both equally effective in long-term information retention. Teachers who are considering introducing new media in their art curriculum would find the following study to be useful. Cason (1998: 346) found that students who studied art history with interactive multimedia “accessed more dimensions, demonstrated more lower order understandings, and had significantly more higher order understandings than students who supplemented their studies with slides”. Thus interactive learning is seen to have improved learning outcomes. Teachers of visual art in middle school carry a great deal of responsibility not only for the implementation of curriculum, but also for its development. In many instances, practising art teachers collaborate with other educators as they develop and adapt curricula (Eisner & Day, 2004: 480). Such an integrated approach to the middle school visual art curriculum is found to be beneficial for normal as well as disadvantaged students and those from diverse cultures. Through transfer of learning from the visual arts dimension to the other academic areas in the middle school curriculum, disadvantaged students are found to improve in learning outcomes and in their confidence levels in tackling other subjects such as maths, science, history, and others. Also, with suitable interventions, their vocabulary and communications skills also improve through discussions and descriptions of visual art works in interactive sessions. Effectiveness Beyond the Art Curriculum Learning across the curriculum is a relatively recent area of interest in art education. Researchers have carried out studies attempting to determine the extent to which learning in art transfers to other areas of achievement. The effectiveness of drawing and discussion as planning activities on middle school children’s narrative writing was studied. The effectiveness of drawing activities on characterization, plot and setting of narrative writing was found to be significantly high, and students showed increased motivation, completeness of rehearsal, and dual-code information processing. Similarly increased conceptual understandings in science have been shown by middle school students who made accurate pictorial representations of science concepts, as compared to another groups who were asked to write what they learned, and a third group which was asked to copy the pictorial representation (Edens & Potter, 2001: 214). Similar investigations on an arts-infusion curriculum on creative thinking, academic achievement, cognitive functioning and visual arts appreciation have found positive results and higher scores as compared to control groups without visual art education. Moreover, high arts involved students scored higher in creativity. Also, teachers scored high arts involved students higher in “expression, risk-taking, and creativity-imagination dimensions, and lower in the cooperative learning dimensions” (Burton et al, 2000: 241). The researchers who investigated learning in twelve middle schools both quantitatively and qualitatively, found that the effective transfer of learning from the art dimension to other areas in the curriculum was only one of a complex of relationships interweaving arts learning with other domains. Visual Arts Provide Freedom of Expression and Meet Needs Arnold (1996: 20) states that a freedom to express one’s beliefs and hopes is central to success throughout life. The freedom of expression through the visual arts should form the core of learning in middle schools in order to provide an environment that fosters autonomy and self-expression. By encouraging the articulate expression of ideas, the children’s communication skills and initiatives in productive activities can be enhanced. An atmosphere of coercion and limited options would never help to achieve optimal learning outcomes. It is important that the school recognizes the middle school child’s need for love, friendship, and belonging to a community. This is especially so in the case of disadvantaged children. A feeling of belonging can help them to gain self-worth and confidence, thereby improving in all other aspects of school life. The middle school should be structured in such a way that students are given opportunities to satisfy these basic needs. A proper balance is required between predictable routines and increasingly widening options to choose from, for children’s development and all-round growth. The discipline of visual arts learning, provides the kinds of challenges and cooperative learning environments that help the child thrive and supports a feeling of mastery. Further, the participating in creating visual arts give the students access to a knowledge of their own uniqueness, and help them to become proactive learners, with a greater role in their academic and other domains. In middle schools, visual arts education provides a platform for youngsters to express their ideas and voice their changing value systems, in a productive manner (Arnold, 1996: 23). Conclusion “Art in the middle school can be the catalyst for an ideal in which there are fewer high school dropouts, and students would leave the public schools as critical and sensitive thinkers” (Glenn, 1985: 7). Children would grow up to be independently secure with a sense of identity and a general ability to function creatively, with adequate life skills. The middle school interdisciplinary approach with a visual arts focus has been found to be effective to help reengage children who are at a disadvantage because of their socio-economic, or cultural background With the curriculum of the middle school structured through a combination of knowledge and organizational skills from a team of teachers from various disciplines, new methods of visual art education to help all transescent children are being developed. Specialized one-to-one interactions are required for disadvantaged children to ensure that their vocabulary and speech construction is consistently being attended to, by the encouragement of narration and description of visual cues. This will help the child improve in communication skills and confidence, enhancing their social abilities. Future research on the middle school approach should focus on how visual art making and visual art viewing should be integrated for best outcomes in learning new art concepts and techiques. Another important area is determining the ways in which verbal and visual information can impact on the transfer of learning from visual art to enchanced life skills and the area of academics, for disadvantaged children and students from diverse cultures. References Arnold, A. 1996. Fostering autonomy through the arts. Art Education, 49 (4): 20-34. Ballengee-Morris, C. & Stuhr, P.L. 2001. Multicultural art and visual cultural education in a changing world. Art Education, 54 (4): 6-13. Burton, J.M., Horowitz, R. & Abeles, H. 2000. Learning in and through the arts: the question of transfer. Studies in Art Education, 41 (3): 228-257. Chanda, J. & Basinger, A.M. 2000. Understanding the cultural meaning of selected African ndop statues: the use of art history constructivist inquiry methods. Studies in Art Education. 42 (1): 67-82. Edens, K.M. & Potter, E.F. 2001. Promoting conceptual understanding through pictorial representation. Studies in Art Education, 42 (3): 214-233. Eisner, E.W. & Day, M.D. 2004. Handbook of research and policy in art education. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Erickson, M & Young, B. 2002. Multicultural artworlds: enduring, evolving and overlapping traditions. Reston: National Art Education Association. Glenn, D.D. 1986. The middle school: art, the transescent child, and the role of the teacher. Art Education, 39 (5): 4-7. Read More