The Art Room: Fine Art Learning Standards for Illinois

STATE GOAL 25: Know the language of the arts.

Why This Goal Is Important: Through observation, discussion, interpretation and analysis, students learn the “language” of the arts. They learn to understand how others express ideas in dance, drama, music and visual art forms. In addition to acquiring knowledge essential to performance and production, students become arts consumers (e.g., attending live performances or movies, purchasing paintings or jewelry, or visiting museums) who understand the basic elements and principles underlying artworks and are able to critique them.

STATE GOAL 26: Through creating and performing,

understand how works of art are produced.

Why This Goal Is Important: Students acquire skills to produce and perform dance, drama, music and visual art. They learn to use media, tools and technologies. They learn to shape ideas and emotions into sounds, images and actions. As students create and perform their own artworks and review the works of others, they become more imaginative, strengthen their problem-solving skills and learn to respond to the creativity of others. Creating and performing are at the core of the fine arts. Students also learn about the role of the artist (e.g., dancer, painter, actor, director, scriptwriter, musician).

STATE GOAL 27: Understand the role of the arts in

civilizations, past and present.

Why This Goal Is Important: The arts are a record of civilizations, past and present. Artists are influenced by—and influence—the times and places in which they live and work. As students learn through the arts about people and civilizations, they learn about others and themselves. Also, students learn about careers related to this goal (e.g., animator, curator, art historian, sound technician).

10 things learned in Art

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.

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Fine Art Learning Standards for Illinois