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The Open Art Room
By Melissa Purtee and Ian Sands
Taking inspiration from a variety of contemporary approaches, this book presents a framework for Choice-Based instruction for Secondary Level (grades 6–12) Art Education. The Open Art Room provides a student-centered approach to art instruction that is inspirational, practical, and classroom-tested. ISBN: 978-16152-8677-5, 217 pages, softcover
Highlights include:
- Flexible instructional frameworks with options for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of Choice
- Assessment for Choice-Based art teachers
- Unit plans, bootcamps, mini-lessons, and classroom examples
- Clear connections to the National Core Art Standards
- Engaging stories of student struggles and successes
What Is Choice?
To teach authentic art-making we have to take a fully holistic view. Art is so much more than the final product—it is a process. The planning, designing, revising, and reflecting that art-making requires, skills that we call “artistic behaviors,” are activities that have enormous value in the art classroom and in the real world. If we want our students to learn how to engage with their own creativity and make art in a way that is authentic, it is essential that we offer them pathways to independence and help them practice artistic behaviors as foundational skills. The facilitation of self-expression has to be a pervasive goal, not merely something that students will be exposed to later, when they are deemed “skilled” enough. These artistic behaviors can be directly taught as learnable skills, as part of every project, K–12. We ought to take the expectation for “pretty” out of art education and instead instill expectations for meaning and for creative thinking. The intent of this book is to help teachers accomplish these goals by providing a framework for teaching students to think like artists.
Table of Contents
- What Is Choice?
- Building the Framework
- Implementing Choice at the Beginning Level
- Implementing Choice at the Intermediate Level
- Implementing Choice at the Advanced Level
- Assessment
- Introduction to Art Bootcamp
- Artistic Behavior Unit Plans