Moving Toward Conceptual Curriculum Planning

When I started putting together my first curriculum, I thought that a helpful bit of information to consider would be my recollection of the art projects I did when I was in school. However, to my dismay, I could not remember many of the art lessons I had as a student. Most of my art education experience in the Florida Public School system is pretty much a blur.

I resorted to talking to friends of mine who were seasoned teachers. They gave me books and pages of old lesson plans which ended up becoming a starting point for my curriculum planning. The two themes I saw in all of these lessons were a chronological presentation of art history, and the elements and principles of design. These two ideas have formed the framework of my curricula ever since I have started teaching art. One thing I liked most about these frameworks is that they made it very easy for me to decide what to do next. After a lesson on Lascaux cave paintings, it was obvious that Ancient Roman art would be a good place to go. By the same token, a project focusing on shape naturally follows a lesson on line.

This seemed to work fine for a couple of years, especially since the elements and principles were new concepts to me (I hadn’t covered them in my music degree), and art history was so exciting in itself. I really thought it was quite an accomplishment to get them to interact with historical art, even if they were producing their own piece in the style of a Van Gogh, or copying a Monet. And if I could get them to think about the way art can be broken down into elements, and how to critique art according to principles, I thought I would be satisfied. But there were many times when I wished that my students’ artmaking experience could be more like mine is—an organic process of creation. I found so much more satisfaction in teaching independent projects some of my students would do when participating in county-wide and nation-wide contests than I did teaching my normal classes, because I could talk with each of them and help them to come up with ideas that were relevant to their interests, and that inspired them to create.

Why was it that I eventually enjoyed teaching my curriculula so much less than these individual projects? In retrospect, I think my frustration with my curricula lied in its exclusion of the first part of the creative process: generating ideas. Many of the projects in my lessons were primarily mimetic. Maybe I was either assuming I could not teach it, or I was assuming that my students could not do it. Maybe I was considering the technical aspects of the art-making process to be more important to teach than the creative thinking aspects. The consequence is that many of my students have difficulties coming up with ideas when I leave projects more open-ended. This is something that I intend to fix as I write my new curriculum. It is true that the technical side of art is much more straightforward, and it is difficult to make good art with little technical skill. However, without the ability to come up with an idea, what good is technical skill to an artist? Therefore, my key concept for my students to explore will be “Where do artists get their ideas?”