Arts Education

Visual Arts

Rationale for Visual Arts Education

Experiences of creating and interacting with works of art and design are vital for all students. Visual arts education develops unique, powerful, and multiple ways of perceiving, interpreting, knowing, representing, and communicating understandings about self and the world.

Visual artmaking and art viewing experiences teach students to observe and think about their visual environments, apply their imaginations, think creatively, explore ideas and feelings, and develop understandings about their emerging personal, cultural, and social identities. Through art experiences, students discover a larger world of real and imagined places, people, and ideas. Art provides a creative and intellectual playground for students, a place of wonder and surprise, a place to learn and grow.

Learning in, through, and about the visual arts promotes open-ended, divergent, and dialogic thinking and encourages understanding and feeling mediated through body, mind, and the senses. The visual arts foster imaginative, exploratory, active, and personalized learning opportunities that engage and motivate. Learning in the visual arts enables students to explore ambiguity, to think imaginatively, innovatively, and with flexibility and empathy, and to feel confident with uncertainty and risk.

A sustained, quality visual arts education seeks to develop the artistic dimension within all students, enabling them to mature into visually and artistically literate adults able to enjoy, participate fully in, and think critically about and within the evolving visual culture that surrounds and exerts influence in their lives. Visual arts education has the potential to promote responsibility and leadership and to prepare and inspire future citizens of the world to address the most critical challenges of their times.