Advocacy

Click here for the TAEA Advocacy Pamphlet

Click here for the TAEA Art Advocacy Web Links

Art: Today's Brain Food — Dr. Cindy Todd



Be an Art Advocate! Act Now!

Tom Waggoner, Advocacy Chair Texas Art Education Association

Benefits of Art Education

Art teachers experience throughout their professional career the many benefits of providing students with a quality fine arts education. Art educators observe their students succeed in the arts in addition to other academic areas. Others, however, may not understand the connection between art/finearts learning and student success. Consequently, art/fine arts teachers must often justify the importance of their programs by validating how students develop and demonstrate art/fine arts knowledge and skills in addition to how art/fine arts education impacts student learning in other content areas.

The Center for Educator Development in Fine Arts (CEDFA) website contains a database of research studies that highlight the impact of a quality art education on achievement in other academic disciplines. Several of the studies contain web addresses of supporting sites. Click this link to the CEDFA website provided below to access the research studies that support the importance of art education in our school.

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

By Elliot Eisner

  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.
  2. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
  3. 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.
  4. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
  5. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
  6. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.