5 Reasons to Study the Visual Arts

1. The visual arts teach visual literacy in our image-saturated world.
2. The visual arts bridge language barriers in increasingly diverse classrooms.
3. The visual arts are ideal for teaching interdisciplinary concepts and skills.
4. The visual arts embrace ambiguities and encourage inquiry and exploration.
5. The visual arts foster empathy and help us envision alternative realities.

Fostering Arts Integration through a Liberation Lens

The academic and civic benefits of teaching with and through the arts, especially for low-income students, are well established. Yet, U.S. Department of Education data suggest that low-income students are less likely to have access to an arts education than their higher-income peers. This arts education gap can be compounded by geography. As a student in rural Vermont and as a teacher in a Yup’ik village on Alaska’s Yukon Kuskokwim delta, I saw firsthand how the proximity to cultural institutions significantly impacted students’ access to the arts.

To level the geographic and economic playing field and extend cultural assets to historically overlooked classrooms, this site is designed around free, publicly accessible resources. The artworks shared are supported by embedded links to the artist’s website or to the museum/gallery that hosts the work. Access these links to view higher resolution images or additional related works. Likewise, the libraries, national parks, and historic periodicals and documents used for further research are publicly accessible, academically sound, and represent some of the best teaching resources the Internet has to offer.

This gap in arts education is also a consequence of the way the arts are taught in American schools. In most elementary schools art is taught by a specialist. Reading, writing, and social studies, on the other hand, are taught by generalists and seamlessly integrated across the curriculum. This is extended in middle school, high school, and beyond when literacy skills are taught in language arts, history, and science classes. This results in an unintended curricular consequence. Artistic thinking’s habits of mind—visual literacy, envisioning, creativity, wondering, and empathy, to name a few—are too often deemed incidental and the responsibility of the arts education specialist.

While teachers are well trained in unpacking literature, unpacking a work of art can be less familiar and more intimidating. To help all teachers harness the power of art, this website offers mentor art and lessons that build on established curricula and popular instructional frameworks. For example, mentor texts have long been used to model writing techniques. Mentor art can likewise be used to inspire, teach, and refine student writing. Mentor art has the added benefit of addressing diverse learning styles and providing visual support to language learners.

Organized around an inquiry-based, expanding-conversation framework, these art-based cross-curricular lessons involve students in exploring real-world issues and envisioning alternative possibilities. Chosen for their capacity to cultivate social imagination, these art works explore topics such as housing discrimination, wildlife preservation, worker rights, Jim Crow laws, and the dangers of fanaticism. Viewing art through a liberation lens helps students recognize the power dynamics that shape a work of art, while also seeing how these iconic works reflect their interests and identities. Students are able to speak to the accomplishments of individual artists, while also challenging their implicit biases.

In addition to providing mentor art, teaching strategies, and discussion prompts, these lessons highlight creativity research and involve students in thinking like artists.

To realize its full potential, this site will need to cultivate an interactive community of educators that grows this content together. Use the comment section on each page to share your insights, needs, and interests. Let us know how we can help you use art analysis, talk, and inquiry studies to nurture artistic thinking and social imagination across the curriculum.