It’s that time of the year when both educators and students are dreaming of long days on the beach (or anywhere outside the classroom really!) during Summer Vacation. The two months outside of the classroom is also the perfect time to catch up on reading some very engaging books on Contemporary Art, Education, and Activism (and beaches are the perfect environments to read!). There are so many worthy titles to read and the list can go on and on, however, for the sake of constraining it to a short period, below is an abridged list of some essential publications that anyone who’s interested in arts-centered learning should pick up.
Against the Flow: Education, the arts, and postmodern culture, Peter Abbs, Routledge (October 4, 2003)
Peter Abbs is one of the UK’s (and the world’s) leading practitioners and theorists in Arts Education (and a very celebrated poet too!). In Against the Flow, Abbs argues that the quantitative focus of modern education –the reliance on a universal proficiency standard to measure student assessment– is a disservice for students because it doesn’t acknowledge that students develop at their own pace. Furthermore, by using proficiency standards and “teaching to the test,” institutions have regarded essential subjects like the arts to be mere specialty areas of study. Abb’s brilliantly argues why this practice is short-sided and how the arts add vitality, engagement, and relevance to the overall contemporary education environment. This book will prepare educators with a wealth of topics, which they can bring back into the school environment. Especially, during the meetings where other educators may snidely say to the art teacher “well art is easy, I wish my students were as engaged in ________ class” or “how do you even asses something as specialized as art?” The answers that art educators can respond to these questions with will have profound influence across the curriculum. Every student can be engaged across the curriculum if they are thinking like an artist (studio habits of mind) and are engaged in creative, collaborative, problem solving activities. The lecture where the teacher talks for 45 minutes straight is as relevant as the arrogant “educated” owl in the Tootsie Roll Pop commercials.
Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play, Mitchel Resnick, MIT Press (August 18, 2017)
This publication was highly influential on my own writing and thinking about creating an inter-disciplinary curriculum that is relevant to contemporary life. In this book, Marshall and Donahue present the framework for inquiry based art-centered learning across the entire Secondary School curriculum (social studies, math, science, and ELA). Many of the ideas are inspired by Harvard’s Project Zero and are further supported through a wide range of examples from the Contemporary Art field. The book breaks down how art projects can relate to students’ lives and support a lifelong thirst for knowledge through visual learning and enduring understandings.
These are just four examples of the amazing array of literature that will quench your thirst for learning how to live, work, and educate artfully! If you have a particular book, publication, or blog that you’d like to share, please add it in the comments!
Artfully Learning 