{"id":135,"date":"2014-09-10T11:29:56","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T11:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jodilis.wordpress.com\/?p=135"},"modified":"2014-09-10T11:29:56","modified_gmt":"2014-09-10T11:29:56","slug":"art-makes-you-smart-or-is-it-art-for-arts-sake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/2014\/09\/10\/art-makes-you-smart-or-is-it-art-for-arts-sake\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Makes You Smart or is it Art for Art’s Sake?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"370px-Auguste_Rodin_-_Grubleren_2005-02\"<\/a>
The Thinker by Auguste Rodin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Innovation and creativity are things that we hear about all the time.\u00a0 To be innovative, you need to think creatively.\u00a0 Art is one way to foster this.\u00a0 OECD published a report, Art for Art’s Sake?\u00a0 The Impact of Arts Education<\/a> looking at the impact of arts education and these kinds of outcomes. They<\/a> asked the question “does arts education really have a positive impact on the three subsets of skills that we define as “skills for innovation”: technical skills, skills in thinking and creativity and character (behavioural and social skills)?\u00a0 What did they find<\/a>?<\/p>\n

We see articles like these : Art Makes You Smart<\/a> and Is Music the Key to Success?<\/a>\u00a0 The research on art making you smart article is based on one school visit to a museum to children who had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions.\u00a0 Is this group of kids smart now?<\/p>\n

The museum article states that \u2018museum visits really do improve critical thinking’ and ‘high achievers say musical training played a central role in their lives.\u2019\u00a0 Lots of studies make the correlation.\u00a0 The OECD study did not find that evidence. \u00a0 The sole longitudinal study in the OECD report on music found there was “no persistent influence after three years of music.”<\/p>\n

Does it matter?\u00a0 It doesn’t matter to me.\u00a0 My reaction how could you possibly measure what seeing and listening to beauty impacts education.\u00a0 It impacts all your senses.\u00a0 It impacts the way you look at things, the way you hear things.\u00a0 Whether it is art, music, even watching an athlete make a perfect play, how could what it resonates inside of you be measured, perhaps years later? My feeling goes along with the title of the OECD report,\u00a0 Art for Art’s Sake.<\/p>\n

My example:\u00a0 I recently did my first Sketchnote<\/a>, a visual note, about an event by Coders4Africa<\/a>.\u00a0 It explains what I learned from the event. I have been taking calligraphy lessons for several years. What you see is my practicing writing pretty letters and learning how to arrange them and using what I learned to write about a techie event.<\/p>\n

What I wonder most about are the kids in the parts of the world that do not have museums or lessons accessible to them.\u00a0 According to the statistics<\/a> being kept for\u00a0Millinium Development to Achieve Universal Education, enrolment in primary education in developing regions reached 90 per cent in 2010, up from 82 per cent in 1999, which means more kids than ever are attending primary school.\u00a0 Yet at the same time 57 million children of primary school age were out of school.<\/p>\n

What about any of these kids, in or out of school? How can they visit museums?\u00a0 Where can they see what is in a museum?\u00a0 How can teachers learn about art and show their students? Is it possible?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Is it feasible?\u00a0 Perhaps. Perhaps not.\u00a0 My purpose is to put it out there.\u00a0 I think of a few teachers in Garissa, Kenya, and I know that he would be excited to learn about this. Start somewhere.<\/p>\n

Google Art Project<\/a>\u00a0 has 40 countries who have contributed more than 40,000 high-resolution images of works ranging from oil on canvas to sculpture and furniture.\u00a0 Around the world you can see art in the Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art<\/a> at Pan-African University, the Rijks Museum<\/a> in the Netherlands, Virtual Museum of Canada<\/a>, the Virtual Museum of Japanese Arts<\/a> and National Museum Australia’s collection interactives<\/a><\/p>\n

How to learn more about creating art? National Gallery of Art has a series of lessons.<\/a> The lesson on texture<\/a> identifies different types of textures found in works of art such as smooth water, wrinkled skin or furry plums and hypothesizing what materials and techniques were used to achieve that texture.\u00a0 Did they brush paint on in watery strokes and thick drips or twirl their brushes to make circles and curls? The pictures in the slideshow can be downloaded although it is set at a small image.<\/p>\n

Have you ever visited the Exploratorium<\/a> site?\u00a0 It is one of my favorites. You can watch a cow’s eye dissection<\/a> and learn how to do your own. You can find a lesson plan on physics using eggs<\/a>, or take a tour on the Geometry Playground<\/a>. When I taught years ago in The Gambia, I would bring my students there to play a \u201cgame\u201d to guess what the object is that they were showing.\u00a0 They loved it.\u00a0\u00a0 Kids can be a Museum Explorer<\/a>\u00a0 or a Time Explorer<\/a> in the British Musem rescuing artifacts.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of these do require internet and have other hurdles to access them, but it could be shown on the teacher’s computer and put up on the wall.\u00a0 Students are groups and at each step of exploration, one group would decide what to do next.<\/p>\n

ArtBabble<\/a> is a website that showcases high quality art-related video content from more than 50 cultural institutions from around the world.\u00a0 One area that they look at is how art and design connect with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics):\u00a0 STEAM<\/a>.\u00a0 Add the A for art in STEM.\u00a0 Listen to Frank Stella<\/a>‘s video about art on irregular polygons.\u00a0 Learn geometry through art?\u00a0 Yes!<\/p>\n

How to bring it altogether?\u00a0 Try virtual museum presentations<\/a>.\u00a0 The site is several years “old” and uses powerpoint as the template to create the museums.\u00a0 But, hey, what a great way to learn powerpoint and go online and search collections of art. The first time I took kids to museum sites was around 2000. I found plenty to see and do.\u00a0 The possibilities are endless now.<\/p>\n

And, of course, if tablets are available, there are plenty of art apps and plenty other sites.<\/p>\n

Let’s simply enjoy the arts – whether or not it makes you smart.<\/p>\n

Photo: “Auguste Rodin – Grubleren 2005-02” by Rodin (1840-1917)User:Hansjorn (Hans Andersen) – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Innovation and creativity are things that we hear about all the time.\u00a0 To be innovative, you need to think creatively.\u00a0 Art is one way to foster this.\u00a0 OECD published a report, Art for Art’s Sake?\u00a0 The Impact of Arts Education looking at the impact of arts education and these kinds of outcomes. They asked the …<\/p>\n

Art Makes You Smart or is it Art for Art’s Sake?<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}