Unit Paper 5: Structures and Systems Rachel Lapastora 1

Rachel Lapastora

Unit Paper 5

Professor Amber Ward

November 2, 2017
Unit Paper 5: Structures and Systems Rachel Lapastora 2

For many years, Americas educational system has continually worked on reforming the

standards-based expectations for students to meet. At times some students as well as teachers

may find it difficult to keep up and follow educational standards, but by having a certain

standard, teachers will be able to better organize and prepare curriculum. In art education having

structures and systems will help guide many students in creating their artwork. Students will also

be able to easily grasp information given to them and not feel they have a vague idea of what is

required from them. According to Eisner (2002), The arts position in the school curriculum

symbolizes to the young what adults BELIEVE is IMPORTANT (p. 29). Incorporating

structures and systems will help guide many teachers to form lesson plans and keep students

aligned with key concepts they would want their students to know. Walker (2001) states, To

design artmaking instruction for in-depth learning, teachers must build own knowledge base

about the units big idea, biographical information for relevant artists, unit-related artworks and

the social context of their creation and presentation, and associated artistic ideas (p. 96).

Structures and systems is a helpful teaching tool that can help keep both students and teachers

stay aligned with one another and cause for less confusion in classrooms.

For my future art students, I would modify the structures and systems Chance

Operations studio by including the use of color to the instructions that were already given. For

example, one of the instructions may include, paint one dot on the line using a cool color or vice

versa using warm colors. The next instruction may continue to say draw a curved line across the

canvas using the complementary color of the previous color used. By doing so, I will know my

students understand the difference between cool and warm colors as well as learning art terms. I

can also use this inclusion of color to add as a learning objective to my lesson plans such as the

student will be able to explore contrasting colors.

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References

Eisner, E. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Walker, S. (2001). Teaching meaning in artmaking. Worchester, MA: Davis.