What Art Means to Me...

Third graders wowed with these playful self-portraits. Each students hold a paper explaining what they loe about making art!

The Crayon Box That Talked

First Graders are experts when it comes to team work. After reading "The Crayon Box That Talked" each student completed a square of the mystery picture to discover their school mascots!

Lincoln Lion:

Longfellow Bear:

Fire Safety Posters

Third graders know all about Fire Safety! Winners of the Oak Park Fire Department Poster Contest will get to have a pizza party with the local fire department! This Year's Theme is "Test Your Smoke Alarm  Every Month!"

Can Art Make You Smarter?

By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN

Published: November 23, 2013

FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.

A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.

Thanks to a generous private gift, the museum has a program that allows school groups to visit at no cost to students or schools.

Before the opening, we were contacted by the museum’s education department. They recognized that the opening of a major museum in an area that had never had one before was an unusual event that ought to be studied. But they also had a problem. Because the school tours were being offered free, in an area where most children had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions, demand for visits far exceeded available slots. In the first year alone, the museum received applications from 525 school groups requesting tours for more than 38,000 students.

As social scientists, we knew exactly how to solve this problem. We partnered with the museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots. By randomly assigning school tours, we were able to allocate spots fairly. Doing so also created a natural experiment to study the effects of museum visits on students, the results of which we published in the journals Education Next and Educational Researcher.

Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum. Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group.

Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, we administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a work of art that was unfamiliar to them.

These essays were then coded using a critical-thinking-skills assessment program developed by researchers working with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Further, we directly measured whether students are more likely to return to Crystal Bridges as a result of going on a school tour. Students who participated in the study were given a coupon that gave them and their families free entry to a special exhibit at the museum. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the group to which students belonged. Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.

Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

Further research is needed to determine what exactly about the museum-going experience determines the strength of the outcomes. How important is the structure of the tour? The size of the group? The type of art presented?

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

Brian Kisida is a senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/art-makes-you-smart.html?_r=2&

Welcome Back!

It is a brand new school year and I am ready to get back to making art with my fabulous students! Stay tuned for some amazing artworks to be posted soon!

Food for thought over the summer...

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.” 
― Carlos Fuentes

“Never judge someone 
By the way he looks 
Or a book by the way it's covered; 
For inside those tattered pages, 
There's a lot to be discovered” 
― Stephen Cosgrove

“Since we are teachers of persons as well as subject matter, we cannot ignore the moral dimensions of our discipline: we have to teach character as well as technique” (Feldman, 1996, p. 97)

Why the Arts Change the Learning Experience by John Eger

John Eger is the Van Deerlin endowed chair of communications and public policy at San Diego State University and the author of The Creative Community: Linking Art, Culture, Commerce and Community. E-mail: jeger@mail.sdsu.edu

Why the Arts Change the Learning Experience 
Although the researchers behind the Arts Education Partnership's "Champions of Change" report conducted their investigations independently, a remarkable consensus emerged among their findings: Issued in 2000, in conjunction with the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the report made these points about K-12 arts education:

• THE ARTS REACH STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT OTHERWISE BEING REACHED. Young people who are disengaged from schools and other community institutions are at the greatest risk of failure or harm. The arts provided a reason and sometimes the only reason for being engaged with school or other organizations.

• THE ARTS REACH STUDENTS IN WAYS THAT THEY ARE NOT OTHERWISE BEING REACHED. Young people who were considered classroom failures, perhaps "acting out" because conventional classroom practices were not engaging them, often became the high achievers in arts learning settings. Success in the arts becomes a bridge to learning and eventual success in other areas of learning.

• THE ARTS CONNECT STUDENTS TO THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER. Creating artwork is a personal experience. Students draw upon their personal resources to generate the result. By engaging their whole person, they feel invested in ways that are deeper than "knowing the answer."

• THE ARTS TRANSFORM THE ENVIRONMENT FOR LEARNING. When the arts become central to the learning environment, schools and other settings become places of discovery. The very school culture is changed and the conditions for learning improve. Figurative walls between classrooms and disciplines are broken down. Teachers are renewed. Even the physical appearance of a school building is transformed through the representations of learning.

• THE ARTS PROVIDE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE ADULTS IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG PEOPLE. Those held responsible for the development of children and youth — teachers, parents and other adults — are rarely given sufficient or significant opportunities for their own continuing education. With adults participating in lifelong learning, young people gain an understanding that learning in any field is a never-ending process. The roles of the adults are also changed. In effective programs, the adults become coaches or active facilitators of learning.

• THE ARTS PROVIDE NEW CHALLENGES FOR THOSE STUDENTS ALREADY CONSIDERED SUCCESSFUL. Boredom and complacency are barriers to success. For those young people who outgrow their established learning environments, the arts can offer a chance for unlimited challenge. In some situations, older students may teach and mentor younger students. In others, young people gain from the experience of working with professional artists.

• THE ARTS CONNECT LEARNING EXPERIENCES TO THE WORLD OF REAL WORK. The world of adult work has changed, and the arts learning experiences described in the research show remarkable consistency with the evolving workplace. Ideas are what matter, and the ability to generate ideas, to bring ideas to life and to communicate them is what matters to workplace success. Working in a classroom or a studio as an artist, the young person is learning and practicing future workplace behaviors.

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/champions/exec%5fsumm.html.


Eger, J. (2008). The arts in contemporary education. School Administrator, 65(3). Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.bu.edu/ehost/detail?sid=d2a67c5f-0989-4744-9aef-d087ac53de1d%40sessionmgr110&vid=2&hid=128&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=eft&AN=508046426
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