The Center for Art and Public Life worked in a yearlong partnership in 2005–6 with two Oakland public schools, East Bay Conservation Corps Charter School and Far West School. United by common educational missions that include arts learning, social justice, and civic engagement, the Center and its two partners conceived and implemented curricula, together called the Art and Social Justice Project.
Art and Social Justice Project
We are pleased to present sample curricula that were created by teachers at each school, with the assistance of Humboldt State University interns and further developed and refined by coaching artists from the Center: Mildred Howard, Liz Harvey, Celia Herrera Rodriguez, and Jennifer Stuart.
Interdependence: Going to Seed and Back Again with the Help of Some Friends
Kindergarten
Teachers: Kim Kita, Isabelle McDaniel
Interns: Natalie Karet, Adrian Wilson
School: East Bay Conservation Corps Charter
Energy Sources: Planning for the Future
Fifth Grade
Teacher: Laura Allen
Intern: Sarah Nilmeyer
School: East Bay Conservation Corps Charter
Habitat: The Importance of the Environment That We Live In
First Grade
Teachers: Melinda Stahr, K.C. Bull
Interns: Sarah Nilmeyer, Nathalie Karet
School: East Bay Conservation Corps Charter
History: The Oakland Hall of Fame
Ninth and Tenth grade
Teacher: Alex Huezo
School: Far West
The Teaching for Understanding and Studio Thinking Frameworks
The curricula are based on the Teaching for Understanding and the Studio Thinking frameworks, pedagogical tools developed by the Center's institutional partner Project Zero.
The Teaching for Understanding Framework guides teachers' lesson-plan design to help their students develop dispositions toward using discipline-specific content and techniques flexibly in a wide range of contexts, both inside and outside the classroom. The framework helps guide teachers' decisions about what to teach, how to communicate their intentions to students, and how to support students in challenging misconceptions and developing patterns of rigorous thinking.
The Studio Thinking Framework guides teachers to reflect on what they intend students to learn in relation to the studio habits of mind, eight cognitive dispositions of mature artistic thinking and practice in the visual arts (see the VALUES Project for a description of all eight). Students who develop these habits become more alert to the world, more skilled at thinking about it, and more able to commit to acting mindfully upon it as visual artists.
In addition, the Studio Thinking Framework identifies and defines three typical classroom structures used by studio arts teachers to support students in developing these ways of thinking. These are Demonstration-Lectures, visually rich lectures that convey information students will use immediately; Students-at-Work, sessions in which students work on individual or group challenges while teachers observe and offer "just-in-time" instruction; and Critiques, metacognitive pauses in which teachers and students reflect upon student work that is in progress or finished.
Funding
Funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.