Curriculum Rationale

Profound changes in American society are requiring that students, in addition to learning the basic curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic, also gain critical thinking and computer literacy skills in order to succeed. Art education, offered in conducive learning environments which include computer resources, presents an excellent opportunity for students to develop these skills.

One of the primary goals of education is to enable students to develop their minds, using multiple intelligences and creativity as a means to achieve this. In order for learners to develop their mental capabilities and realize their full potential, they need to be exposed to many kinds of knowledge and ways of expressing their thoughts. Learning about art is important because the visual arts convey meaning and knowledge about the world, through two and three-dimensional forms such as drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture, that are unique and different from that gained through verbal and written language (Getty, 1985).

It is also important to learn about art because, as American society becomes more and more diverse, the importance of developing students who are culturally sensitive and literate is also increasing. Art education has the ability to provide students with a means for understanding the history and expressions of cultures and civilizations, enabling them to examine the values of their own culture and to appreciate the achievements of other cultures.

Traditionally, providing conducive learning environments for students to learn about art has meant providing qualified teachers, art rooms, instructional materials, curricula, programs, administrative support, and financial resources. Increasingly, it also means providing students in visual art courses with access to computer technology.

We live in an era which has been and will continue to be profoundly influenced by advances in digital technology. These advances are having a dramatic impact in the field of education, where a growing number of educators are exploring ways of taking advantage of interactive multimedia and telecommunications technologies in order to expand the repertoire of pedagogical practice and enhance learning.

Computers are increasingly useful for instruction in art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. A growing number of cultural institutions, including The National Gallery of Art in London, The Louvre, and The Art Institute of Chicago, and publishers such as Digital Collections, Inc. (The Frick Collection: Paintings) and Yale University Press (Interaction of Color: Josef Albers) have produced interactive multimedia programs on the visual arts. Such programs offer educators a powerful means of enriching the experiences of students in art education courses.

Bonny Lhotka, Free Weight, 1995
Courtesy of the artist

The open-ended design of some computer graphics programs, such as Fractal Design Painter and Dabbler, enables students in art production courses to create visual images of considerable complexity and sophistication, extending them into realms of self-expression. These graphics tools can be used for tasks such as refining visual concepts and ideas, preparing rough layouts, and even executing finished works (Blomeyer, 1993).

In the field of education, the concept of School is shifting from the traditional model of a building with centralized resources to a future model of a location-independent collection of educational resources and services. The implication for art education curricula in schools is clear: in order to achieve many of their curricular aims today and on into the 21st-century, they must effectively utilize digital telecommunications technology to enhance student access for learning about art.

Recently, educators have begun to give serious attention to the educative potential of the Internet, including the World Wide Web (WWW or the Web), a global multimedia communication network. Using browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, Web users can view files with text, graphics, photographs, sound, and video located on computers around the world. Web files are linked to other Web files using hyperlinks, which can be text or graphics with the addresses of other Web files attached to them in the underlying scripting language. By simply clicking on the hyperlinks on the computer screen, Web users can navigate between files and computers on the Web.

The educational value of the Web in its present form is significant. The hyperlinked nature of the Web, which makes it possible to connect content and ideas at deep and meaningful levels, can be viewed as analogous to human cognitive processes for encoding information, such as forming hierarchies or using elaboration to increase the number of associations in information. With tens of thousands of server computers containing millions of documents, the Web contains an impressive number of resources and amount of information. Designed to facilitate information access and retrieval, Web technology enables unstructured discovery or, with the participation of a teacher at the same site as the user, guided discovery learning is possible.

The educative potential of the World Wide Web will be substantially increased when Web technologies are combined with videoconferencing and voice communications technologies. This will enable real-time human interaction within shared interactive multimedia environments that can be accessed from locations around the world. Within these online environments, art students could benefit from communicating with artists, specialists, and other students from around the world. This development also would promote cross-cultural awareness and support global collaborative projects. Progress toward this goal in the field of education can be seen in applications of Internet-based videoconferencing software such as CU-SeeMe. Developed at Cornell University, CU-SeeMe (pronounced “see you, see me”) provides an ability to communicate via video, sound, and text on the Internet (Sattler, 1995). CU-SeeMe has been used in a number of educational projects with notable success.

There are other compelling reasons to include computers in environments for art education which go beyond curricular applications alone. One reason is the cognitive benefits students in art education courses derive as a result of using types of educational software that have been referred to as cognition enhancers. The concept of a cognition enhancer is that the cognitive strengths of a person and a computer technology can be used to complement each other. For example, computers have much more short-term memory, in the form of random-access memory (RAM), than do humans. People on the other hand store information over the long term in rich networks of associated textual, temporal, and visual imagery which gives them an advantage over computers at applying knowledge to unstructured problems (Dede, 1987). Examples of cognition enhancement software include graphics programs such as Fractal Design Painter, interactive multimedia environments such as the CD-ROM "A Passion for Art: Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Dr. Barnes," microworlds such as that represented by MicroWorlds Logo, and a virtual field trip to an art museum such as The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC via the World Wide Web.

Another important reason to include computers in art education courses, which goes beyond their use to achieve specific curricular goals, is the role computers can play in instilling students with a positive orientation to the future, which some research has suggested is the case (Tierney, 1992). A positive orientation to the future is a priceless characteristic for anyone to have, and computers in art education courses can play a role in developing this in students.