Living and teaching in Asia painfully reminds me of how inadequate my knowledge of non-western art is. I can rattle off movements and artists from Europe and the Americas without blinking an eye, but given the same challenge with non-Western art, nothing but the sound of silence would fill the air.
While it is impossible for art teachers to cover art created by all the peoples of the world over thousands of years in their classrooms, I do think it is our responsibility to make more of an effort. Often times, art from places such as Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are included in the curriculum as “special multicultural units.” While this is a noble attempt to expand our students’ knowledge of art, it simply doesn’t cut it. Art from areas such as the ones mentioned above should be incorporated into all lessons done throughout the year. Wouldn’t a lesson on landscape painting be more effective if students compared and contrasted European and Asia images of nature? How might a student’s understanding of pattern might change after looking at textiles from America and Africa?
In order to start filling in the holes of my own art knowledge, I am starting to compile a list of online resources. Seeing I live in China, my stop is Asian art. I came across a link to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum on the Asian Region Art Educators website and thought this was a great site to share. The museum’s education section has a series of very informative and very free PDFs on art from all over Asia. They are worth checking out.
If anyone has other good Asian art resources, please send me the link and I will post it to this site for others to see.
Last night, David and I had dinner with two wonderful ladies from Philadelphia’s Classrooms for the Future program. After cleaning up from a very yummy dinner one of the women showed us her technology goody bag. One of the items that she shared was a Livescribe Pulse Smart Pen. My jaw hit the floor when she showed us how it worked! This pen allows users to take hand written notes in a special pad and record audio at the same time. The cool thing about the pen is that you can upload *both* items onto your computer. You can search your notes for certain key words and then easily replay the audio file that relates to that topic. Brillant! Where was this when I was in grad school?