Art & Activity: Interactive Strategies for Engaging with Art

Art can be a powerful catalyst for building skills and understanding a range of subjects. Intended for primary and secondary teachers of all disciplines, Art & Activity builds upon the inquiry-based approaches of Art and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies for Your Classroom, while delving into activity-based strategies that will make your students empowered participants.

Introduction to Art and Activity
Welcome to Art and Activity: Interactive Strategies for Teaching with Art. Art can be a powerful catalyst for building skills and understanding across a wide range of subjects. Establish your foundation by watching each module's video lectures and reviewing the required readings, artworks, and additional resources. Then, test your knowledge with the quizzes and be sure to comment on videos and post in the discussion forums to share your thoughts.

Activities for Analyzing and Reflecting
In this module, we’re moving from theory to practice, with videos that discuss drawing, sound, movement, writing, and game-based activities that build skills for analyzing and reflecting about art. Most videos touch upon a variety of methods, while the Take Action segments are in-depth demonstrations of specific activities. You’ll get the most out of these videos by actually doing the activities yourself. We encourage you to snap a photo of something you’ve made in response to a Take Action prompt, and then share it in the discussion forums.

Activities for Creating, Imagining & Connecting
In this module, we’ll stay active by covering activities that involve drawing, writing, discussion, sound, and movement. We’ll also put on our designer hats, with a Take Action video that presents a cosmic design challenge. You’ll have a chance to test your knowledge with the third and final quiz of the course. Finally, we want you to put all that you’ve learned into practice by using one of the activities with family, friends, or students, and then reflecting on the experience in the discussion forums.

Assessment Strategies
In this module, we shift the focus from activities to assessment. There are two videos; one that emphasizes self-assessment for you as the facilitator, and a second on assessing student work. Additionally, we have assigned two readings that support the video lectures, which you should complete before stating the final project.