D AellpLetve.lsNam e Goes HereArtEd Onli Lnevel Goes Here
A Symphony of Sites
Craig Roland
Symphony, as Daniel Pink
defines it in his book A
Whole New Mind, is “the
ability to put together the
pieces” in a unified whole. It is the
capacity to ”see the big picture,” to
notice relationships between seemingly unrelated fields or things, to
think metaphorically, and to invent
something new by combining elements that nobody else thought to
join. The following sites offer ideas
and resources for fostering Symphonic thinking in your classroom.
Learning to Draw
According to Pink, learning how
to draw is one of the best ways to
understand and develop the aptitude of Symphony. He describes
his experience of taking a drawing
class based on methods pioneered by
Betty Edwards and detailed in her
popular book, Drawing on the Right
Side of the Brain (www.drawright.
com). Encouraged by his success in
the course, Pink emphasizes that
learning to draw requires one to
become better at seeing relationships between positive space and
negative space, light and shadow,
and angles and proportions. These
ideas are familiar to art teachers
and are also the basis for the drawing lessons offered through Draw!
( www.accessart.org.uk/drawing/
contentspage.swf), an interactive
learning resource offered by Access
Art that introduces adolescent students to the basics of drawing.
Many art teachers promote drawing through the use of sketchbooks.
For ideas on using sketchbooks in
your classroom,
see “Keeping
a Sketchbook”
on Art Junction
( www.artjunction.
org/sketchbook.
php), which also
includes instructions on making a
sketchbook. For additional tips on
teaching drawing to students, see
Art Professor Marvin Bartel’s advice
on “making it easier for the right
brain and harder for the left brain”
to learn to draw ( www.goshen.edu/
art/ed/ easydraw.html).
Interdisciplinary Connections
Art education provides ample opportunities for promoting interdisciplinary connections—another one
of Pink’s key strategies for achieving Symphony. The Guggenheim
Museum’s Learning Through Art
program (www.learningthroughart.
org) encourages teachers to develop
art lessons that support student
learning across the curriculum. The
program’s website offers suggestions
and resources for facilitating class
discussions around works of art
and descriptions of cross-curricular
art projects that enable students
to work with important ideas and
questions.
For photography teachers, the
International Center of Photography
( www.icp.org) offers a download-able curriculum guide that explores
some of the many possibilities
for interdisciplinary connections
through photographic education.
Another excellent site for making
connections across disciplines is the
British Library’s Arts and Images
site (
www.bl.uk/learning/artim-ages), which includes a number of
interesting ideas for integrated art
lessons involving mapping, bodies
of knowledge, writing, and bookmaking.
Seeing Negative Spaces
According to Pink, “Negative space
is the part of the big picture we
often overlook.” Seeing negative
space is an important skill for students to learn in drawing as well
as in photography, as illustrated in
the Negative Space Pool on Flickr
(
www.flickr.com/groups/negatives-pace), which includes over 14,000
photographic images contributed by
group members.
Artists to Study
Blending together different ideas,
elements, and disciplines to produce
unified compositions is essential to
the creative processes of many artists. For example, Joseph Cornell:
Navigating the Imagination (www.
pem.org/cornell) is an interactive Web feature that beautifully
illustrates the artist’s ingenuity in
integrating ideas, materials, and
traditions from a diverse range of
disciplines into creating a new
art form—the box construction.
Another artist that students will
enjoy studying is cartoonist Rube
Goldberg ( www.rube-goldberg.
com) who designed convoluted
inventions that combined varied
actions and devices to perform
simple tasks. Lastly, M. C. Escher
( www.mcescher.com) taught himself math and science to achieve
his artistic goals. His legendary
tessellations, which contain repeating geometric patterns of distinct
shapes, are often used to teach students of varying ages connections
between art and math.
Craig Roland is an associate professor of
art education in the School of Art and Art
History at the University of Florida in
Gainesville, Florida. He is the author of
The Art Teacher’s Guide to the Internet
(Davis Publications, 2005). rolandc@ufl.
edu
