Advantages to a Conceptual Framework
1. Uniting – 20 responses
- develops essential common language and understandings
- articulates a broad mission with clarity
- builds collaboration
- creates a unified perspective across disciplines
- expresses common values/beliefs about Arts Education
- captures best thinking across the disciplines
- defines the parameters for student learning
- defines a coherent balanced vision of purposeful learning in arts education
- distills and expresses knowledge gleaned from best practice, experience and
history
2. Organizing – 25 responses
- provides a logical organization guiding both standards writers and standards
users
- prioritizes content, promotes purposeful learning
- creates a meta level of language within which detailed standards can fall
- demonstrates hierarchal and other forms of relationships
- aligns artistic processes with NAEP, P21, International Research,
National trends
- provides a way to divide and conquer standards
- allows lenses for knowing and doing
- encompasses big ideas and enduring understandings
3. Communicating – 20 responses
- organizes concepts, processes and skills to guide development of the standards
- provides a logical organization guiding users
- provides consistency of vision and transparency of goals
- logical organization and clear vision guides standards writing
- provides uniformity leading to ease of use at a state and local levels
- makes arts learning comprehensible to broader education community
- informs assessments and guides instruction
- makes connections to imagination/creativity/innovation
- provides a structure for teacher training/teacher evaluation
- communicates rigor in arts education
- provides a tool for alignment with other conceptual frameworks
Challenges in Creating a Conceptual Framework
1. Reaching a Unified Vision – 10 responses
- must encompass all art forms,
- different art forms have different languages; what if all can’t align
- a common framework might disadvantage some art forms
- establishing a unified vision can be difficult; sometimes consensus can be messy
2. Organizing and Determining Grain Size – 9 responses
- if the framework is too detailed it leads to calcification/narrows vision
- challenging to determine scope and sequence
- could be viewed by general public as “wishy-washy”
- may de-emphasize important aspects of the art making process
- may be too broad or too vague to be useful
3. Other Considerations – 18 responses
- need to avoid forcing an agenda
- need to consider state policies that might conflict with adopting a common
framework
- may be seen as restrictive
- prioritizing within the educational landscape
- resource scarcity (people, money, time)
- who will do the work?
- designing assessment for all demographics
- how will this be measured?
- need to remember that benchmarks are measured, frameworks guide standards
and benchmarks
- all four art forms need to stay true to the core of each arts discipline, yet also
realize 21st century learning, college and career readiness and cross cultural
natural connections
- have a responsibility to help students use their minds well
- need to determine what we hang on to, what we throw out
- digital medias must be included, either as their own discipline or embedded
across the fields
- need to remember cross cultural connections