New+Jersey+Core+Curriculum+Content+Standards+for+the+Visual+Arts,+2009+(Adams)

= New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for Visual Arts =

J. Marshall Adams, NGSSS-Arts: Visual Art Writing Team May 2010
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** Introduction **
The New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for Visual and Performing Arts were approved in 2009 to become effective in 2012. The mission statement of the NJ standards for the arts is described as:

The arts enable personal, intellectual, social, economic, and human growth by fostering creativity and providing opportunities for expression beyond the limits of language.

The NJ standards for the arts build upon the philosophy and goals of the National Standards for Arts Education, and correlate structurally with NAEP’s 2008 Arts Education Assessment Framework and its three arts processes: **creating, performing**, and **responding.**

The NJ standards for the arts integrates all four arts disciplines into a single, intellectually unified set of arts standards. This framework “reflects the critical importance of locating the separate arts disciplines … as one common body of knowledge and skills, while still pointing to the unique requirements of individual disciplines.”


 * Creative** standards:
 * Standard 1.1 The Creative Process:** //All students will demonstrate an understanding of the elements and principles that govern the creation of works of art in dance, music, theatre, and visual art.//


 * Standard 1.2** **History of the Arts and Culture:** //All students will understand the role, development, and influence of the arts throughout history and across cultures.//


 * Performing/Interpreting** standard:
 * Standard 1.3 Performing:** //All students will synthesize skills, media, methods, and technologies that are appropriate to creating, performing, and/or presenting works of art in dance, music, theatre, and visual art.//


 * Responding** standard:
 * Standard 1.4 Aesthetic Responses & Critique Methodologies:** //All students will demonstrate and apply an understanding of arts philosophies, judgment, and analysis to works of art in dance, music, theatre, and visual art.//

Following the standards, proficiency levels and grade band clusters “correspond to new federal definitions of elementary and secondary education.”

The following six-point review format is adapted from the Criteria and Definitions used by Achieve to review the 2006 Florida Reading Language Arts Standards.
 * Review **

By framing the standards to align with national policy initiatives and efforts, they appear to be rigorous in their organizational structure, which demands a degree of intellectual challenge to implementing teachers. The standards are written to be open (see “Specificity”) and are designed to provide minimum expectations for arts learning across the grades. Students who proceed through their educational lives in New Jersey will receive a solid, well-grounded arts education that is familiar to practitioners today.
 * 1.** **Rigor**

These standards do offer a unified vision of all of the arts, anchoring them to creativity and the needs of 21st century citizens. By correlating to the NAEP assessment framework, there are established connections and commonalities in the creative process of the arts disciplines. I did not perceive any overt connectivity among the visual arts strands, but the standards themselves are intentionally open and so invite individual teachers to make their own cross-strand connections. There are no attempts to make concerted links to non-arts subjects as many state standards do. The progression across grade levels seems to me to be standard.
 * 2.** **Coherence**

The content seems to me to be fairly standard as well. I did not see any innovations here, did not see the door opened fully to emerging technologies and the manner in which 21st century students live, create and share visual arts in the world today. It seemed like the traditional standards with which we are all familiar/comfortable, condensed and cleaned up. I did not detect an accelerated schedule to cram content.
 * 3.** **Focus**

The standards are intentionally written to be “deliberately broad to encourage local curricular objectives and flexibility in classroom instruction.” Therefore, there can be a lack of specifics in considering a particular standard’s expected level of student performance.
 * 4.** **Specificity**

The structure of the standards relies on their correlation to NAEP’s creating, performing, and responding activities, which is a convenient device to distill the essence of creative endeavors and unify arts disciplines. However, this is nested within a larger hierarchy that is understandable but more challenging to penetrate in the final version (see “Conclusion”).
 * 5.** **Clarity/Accessibility**

As the standards are purposely written to be open, measurability is not specified. Therefore, the Cumulative Progress Indicators (CPIs) provide actionable statements without specific metrics prescribed (Ex: 1.3.P.D.1 Demonstrate the safe and appropriate use and care of art materials and tools). These statements do use performance verbs including demonstrate, use, synthesize, delineate, produce, differentiate, et al. There are a few examples of verbs that are not performance-based, including examine, develop, et al.
 * 6.** **Measurability**

I spoke to two nationally-recognized art education professionals in New Jersey and New York regarding their opinions about the development of the NJ standards.
 * Conclusion **

Compared to the previous NJ standards, these provide more examples of the standard in action which was appreciated. The on-line version of the standards was singled out for praise in its use of hyper- and interlinked information and material – it was not just a downloadable print design, but intended to also live on the Internet, connected to other supporting resources that formed and informed the standards.

The concerns they expressed can be viewed as pitfalls for all standards writing teams: the challenge of state standards existing as a **political document** which seeks to validate art education for students and justify the professional interests of educators, and as a **practical resource** that is a useful daily guide to the classroom and recognizes the realities of how teachers will use them.

__ Standards as Political Documents __ Designing and correlating the NJ standards to prominent and accepted national research gives them an enhanced credibility in justifying their relevance and assuring their validity.

While the NJ standards were accepted for rollout in 2012, there were some notable areas of dissent and disappointment by art educators in the state. NJ’s prior standards included a **Design Standard** that was intentionally omitted in the 2009 revision. Many art educators felt, in light of the writings of Daniel Pink and others, that design was a critical element for New Jersey students to master as part of a 21st-century art education. There was a suspicion that the Design Standard could not be made to fit into the predetermined structure of the new NJ standards. The Art Education Association of New Jersey contemplated withholding their support of the new standards due to this omission.

It was also noted that in Standard 1.4 reflecting student responses to the arts, **aesthetics** and **critique** were combined for all arts disciplines. This is a challenge to some visual art educators who were trained in and draw their own philosophies of practice from the DBAE model which separates the two as coequal disciplines. The concern here was not that the standards must adhere to DBAE or reflect any specific philosophy, but that in order to satisfy the NAEP assessment structure adopted, that this was an example of some square pegs that got shaved down to fit into one round hole – an artificial and unsatisfying result for some.

__ Standards as Practical Resources __ Another source of frustration has been the language and relative inaccessibility of the document as a practical resource to daily teaching. The language is understandable but not “go to” in nature. It is seen as too wordy, and lacks the clarity needed; it does not answer “What do you want me to do?” for a busy art teacher. The standards do not need to be “dumbed down,” just more user-friendly, accessible. It was pointed out that even the page design is not useful – Content Area – Standard – Strand – Content Statement – Cumulative Progress Indicator. To put it into web terminology, too many “click-throughs” to get what is needed.

Another related example is the combining of the different arts disciplines into unified standards that exist on the same printed page. The New Jersey art educator to whom I spoke had to print out the full standards then cut and paste the visual arts sections out and into her own document to be able to have something for reference that applied only to her, that she did not have to dig through the other disciplines to find what she needed.

__ Recommendations __ p If standards must exist in a political form, can there be supporting documents that translate the information in a user-friendly nature for teachers? p When standards are ready to be disseminated to art teachers in the classroom, can this text be given to a professional graphic designer familiar with the practices of textbook layout, who can arrange things so that they are not only pleasing to the eye and useful, but are presented in a clear and sequential manner that will promote their acceptance and use? p When/where standards are presented digitally, can they be in a rich, on-line environment with glossary interlinks, hyperlinks to supporting materials, and other virtual means to make the document come to life?