What+are+ENDURING+UNDERSTANDINGS?+-+For+May+5

**//__A. Experiencing Understanding __//**
One of the greatest benefits of the visual and performing arts is their capacity to expand students' understanding of themselves, their world, and their ways of constructing personal meaning while engaging in the process of self-expression. In fact, it is virtually impossible for any of us to remain in a passive, "knowledge-recall" state of being when we are authentically engaged in creating visual products or participating in meaningful performance-based artistic activities.

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These **six mental/emotional dispositions** and behaviors are what Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, authors of the instructional design framework Understanding by Design (UbD), call **"the six facets of understanding."** =====

As you recall your experience, you can observe yourself engaged in a wide range of behaviors, including 1. Actively applying what you were learning to authentic problems and real-world decisions; 2. Interpreting your world using this internalized knowledge; 3. Explaining your experiences in verbal and non-verbal forms so that others can relate to and understand them; 4. Analyzing conflicting perspectives related to your experiences; 5. Expressing empathy for those whose perceptions and judgments were different than your own, confirming your growing ability to "walk in their shoes"; and, 6. Throughout the experience, demonstrating growing self-knowledge and an expanding ability to reflect upon, assess, and revise your own thinking and behavior.  Let's begin with what enduring understandings might be like within the fields of the visual and performing arts. According to Understanding by Design authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2004, Understanding by Design Professional Development Workbook, page 115), an enduring understanding:
 * //__C. Creating Enduring Understandings in the Arts __//**
 * 1) Involves the big ideas that give meaning and importance to facts.
 * 2) Can transfer to other topics, fields, and adult life.
 * 3) Is usually not obvious, often counterintuitive, and easily misunderstood.
 * 4) May provide a conceptual foundation for basic skills.
 * 5) Is deliberately framed as a generalization-the "moral of the story."

**//D. To give you a sense of how enduring understandings might operate in the visual and performing arts, here are a few examples. Consider how each of them reflects the design principles presented by Wiggins and McTighe:// **
 * 1) Art is a mirror to life, reflecting artists' construction of meaning about their lives, their world, and their times.
 * 2) Through the visual and performing arts, we can express our personal vision of the world and understand the vision of others.
 * 3) Great artists throughout the ages have both foreshadowed and articulated the effects of social, political, cultural, and technological changes in our world.
 * 4) Every art form has a unique language used by the artist to communicate with the world.
 * 5) The medium through which an artist works shapes and refines his or her ways of expressing a personal vision as well as reactions to universal human experiences.

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