Comprehensive Arts Education

Comprehensive arts education (also known as discipline-based arts education) is a conceptual approach, not a prescribed curriculum. It is taught as an essential component of general education and as a foundation for specialized arts study.

The goal of comprehensive arts education is to develop students’ abilities to understand and appreciate the arts by:

• exploring the nature and meaning of the arts (aesthetics),
• responding to the arts (criticism),
• discovering contexts of artworks (history), and
• creating works of art (production and performance).

Curriculum is:

• written with sequentially organized content at all grade levels;
• developed around enduring ideas and works of art from Western and non-Western cultures from ancient to contemporary times;
• structured to provide creative inquiry from four perspectives (aesthetics, criticism, history, and production); and
• organized to increase student learning and understanding while recognizing appropriate developmental levels.

Full implementation of a comprehensive arts education program is marked by:

• systematic and regular arts instruction, arts education expertise, administrative support, and adequate resources; and
• student achievement and program effectiveness, which are confirmed by appropriate evaluation criteria and procedures.

Blending teaching practices often thought of as separate, comprehensive arts education expects instruction in the arts — and in any art form — to:

• include knowledge and skills in creating or performing, aesthetics, criticism, and history and culture;
• integrate with other subjects around important themes or big ideas; and
• use the set of practices that have come to be called “constructivist” or “inquiry-based” and that adjust to the diverse learning styles of students, especially those at risk of educational failure.

For more information, see:

• ArtsEdNet, J. Paul Getty Trust
• Southeast Center for Education in the Arts, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
• Stephen Mark Dobbs, Learning In and Through Art: A Guide to Discipline-Based Art Education, J. Paul Getty Trust, 1998. ISBN 0-89236-494-7