Breannah Gammon

Unit Paper 1
Art 133
This Units Big Idea is identity. With this in mind, we learned about connecting big ideas and
meaning making within our approach to teaching. It was discussed by Franco, Ward, and Unrath
(2015) that when children are able to make connects between concepts via artmaking, they are
exposed to new ways of thinking and new ways of learning that subject matter. These new ways
of thinking will be ever-more important in the fast-moving and quickly changing world
expressed by Michael Parsons (2004). He expressed that, ...the artworld and our general modes
of communication have also changed in such a way as to make art potentially more central to the
curriculum...the kinds of problems we face are changing rapidly. (Parsons, 2004, p. 775) We
can see that with the changing world that our students will be facing, theyll need to be equipped
with new and creative ways to build a meaningful understanding of their world, such as
described by Franco, Ward, and Unrath (2015).
This can be adapted for use with a young audience, using the big idea of identity, by asking them
to think about what identity is in different contexts. We can integrate this into not only subjects
such as math, asking what is the identity of a number? and showing that via art, but also
allowing them to create deeper meanings of identity by exploring what it means in reference to
themselves. This could be done by an activity in which they show us things that make up their
own identities via collage, taking different images or parts to make one unified artwork.
References
Franco, M. J., Ward, A., & Unrath, K. (2015). Artmaking as meaning-making: A new model for
preservice elementary generalists. Art Education, 68(5), 28-33.
Parsons, M. (2004). Art and integrated curriculum. In E. W. Eisner & M. D. Day (Eds.),
Handbook of research and policy in art education (pp. 775-794). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.