Teaching contemporary art at a elementary level

After reading the article “Contemporary Practice in the Elementary Classroom: a Study of Change” by Anne Thulson, I started thinking about school art and how children in elementary are not really exposed to contemporary art. Her article made so much sense to me; children should be exposed to twenty-first century art. The projects that she mentions in her article that she has done are not typically school art projects that you get to take home and your parents put up on the fridge. They are projects that children get involved in the community and get to show there opinion and identity through their work. These projects also help children gain team building skills since they have to sometimes work together to build a large project and put their heads together to make it be successful.

The article starts talking about how children in the elementary level are not going to be able to understand contemporary art and that they have to start from the beginning and learn the basics. I do agree that children need to learn the basics of art but they are the ones that are more exposed to contemporary art through different media like the TV or video games. At the elementary level, kids are very creative and have very bright ideas that should be expressed in a contemporary art format instead of making them all do the same thing and not let them be unique. Teaching contemporary art at an elementary level also shows kids that art does not have to be contained in one place or done only in a classroom. Art can be expressed anywhere and in many forms. I also really like how she documents her students’ artwork instead of putting a bunch of school art on the walls in the hallway. Instead, she shows the process and end of the bigger and more outside projects.

Today many teachers face the problem to what to teach in the classroom and what is the best way to teach it and I think this article has very good points in talking about those issues.