On Teaching Art: Art vs. Craft

I received an email from Carrie Birmingham of Pepperdine University about teaching art.  She teaches a general education course.  She proposed a number of questions about teaching art that she would like to share with her university students.  Here is what she writes:

“The students I have will be general ed classroom teachers, mostly K-5. They may or may not end up at a school which has an art teacher, and I want them to have a starting place if they want to teach art separately or in conjunction with other things they’re teaching.

I found blogs and other collections of art lessons with so many examples that I’d love to share with my students. I will share the resources, like your blog of course, but I’d like for them to have a few pegs to hang all these resources on. They (and I) need some larger categories or ways to organize our thinking.”

I am writing a series of blog posts about teaching art to share with Carrie and her students.  I can only write from my experiences and the philosophies I have researched.  It is hard to sum up all that we do in a series of blog posts.  People spend their whole lives researching arts education.  Here’s where I need your help.  Through each of the posts, I would like your feedback.  Do you agree or disagree with me?  What are your feelings on the questions?  What advice would you give?

The first question is:

1. What is art for children (as opposed to crafts, which many of my students enjoy personally and have seen in their classrooms)?

There has been much debate about the value of crafts versus art.  Personally, I enjoy crafts of all kinds.. such as scrapbooking, crochet and jewelry making.  I have never enjoyed following a pattern exactly as written.  I think that is why I enjoy these forms of crafts, because there is a lot of room for creativity in each of these crafts.

The debate in the art education field is more about using tracers, step-by-step art and teaching the children to exactly copy a teacher’s example.  For example, making an Spring chick craft where each child cuts out exactly the same pre-drawn pieces to assemble their chick.  Instead, you could bring in live chicks (like our Science teacher did!) to observe or show photographs of chicks and have the children paint their own birds.  The results will be much more meaningful to the kids and you will be surprised at their ability to see the details and personality of the chicks.

I think there is room for crafts in education.  Crafts help to develop fine motor skills, teach kids to follow directions and to gain practice using tools properly.  However, these same goals can be reached by more open-ended art projects in which each child can put their own spin on a project.

I feel that art class should be a place where the students learn art techniques, vocabulary, processes and art history while at the same time are given the opportunity to express their ideas, exercise their imagination, make new connections, celebrate their individuality and PLAY!

Here are some interesting blog posts about this subject:

Process Vs. Product by Pre-K and K sharing

A great article about the differences between crafts and art by Mary Ann Kohl

About “cookie cutter” art.. debates at the Art of Education 

More “cookie cutter” debates at Art Project Girl

What are your thoughts?  What is the difference between crafts in the classroom and art?  Are you a classroom teacher?  I would especially like to hear your opinions.

Up next in the series

“On Teaching Art:  Organizing Instruction”

I will give my response to this question and ask for your input:

“How can we organize planning for art instruction? For instance, I can imagine planning around art elements like line and color, or planning based on great artists, or planning based on curricular connections, or planning based on children’s development. There are probably a lot of other ways. More concretely, suppose one of my students wanted to plan one art lesson a week, how would she pick which lessons?”