Today the importance of our educational system is being recognized by everyone. The federal government is again making major efforts to look at our public school education systems. The State of California is now in a position to provide more funding for the schools in California due to the efforts made by Governor Brown to get help from legislation reforms.
During my professional years as a visual art teacher in Wisconsin I realized one of the areas in our schools in the nation was the importance of teaching art. In March 1994, the Education Bill 2000 became a law and its provisions was the declaration that the arts were to be considered as a “core” subject along with English, history, geography, science, math, civics, government and foreign languages. The law provided a means and start up money to encourage implementation of the goals in state and local educational planning in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education on the arts for school boards to implement goals necessary to give classroom teachers professional development workshops. Schools can develop workshops and bring in people who can conduct the workshops within the school district area and provide the classroom teachers the opportunity to work with professionals to learn how to use the “Language of Art” for developing units of study in the elements and principles of design. This bill bestowed national recognition on the arts in a major way. At the present time I am in the process of creating a manual on how to integrate the visual arts into the classroom curriculum for all grades and subject areas. Before I retired from teaching art classes to elementary and middle school students in Wisconsin, I developed a workshop for “Experiences in Art” to teach classroom teachers how to integrate the visual arts into their curriculums. I taught these workshops for over two years and I am using the material to produce the manual and offer to school districts and classroom teachers. Students of all ages need to be given environments which can open them to learning in reading, math, social studies, music and art. There are many benefits for art education to be part of the lives of all of our children. Today this is an area our office of education needs to give more attention to in the examination of our public school education programs.
Jaylene Armstrong is a retired Art Teacher from Madison, Wisconsin, a former National Art Education Association Western Region Vice President and President of Wisconsin Art Education Association. For more information contact Jaylene at 661-255-3050.