Sunday, February 1, 2009

Integrating Art with Social Studies




 "Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in." - Amy Lowell

Some really incredible pieces of art have been created through the recent development of digital art. Digital art can allow us to go places we couldn't previously, and makes art accessible to all of us (even the most artistically challenged of us).

Art speaks to us in ways words and photographs cannot, and provides another doorway for students seeking to understand an idea or concept from all sides.  "The work generates itself and ideas and progress and learning come out of doing the work in a particular way. Creative art is a learning process for the artist and not a description of what is already known."  -Gertrude Stein



 I would let students explore creating digital art from historical or current photographs that document whatever our current topic was. All of the photographs in this post have been altered in some way, using Photoshop Elements. They are all photographs I would use in a unit on migrant workers, and each tells a different story.



"Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?" -Cesar Chavez



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