Teaching Globalization Through Contemporary Chinese Art PDF Download

Author: Elizabeth D. Hoffman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This study investigates whether it is possible for the education department of a museum to provide materials, including lesson plans and audio-visual materials, to art and social science teachers so that they may be able to teach high school students about Globalization through contemporary Chinese art. The central focus of the thesis is to advocate for the inclusion of a non-Western history of art and culture into the curriculum, so that U.S. students can better understand multicultural global dynamics. My main research question is: By integrating a curriculum on Chinese art and culture into a high school, can students broaden their understanding of global culture and their place in the process of globalization? Additionally, my action research was guided by many sub-questions. Through teaching a curriculum based on Chinese contemporary art and globalization, I was curious how students could develop, firstly, a perspectives consciousness; that is, the recognition or awareness that one's view of the world is not universally shared; and that others have views of the world profoundly different from one's own. China is experiencing nine to ten percent growth rates since the loosening of controls on their economy by the Central Communist Committee. By incorporating information about some of the changes that have occurred into the curriculum, how can students better understand emergent global trends? By learning about traditional and contemporary Chinese art and culture, how can the students gain a cross-cultural awareness (i.e. of the diversity of ideas and practices to be found in other countries)? How can the curriculum teach about contact and borrowing among cultures and societies (specifically between the U.S. and China), origins and development of cultures and values, historical antecedents to problems and issues? This study began as an action research project as part of my student teaching at Walter Payton College Prep in Chicago, IL in the spring of 2007. I developed a curriculum that included teaching the students about contemporary Chinese artists and about the many changes that are occurring in Chinese culture and society, and which also contained lessons about three dimensional design, and a studio lesson based on the Chinese artist Lin Tianmiao. Since then, I have broadened the project to be a curriculum package that could exist in the educational department of a museum which could be borrowed by high school art and social science teachers to be used in their classrooms. The curriculum package now includes not only the original curriculum which I used in my action research at Payton and a guide to accompany three PowerPoint presentations, but also includes: two DVDs from PBS (one about Globalization and the other about a Chinese artist, which are available to be borrowed at the School of the Art Institute's Flaxman Library), along with the lesson plans which accompany these DVDs, books for reading, and suggestions for three alternative studio projects. The action research portion of this project consisted of administering a quiz to the students at Payton on the first day in order to get a baseline assessment of how much the students knew about China. Then after several weeks of teaching them the curriculum, I administered another quiz to ascertain how much they then knew. The results of the two quizzes were compared to discern whether or not they had learned about China. I found that indeed it is possible by teaching the curriculum which I had put together about globalization and Chinese contemporary art to teach high school students about another culture. For their answers on the final quiz were not just quantitatively better than the initial quiz, they were qualitatively better and more substantive. Which leads me to conclude that they were able to gain a perspectives consciousness. My recommendations for the field are that teachers, especially art teachers, should use contemporary cultural artifacts to examine contemporary issues such as globalization. My research shows that it is possible to convey complex ideas through art and by visual means. Moreover, through learning about another country's culture, students can gain awareness that one's view of the world is not universally shared.