Evaluating process over product in student art
In a world where adults judge the quality of an art program by the quality of the student work, the artwork students produce independently causes shock, but rarely awe... not at first. What we're talking about here is the difference between teacher-led art projects that often produce cute refrigerator-ready artwork and open studios where students practice artmaking to express original ideas. Student-let art programs are called by different names such as TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior), Choice-based art, or open studio. This general observation about the quality of student work pertains to all grade levels from Kinter through 12th grade, but this article will focus on elementary art. When teachers switch to an open studio art curriculum, and there are a lot of research-backed reasons for doing just that, they often decry the quality of the work. Here's a rubric I use to help explain what I'm looking for.