January 4, 2012 Grade 6-7-8

On my United/Continental return flight to Tegucigalpa Sunday morning I was browsing through the January 2012 issue of their“in-flight” Hemisphere magazine and saw an article titled “Next Big Things”about six innovators “who promise to change the way we live”. There I met José Gomez-Marquez / age 35 / from Tegucigalpa, Honduras / lives in Boston. He is a 2011
TED fellow and program director of MITs Innovations in International Health
lab.

I read the article and later “googled” him. As I read about him and his work these words and phrases kept leaping out at me – experiment, explore, investigate, innovation, love of design, multi disciplinary research.

I am always trying to find ways of explaining to our high school students why we study art. Here before me was my answer – Jose Gomez-Marquez! Is he a great artist in the fine arts sense of the word – no! Is he a great creative thinker and a creative problem solver – YES! And what will our young people be called on to do? Right – experiment, explore, investigate, innovate, design, and research.

This semester our visual arts high school and middle school students will be doing just that. AP students will be exploring and solving a variety of visual problems. Grade 10 students will delve further into the 20th Century Modern and investigate and experiment with art making techniques that changed the way we define art. Grade 9 students will research and create designs based oncenturies old spiritual traditions.

In the middle school grade six students will look around the world for “curiosities” and build curiosity cabinets. Grade 7 students will explore art through a microscope. And grade 8 students will investigate pattern and design.

Six words to describe Discovery visual arts in 2012 - experiment, explore,
investigate, innovate, design, and research.