Unit 4 — Connecting
Description
Upon exposure to various artists, artistic movements and diverse cultures, students make connections with their personal experiences and artwork to the content and context being taught. In media arts, students make and respond using media arts knowledge and skills to represent meaning associated with personal and global views. In visual arts, students understand the role, development and influence of the arts throughout history and across cultures. Students recognize that artworks are reflections of society's values and beliefs and that through making art they develop awareness of culture and personal experiences. Students access, evaluate and use internal and external resources including cultural and societal knowledge, research and exemplary works to inform artistic creation. Students analyze how art forms represent, establish and reinforce group identity and reflect global issues.
Essential Questions
- How does engaging in creating art enrich people's lives?
- How does art help us understand the lives of people of different times, places and cultures?
- How is art used to impact the views of a society?
- How do media artworks contribute to awareness and understanding of our lives and communities?
- How do the other arts, disciplines, contexts and daily life inform the creation and response to media arts?
Learning Objectives
- Access, evaluate and use internal and external resources to inform the creation of media artworks such as cultural and societal knowledge and research.
- Explain and demonstrate how media artworks expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences.
- Generate ideas to make art individually or collaboratively to positively reflect a group's identity.
- Analyze and contrast how art forms are used to represent, establish, reinforce and reflect group identity and culture.
- Analyze and contrast how art forms are used to reflect global issues including climate change.
- Recognize works of visual art as a reflection of a society's values and beliefs.
- Use age-appropriate stylistic terminology and experiment with various compositional approaches.
Supplemental Resources
- Printed images of artworks reflecting diverse cultures and historical periods
- Sticky notes for recording personal connections to artwork
- Chart paper for mapping connections between art and society
- Magazines and newspaper clippings for research on global issues in art
- Folders for organizing resources about cultural and artistic movements
Music - Connecting
Media Arts - Connecting
Students investigate scientific concepts and natural phenomena as inspiration for creative artworks and media productions.
Students examine how artworks reflect cultural values, historical contexts, and diverse perspectives from various societies and time periods.
Students use written and verbal communication to describe artworks, construct arguments about artistic intent, and articulate personal responses to visual media.
Students explore how art forms communicate meaning across cultures and linguistic boundaries.
Formative Assessments
- Group work on identity-based artmaking projects
- Question and answer discussions about cultural context and global issues
- Projects connecting personal experience to artistic creation
- Discussion about how art reflects societal values and beliefs
Summative Assessment
Media arts students explain and demonstrate how media arts expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences. Visual arts students recognize works of art as reflections of societal values and beliefs. Using age-appropriate stylistic terminology and experimenting with compositional approaches, students make meaning by investigating awareness of culture and personal experiences.
Benchmark Assessment
Group work projects, discussions, question and answer about cultural connections
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through a visual presentation, artist statement with sentence frames, or one-on-one discussion with the teacher about how their artwork connects to cultural or personal experiences. Visual supports such as image banks, vocabulary cards, or reference charts may be provided to scaffold research and artistic decision-making.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students benefit from visual supports such as image-rich reference materials and exemplar artworks to help anchor abstract concepts like cultural identity and societal values. Directions for multi-step artmaking or analysis tasks should be broken into numbered steps and paired with visual models of the expected outcome. Teachers may allow oral responses or recorded explanations in place of written reflections when assessing a student's ability to connect personal experience to artistic creation. Scaffolded graphic organizers can help students organize their thinking around how an artwork reflects a group's values before participating in discussion or producing their own work.
Section 504
Extended time should be provided for both artmaking processes and any written or verbal response components tied to cultural analysis and reflection. Preferential seating near instructor demonstrations and reduced visual clutter in the workspace can help students maintain focus during discussions about art and global issues. Printed copies of discussion prompts or response stems related to cultural context and societal values support access without altering expectations.
ELL / MLL
Teachers should provide visual cues, culturally diverse exemplar artworks, and image-supported vocabulary resources to help students engage with key terms related to identity, culture, and global issues. Simplified directions for artmaking tasks, paired with visual step-by-step models, allow students to access the creative process more independently. Where possible, connecting the unit's themes of cultural identity and group belonging to students' own cultural backgrounds and home-language knowledge builds meaningful entry points into the content.
At Risk (RTI)
Connecting artmaking to students' personal experiences and communities provides a strong and motivating entry point into the unit's themes of identity and culture. Teachers can offer structured choice in how students express cultural connections—through image selection, compositional decisions, or discussion—to lower barriers while maintaining meaningful participation. Reducing the complexity of analysis tasks by focusing on one element of an artwork at a time (such as color, symbol, or subject matter) helps students build confidence and gradually develop the vocabulary and thinking skills needed for deeper cultural reflection.
Gifted & Talented
Students ready for greater challenge can explore connections between artistic movements and their broader historical or geopolitical contexts, examining how shifts in society have driven changes in artistic expression across cultures and time periods. Encouraging independent research into underrepresented cultural art traditions or contemporary artists addressing global issues such as climate change allows students to pursue depth beyond the core content. Students may also be invited to take on curatorial or analytical roles in group discussions, synthesizing multiple perspectives on how art reinforces or challenges group identity and cultural values.