Unit 4 — Connecting
Description
Students make connections between their personal experiences, artwork, and the content and context being taught. In media arts, students make and respond using media arts knowledge, understanding, 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 investigate how artmaking helps people understand lives of different times, places, and cultures, and how art is used to impact societal views and preserve aspects of life.
Essential Questions
- How does engaging in creating art enrich people's lives? How does making art attune people to their surroundings?
- How do people contribute to awareness and understanding of their lives and communities through artmaking?
- 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 does art preserve and mirror aspects of life?
- How do the other arts, disciplines, contexts, and daily life inform the creation, performance and response to media arts?
Learning Objectives
- Access, evaluate and use internal and external resources to inform creation of media artworks using cultural and societal knowledge
- Explain and demonstrate how media artworks expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences
- Access, evaluate and use internal and external resources and context to inform media artwork creation
- 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, and reflect group identity and culture
- Analyze and contrast how art forms reflect global issues, including climate change
- Recognize works of visual art as reflection of a society's values and beliefs
- Investigate awareness of culture and personal experiences through artmaking
Supplemental Resources
- Newspaper and magazine clippings for exploring contemporary cultural issues in art
- Printed images of artwork from diverse cultures and time periods
- Lined journals for recording personal connections to artworks and artistic inspiration
- Blank booklets for student publishing of artistic reflections and cultural analysis
- Construction paper for creating visual responses to cultural and global themes
Music - Connecting
Media Arts - Connecting
Students apply mathematical thinking to art and design by measuring, calculating proportions, analyzing spatial relationships, and using geometric principles in composition and visual problem-solving.
Students investigate the properties of materials, color theory, light and optics, and sustainable practices in artmaking while developing scientific inquiry skills through experimental approaches to media and visual arts.
Students examine how artworks reflect and communicate cultural, historical, and social contexts across diverse civilizations and communities. They analyze how art forms represent group identity, preserve cultural heritage, and address global issues including climate change.
Students develop communication skills through critique, artistic statements, exhibition narratives, and analysis of visual texts. They practice reading and interpreting artworks, writing evaluative arguments, and engaging in discussions about aesthetic meaning and cultural perspectives.
Students explore artworks and artistic traditions from diverse global cultures and communities, enhancing cross-cultural understanding and appreciation of artistic expression across different linguistic and cultural contexts.
Formative Assessments
- Group work connecting personal experiences to artwork
- Question and answer about cultural context and artistic meaning
- Discussion of how artworks reflect societal values and beliefs
- Projects exploring connections between art and daily life
- Collaborative investigations of cultural and global issues in art
Summative Assessment
Media arts students explain, evaluate, and demonstrate how media arts expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences; access and use internal and external resources to educate about creation of media artworks. Visual arts students use age-appropriate stylistic terminology and experiment with various compositional approaches to recognize works of visual art as reflection of society's values and beliefs; make meaning by investigating awareness of culture and personal experiences.
Benchmark Assessment
A visual analysis task in which students identify and explain one artwork's connection to a specific culture or time period, describe how their own experience relates to its meaning, and evaluate what that artwork reveals about society's values. This assesses comprehension of cultural context, personal connection-making, and ability to interpret art as a reflection of societal perspectives.
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through a guided discussion with the teacher, visual mapping of connections between personal experience and artwork, or a recorded explanation rather than written analysis. Sentence frames and visual reference examples may be provided to support responses about cultural context and artistic meaning.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students may benefit from visual supports such as exemplar artworks, graphic organizers, and structured discussion prompts that help them connect personal experiences to cultural and historical context. Providing simplified written materials alongside verbal instruction supports processing during art analysis discussions. When demonstrating understanding of how artworks reflect societal values, students should have the option to respond orally, through annotated sketches, or through collaborative work rather than extended written explanations. Breaking multi-step creative and analytical tasks into smaller, sequenced stages with frequent check-ins allows students to build toward the unit's broader conceptual goals.
Section 504
Extended time should be provided for projects and reflective tasks that require students to connect personal and cultural experiences to artworks. Preferential seating during group discussions and critiques supports sustained focus, particularly when analyzing cultural and global themes in art. Printed copies of any visual prompts, discussion questions, or analysis frameworks displayed during instruction ensure consistent access to content without reliance on copying or memory alone.
ELL / MLL
Visual cues such as diverse artwork examples, photographs, and cultural artifacts help make abstract concepts around identity, culture, and global issues more concrete and accessible. Key vocabulary related to cultural context, artistic meaning, and societal values should be introduced with visual support and reinforced consistently throughout the unit. Wherever possible, invite students to draw on their own cultural backgrounds and home-language knowledge as a meaningful entry point into discussions about how art reflects group identity and lived experience. Simple, clearly structured directions for collaborative and reflective tasks help students participate fully without language serving as a barrier.
At Risk (RTI)
Grounding discussions and creative tasks in students' own personal and community experiences provides a meaningful and accessible entry point into broader concepts about culture, identity, and global issues in art. Reducing the complexity of analytical tasks by focusing on one or two clear connections between an artwork and a cultural or societal context—rather than multiple simultaneous comparisons—supports engagement and builds confidence. Structured frameworks, such as guided observation prompts or partially completed graphic organizers, help students organize their thinking before contributing to group work or independent projects. Recognizing and affirming students' cultural perspectives and lived experiences as valuable contributions to the unit's themes fosters motivation and a sense of belonging.
Gifted & Talented
Students are encouraged to pursue deeper independent inquiry into the relationship between art, power, and cultural narrative, moving beyond identification of societal values to critically analyzing how artworks have been used to challenge, shift, or reinforce those values across different historical periods. Exploring connections between local and global issues—such as climate change or social justice—through a self-directed media arts or visual arts lens allows for complex, synthesis-level thinking. Gifted students may also examine how artistic movements emerge from specific cultural and political conditions, drawing on primary and secondary sources to build and defend original interpretive arguments in discussion or through their own artmaking.