National Coalition for Core Arts Standards Writing Teams

Project Director: Phillip E. Shepherd, Manager, Academic Core Branch, Kentucky Department of Education

Social Emotional Learning Competencies 

Introduction

Visual Arts include the traditional fine arts such as drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and sculpture; media arts including film, graphic communications, animation, and emerging technologies; architectural, environmental, and industrial arts such as urban, interior, product, and landscape design; folk arts; and works of art such as ceramics, fibers, jewelry, works in wood, paper, and other materials. (National Art Education Association)

Welcome to the 2014 Theatre Standards. These grade-by-grade standards are an effort to articulate the most fundamental elements of theatre, in the hope that by doing so there will be recognition that every student  can and should achieve a level of proficiency or beyond in this ancient and honorable craft. The most widespread theatre education opportunities in the United States have traditionally been in high schools, and the standards included here can readily be employed as a springboard for curriculum design and assessment at that level.

Media arts standards are intended to address the diverse forms and categories of media arts, including: imaging, sound, moving image, virtual and interactive. Media arts standards do not dictate what or how to teach, but define age-appropriate outcomes for students, towards the achievement of Enduring Understandings and Artistic Literacy. They are therefore quite generalized, not specifying particular technologies or techniques, and containing very few examples of terminology and activities. The standards allow for a great diversity of instruction, methodology and circumstance.

The National Core Arts Standards in Dance are designed to enable students to achieve dance literacy.

To be literate in the arts, students need specific knowledge and skills in a particular arts discipline to a degree that allows for fluency and deep understanding. In dance, this means discovering the expressive elements of dance; knowing the terminology that is used to comprehend dance; having a clear sense of embodying dance; and being able to reflect, critique, and connect personal experience to dance.

Understanding and Using the National Core Arts Standards

The arts have always served as the distinctive vehicle for discovering who we are. Providing ways of thinking as disciplined as science or math and as disparate as philosophy or literature, the arts are used by and have shaped every culture and individual on earth. They continue to infuse our lives on nearly all levels—generating a significant part of the creative and intellectual capital that drives our economy.