Glossary

Aesthetic Inquiry	Systematically, aesthetics consists of asking questions, then developing arguments or theories in an attempt to answer these questions. Its content consists of these questions and answers, expressed as theories. For students of art and visual studies, aesthetic inquiry also consists of exploring their own and other's values through examining aesthetic artifacts and performances so as to understand themselves and others and ultimately make the world a better place (see also Reconstructionism and Social Reconstructionism).
Aesthetic Response	A reaction to beauty or to visual artifacts. It is normally thought of as a heightened state of perception and emotion in which there is no interest in the functional aspects of the experience.
Aesthetics	Most or all of the world's cultures have some philosophy of art and beauty, but aesthetics in the western philosophical tradition addresses the nature of art, beauty, and aesthetic experience, and talk about art and visual culture, from the West, and less authentically, from other cultures. Aesthetics is a highly sophisticated branch of philosophy.
Appropriation	A postmodern strategy of taking something (style, form, content, or all three) from an existing work of art and using it in toto in a new work, frequently as a political act denying that the original artist or work "owns" the content or form. As a practical act, appropriation is different from copying a work in order to understand the technique or composition.
Art Criticism	Talking about or writing about art. We undertake it because we want to know the meaning and significance of artworks (see also Critique).
Art History	Through art, historic records of people and events include not only facts but also the spirit and emotion of the time. Art history is an attempt to understand this record, typically by focusing on artworks, artifacts, or artistic performances to find out how they were created, by whom, when, why, how, and in what context. Art historians look more for information about a work of art, whereas critics look for information within the work of art (see also Contextual Research).
Artistic Intelligence	One's ability to make and understand meanings in aesthetic symbolic forms.
Artistic Style	The way an artist or designer puts together the elements (media, composition, elements and principles of design, and so on) that carry the content of a work of art or a consciously designed visual artifact. Through artistic style, artists always tell us (deliberately or not) something about what they think and feel.
Artistic Symbols	Aesthetic presentations that stand for something beyond themselves. Artistic symbols are not logical, linear, or discursive; they are subjective and affective.
Artwork	A visual artifact, made by a person, that has as its purpose the presentation of human meaning in aesthetic form (see also Aesthetic Response).
Authentic Assessment	Assessment directly connected to the process of teaching and learning. In authentic assessment, evaluation is intentionally intertwined with learning: students play a role in developing and applying the criteria. Evaluation is ongoing, nonstandardized, and based on performance.
Authentic Instruction	Teaching and learning that have consequences in the real world, both as content that applies outside the classroom and as teaching and learning strategies that are useful in life. Authentic instruction promotes students' construction of learning in small collaborative groups, expects higher-level thinking, encourages substantive conversation about and responsibility for a topic, and takes a thematic approach to research and learning.
Biocultural and Biosocial Development	The idea that children's development is affected by biological propensities and cultural influences. For example, we all seem to have a propensity to make some things beautiful and special. But because of cultural influences, in the Czech Republic that may take the form of a town of woodworkers whereas in the East Village in New York it may take the form of a neighborhood of postmodern installation artists. Also, because of family and peer influences, the woodcarvers may specialize in chairs, statues, or coffins. Beyond a certain point, individual development is primarily cultural.
Brainstorming	Freewheeling discussion in which, ideally, everyone participates equally and contributes to an innovative or creative outcome. Many alternatives to solving the problem at hand are encouraged. Negative criticism is not allowed, and judgment is deferred.
Cognition	In art for life, thinking which incorporates both the intellect and the emotions and which begins with sensory perception and kinesthetic sensations (muscle strain, butterflies in the stomach, and so on). Making and understanding visual images and art are cognitive activities.
Collaboration	Working together toward a common goal. Collaboration is socially conditioned and has cultural consequences. These consequences can include the development of tolerance for opinions other than one's own, leading to crosscultural acceptance.
Community Murals	Large-scale, usually permanent two-dimensional works that are undertaken because of community desires and that reflect community values. Usually, the primary workers who construct such murals are members of the community. Community murals are typically activist and reconstructionist (see Reconstructionism).
Comprehensive Art Education (CAE)	An outgrowth and maturation of discipline- based art education (DBAE). DBAE focuses on making art, art criticism, aesthetics and aesthetic inquiry, and art history. CAE incorporates additional strategies and understandings. There are various forms of CAE, but all are disciplinecentered, cognitive, thematic, interdisciplinary (as appropriate), and life-centered. Art for life is one model of CAE.
Conceptual Theory	Conceptualism, as an aesthetic theory, leaves the traditional realm of the aesthetic as a response to beauty, focusing instead on the idea embedded in an artistic act or artwork. Art is made and examined not for its aesthetic value but for the idea it contains.
Construction of Knowledge	A term implying that students actively develop knowledge rather than passively receiving it from teachers, textbooks, or other authorities. Constructing knowledge involves higher levels of thinking: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Such high-level cognition engages not only the intellect but also the emotions and can take place through making and receiving art.
Constructivism	A theory of teaching and learning encompassing the idea that our understandings are constructed by us, not predetermined or given from on high. In constructivist learning theory, the emphasis is on active participation of the learner in the environment.
Contextual Research	Contextual research looks at the conditions surrounding an art form or a performance, rather than at the qualities of the form or performance, to understand the circumstances in which a work was created, used, and valued. Contextual information cannot be seen in the physical form, so contextual research has to do with artin- context and visual culture rather than the object or performance itself. It consists of examining cultural and historical records and artifacts other than the one in question and interviewing people to determine the maker's motivations, how the artifact is or was used and valued, and so on (see also Art History).
Contextualism	The idea that the meaning and worth of art can be determined only in the context in which it is made and used. Contextualists think that art is or should be made and used for something beyond itself. This is a time-honored position in art education, in opposition to essentialism.
Contextualist Theory	Contextualists argue that the meaning of a work lies not so much in its form as in how it is viewed, valued, and used. Rather than applying internal or intrinsic criteria, contextualism values artworks in relation to their social significance.
Creative Self-Expression in Art	Making forms that carry human meaning. This is an intentional, purposeful act of making meaning through the use and manipulation of aesthetic tools such as composition, technique, and concepts. Creative self-expression may be judged by the appropriateness of the means in relation to the perceived expression in a social context (see also Creativity.)
Creativity	Conceiving, developing, or discovering unique connections between one thing and another. Creativity is both personal and social, because it involves making connections not only between form and meaning but also, especially for artists, between art and society. Creativity does not happen purely inside an individual's head, but in the interaction between a person's thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is in essence a social activity.
Critical Analysis	A strategy in art for life that involves thoughtfully talking and writing about art and visual culture. It systematically examines the forms of art and visual artifacts, their uses and meanings, and contextual information.
Critique	An oral or written description, analysis, and interpretation. With regard to art and visual culture, a critique involves digging (figuratively) below the surface of a work to find profound or hidden meanings in the work itself or in the way it is used or valued. Critiques may also take visual form. The point is to make visible what was hidden and invisible—that is, to understand how images and performances convey meanings and to understand the meanings conveyed.
Dialogue	In art for life, verbal and visual conversation between students, the teacher, and others about things that matter. The goal is mutual understanding and ultimately artistic and aesthetic actions and understandings that may have real-life consequences.
Digital Image	Any image achieved electronically without the use of film. Digital images may be recorded as still photos or moving (video) images or may be "drawn," using software such as Adobe Photoshop, directly on the computer.
Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE)	In DBAE the focus is on understanding the artistic work or performance using four so-called disciplines of art—art production, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics— as strategies or approaches to that understanding (see also Comprehensive Art Education, CAE).
Essentialism	The belief that the value of art is intrinsic: that art is to be understood for its own sake, for its own qualities and their aesthetic and emotional effect. The artist who says, "The work should speak for itself" is taking an essentialist point of view. This is a time-honored position in art education, in opposition to contextualism (see also Formalist Theory).
Expressionist Theory	Expressionism finds excellence in the degree of a work's emotional power, which is usually achieved through exaggeration of form and color and animated, dynamic treatment of forms.
External Verity	In art history, external verity looks for confirmation to sources outside the account or art object for verification of its nature, status, and truth.
Feminist Theory	An important model for instrumentalist reconstruction. Feminist theorists deconstruct the patriarchal and hierarchical categorization of art of the modernist tradition and offer instead a more fluid understanding of art in relation to life. Feminist educators frequently extend their humanist concerns to all people and also advocate crosscultural and multicultural critical strategies and content.
Formalist Theory	The idea that the excellence of a work has to do with its visual power, which is related to the unity, harmony, and power of interacting qualities within the work, unrelated to external criteria such as social or practical functions. In formalist theory art is seen as existing for its own sake, or at least primarily for the sake of our aesthetic response.
Installation Art	Art in which meaning is created simply by the way the artist selects and arranges objects in a display. Installation art may not actually involve the construction or fabrication of an art object; it relies instead on the meaning arising from relationships between preexisting objects in a particular context. Frequently, installation artists convey meaning by recontextualizing objects —that is, putting them in unexpected and previously unknown relationships. Usually the point of installation art is social criticism.
Institutional Theory	A form of contextualism. According to institutional theory, society decides collectively what is art and what is not art. This decision is based not only on physical qualities such as beauty, skill, and aesthetic (compositional) appeal, but more fundamentally on how these qualities are seen by the group as making the potential object or performance special and thus worthy of the status of art. Different groups make different decisions in different times and places; that is why classic Yoruban art has different forms and functions from classic Greek art. In institutional theory, there are no universal forms.
Instrumentalism	In art, the philosophy that artworks do or should do something in the world beyond simply being beautiful or decorative. Instrumentalists value artworks that, through their naturally aesthetic means, call us to action in the world.
Instrumentalist Theory	A form of contextualism. Instrumentalism finds excellence, not in the form itself, but in the degree to which an artwork or aesthetic performance can stimulate people to make some conceptual change or undertake some action that has a bearing on the social world. Propaganda art, religious art, and advertising are examples of instrumentalism.
Integrated Instruction	Instruction that utilizes more than one disciplinary domain or strategy to facilitate learning —for example, using art, social studies, and history to understand the themes of the American Civil War.
Interdisciplinary Instruction	When we seek and make meanings by asking a question or focusing on a theme, our aims and foci determine what we attend to and how. These purposes are very seldom restricted to a single discipline—say, art history or art criticism. Rather, they normally range across disciplines and reflect cross-disciplinary concerns. The protocol for examining meanings, then, is making connections between ideas and the forms in which ideas present themselves, rather than keeping these ideas separate within separate academic disciplines. Interdisciplinary instruction crosses the boundary between one discipline and another to pursue larger meanings.
Internal Verity	In art history, an artwork itself or an account of a work may be examined for flaws that suggest deception or misinterpretation. If there are no such flaws, the work may have internal verity.
Making Art	The act of creating aesthetic objects or engaging in aesthetic performances. We make art to make sense of things, to give meaning to our existence. To construct this meaning, we use a visual language consisting of compositional, technical, and conceptual tools and strategies. Artists connect ideas and emotions through the physical act of constructing aesthetic forms to represent their meanings. Kinesthesis and consciousness, body and head, coincide. The eye, the mind, the heart, and the hand interact and inform each other when we make art.
Mandalas	Temporary, usually symmetrical, often circular aesthetic forms that in some societies are believed to retore health and achieve social and ecological balance by restoring balance to people and their universe.
Metacriticism	In aesthetic terms, critical theory directed to examine systematically how we talk about art. It is not "art talk" but talk about how we talk about art.
Metaphor	A symbolic transformation that occurs when one thing (a visual image, a figure of speech, a musical configuration, or the like) in its entirety denotes another thing in its entirety: for example, the sun as life, a circle as wholeness, or Copland's musical composition as an Appalachian spring. Metaphor is not simply a cognitive nicety; it is central to our ability to think and to our creative activity.
Mimetic Theory	The idea that the best art accurately represents what is out there in the world. The aim is objective accuracy. Mimetic art is sometimes called naturalism or realism.
Modernism	A response to traditionalism. Modernism is a movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that values individual rational independence and creativity over all else and considers individual creative self-expression the most important quality of art and artists. It is individually focused rather than socially focused like traditionalism.
Narrative	A story. Narrative reports— for example, in art history or art criticism or as the result of a critique —are "true" stories to the best of the critic's or historian's perceptual and analytic ability.
National Standards for Arts Education	Standards developed by a consortium of professionals in art, music, theater, and dance. These standards are not actually mandated by national legislation, though they are advocated by the National Art Education Association and almost every state has instituted some version of them. Most teachers have to show which state standards are met in their curriculum and lesson plans. The standards for visual arts are available through our web link.
New Technologies	In art for life, advanced, electronically generated technologies, such as video and digital imaging and especially computer- generated imagery and its transmission over the Internet.
Postmodernism	A response to modernism. Postmodernism is centered on critique more than on content. Postmodernism is not a philosophical system; rather, it is a critique of philosophy. Most types of postmodernism deconstruct the premises and values of older philosophical systems such as Romanticism, Marxism, and capitalism, turning them against themselves. Certain kinds of postmodernism such as feminism, environmentalism, and neo-Marxism reconstruct new premises, values, and ideas in place of the old ones they have deconstructed. In this way they attempt to move previous value systems to the periphery and bring new ones to the center.
Pragmatic Theory	A form of institutional theory, pragmatism sees functionality as truth. If something works, socially and practically, then it is true. In art, pragmatism is grounded in a focus on the context in which a work is made, seen, or used.
Provenance	An important tool in art historical research, provenance is an examination of the history of the work through its ownership in an effort to establish its authenticity.
Qualitative Instruction	Instruction in which the teacher's job is to enrich the curriculum and stimulate and challenge students to see more, sense more, remember more, and put their own visual imprint on ideas. Students are encouraged and helped to express themselves in the language, structure, and forms of art, visual artifacts, and design. Qualitative instruction entails consistent formative and ongoing evaluation in the form of feedback from instructor to student. It also entails continual reflection by students about their own work and the work of others.
Reconstructionism	An umbrella term referring to the idea or fact of changing society for the better, usually by applying a particular philosophy. In education, reconstructionists are usually thought of as liberal or radical political activists who believe that to make the world a better place, we need to start by reforming education with an eye to social justice and environmental balance.
Research Journals	In art for life, visual and verbal accounts of things that matter to students. Journals incorporate visual exploration, contextual research (including art history), critiques and other visual and verbal forms of art criticism, aesthetic inquiry, and above all personal reflection —which ties everything together.
Social Acculturation	The ways we are molded by and integrated into groups and society at large.
Social Construction of Meaning	Term referring to the idea that understanding of things in the world is constructed by groups of people— societies—rather than being given and predetermined.
Social Reconstructionism	In art for life, the critical examination of social reality, focused on art in its authentic contexts and on other forms of visual culture. The purpose is to suggest what is wrong in society and how it can and should be changed.
Studio Art	A common but outmoded term for artworks and the making of art, implying that all art work is made in a studio. The term thus has elitist implications (see Artwork and Making Art for more appropriate descriptions).
Substantial Conversation	In art for life, a critical component in highlevel thinking and the construction of knowledge, involving both verbal and visual conversation. Observation, crucial to artistic expression, is immeasurably enhanced by shared experience and dialogue.
Symbolic Communication	Communication that makes connections between form and meaning—between a sign or symbol that is being constructed, with its nuances and particularities, and how it represents experience. Making and perceiving art and visual artifacts are forms of symbolic communication (see also Artistic Symbols).
Synectics	The joining together of different and apparently unrelated elements. Synectic methods are conscious approaches to constructing direct, personal, fantastic, or symbolic analogies in order to solve problems or generate ideas.
Thematic Instruction	In art education, teaching and learning centered on significant human themes rather than on the traditional elements and principles of design or units of instruction based on media, such as clay or pencil drawing. The three central themes for art for life are (1) a sense of self, (2) a sense of place, and (3) a sense of community. Themes are used to attain meaning. Ideas and emotions are elicited and taken to their natural conclusion. The guide is students' own logical and emotional connections.
Themes	Themes arise from our personal relationships to topics (for example, our love of horses, our fear of dogs or of meeting someone new, or the thrill of flying in an airplane). When we make a topic human and personal through such connections, it becomes a theme.
Traditionalism	Art from traditional societies, supporting social values that are carried through aesthetic form from one generation to the next. Elaboration, beauty, and replication are the primary qualities valued in traditional art, and skill in achieving these ends is the primary quality valued in traditional artists.
Verity	A term used by historians to mean the truth.
Virtual Reality	An electronically generated image or more usually an entire electronically generated environment. It may appear real (threedimensional) but in fact exists only electronically. The user is immersed in a digitally generated space of sound and images. Potentially, the aesthetic experience is totally interactive.
Visual Artifact or Performance	In art for life, something constructed by a person. It need not be constructed specifically for aesthetic expression, but it at least has an aesthetic component. Examples include shopping malls, clothes, television ads, footballs, paintings, and dance performances.
Visual Culture	Visual artifacts and performances of all kinds, as well as new and emerging technologies, inside and outside the art museum, and the beliefs, values, and attitudes imbued in those artifacts and performances by the people who make, present, and use them. The primary means of understanding visual culture in art for life is critique.
Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE)	The point of VCAE is to "read" and grasp the meanings of expressive visual artifacts and performances in order to succeed in life. VCAE includes all visual artifacts and performances: traditional high art, theme parks, shopping malls, the popular arts, and so on. It focuses on the artifact or performance within the culture where it is made and used. The object or performance is thought of as representing that culture.
Webbing	A form of verbal and visual brainstorming that encourages participants to construct thematic bridges between fragmentary bits of knowledge and find relationships between ideas. It is often used as a teacher-directed instructional strategy in group discussion, with the teacher or a student introducing a theme for exploration. After the theme is introduced students may brainstorm a list of questions about the topic, based on information they already have.