A Grand Experiment in Dbae: The Getty Center for Education in the Arts

Author: Ann C. S. Kuo

Abstract：

The Getty Center for Education in the Arts, an operating unit of the J. Paul Getty Trust, established the 1983 and 1984 Institutes for Educators on the visual Arts to explore the introduction of discipline-based art programs into elementary schools of the United States. Leilani Lattin Duke, the Director of the Getty Center, has stressed that study of the arts should be an integral part of all children's education.
The origin of the J. Paul Getty Trust was set up by its founder as a private operating foundation. Unlike a grant-making foundation, which funds the programs of others, the primary purpose of the Getty is to create and operate its own programs.
The Center's stated mission is to improve the quality and status of arts education in America's schools. To bring about any significant change in the way the public perceives art and in the way teachers teach it, we need a more comprehensive under-standing of how and why the arts are taught.
The Center had two components, summer staff-development programs for school-district personnel and year-long curriculum implementation programs. The designers hoped that participants would view art education as fostering understanding and appreciation of serious works of art and view art as an educative force and cultural necessity. They expected participants subsequently to teach their students to encounter serious works of art in meaningful ways and to establish programs offering balanced art instruction in aesthetics, studio production, art criticism, and art history. Today, we believe it is demonstrably evident that the discipline-based approach is becoming acceptable nationwide as the new standard for art education, the goals of the Center for DBAE are virtually identical to the aims stated by the National Art Education Association for achieving "Quality Art Education."
In the past five and a half years the Getty Center for Education on the visual Arts has made a notable beginning toward achieving one of the goals of the J. Paul Getty Trust: enhancement of the public's understanding and appreciation of the visual arts. As the Trust looks to the future, it anticipates preparing a generation of students who will provide leadership for greater involvement in, and understanding of, the arts in their communities.
As the Center becomes more experienced, it will learn more about where and how the Getty Center can help improve the status of education in the arts.
The arts are a means of communicating with others, the very essence of our understanding of life. Our hopes, fears, and values are infused into our works of art. Our views of the world and our relationships to each other are reflected in our arts. We are certain that we need the arts because they permit us to share perceptions that cannot be expressed verbally but nevertheless affirm our common sense of humanity. If education in the arts is to be revitalized so that it can find a place of respect in the mainstream of general education, then it needs to be redefined to include aesthetic perception, art history, art criticism, along with creative and expres-sive activities. All this is the central purpose at the Getty Center for Education in the Arts.

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