Fine Art Goals

Creating art is the most human of processes, since the fine arts are the common language of humanity. Studying the arts cultivates that vital connection between developing aesthetic literacy and achieving personal mastery in artistic practice. As four diverse, yet related areas - dance, music, theatre and visual art - the Fine Arts Department supports intellectual and personal development in an integrated manner. In this way, the Fine Arts Department will:

• Develop and maintain a Fine Arts curriculum that integrates and promotes concepts of deeper understanding and critical thinking in alignment with the Mission and Goals of The Culver Academies.
• Develop and foster artistic practice and attention to craft.
• Encourage and promote aesthetic literacy through the understanding of international and cross-cultural applications of harmony, form, order, excellence, and beauty.
• Build, through regular revision, pedagogic practices that encourage both disciplinary and trans-disciplinary viewpoints of aesthetic connections, through collaboration between artistic disciplines and other academic areas.
• Identify and construct opportunities to link Culver’s character education and leadership goals with program and individual lesson objectives and classroom management.
• Cultivate, within the learner, critical aesthetic assessment of self and others through observation, analysis, synthesis, and judgment.
• Measure aesthetic, academic and artistic growth of student progress through authentic assessment, by means of student portfolios, individual performances, critical inquiry, and personal discipline within the creative process.
• Advance the use of technological means and methods of instruction and creation where it is appropriate to the medium.
• Maintain multiple professional development opportunities in order to nurture the artistic excellence of the teaching faculty.