Choice-based Art & Design Thinking

Download or read book Choice-based Art & Design Thinking written by Kim Dahlheimer and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of my research was to discover what happens in a fourth grade classroom when I create and implement a curriculum unit that fuses choice-based art education and design thinking process. I am particularly interested in fostering the creativity of my students. This paper describes how I did this, and what happened in my classroom. I also created a website (http://fostercreativethinkers.weebly.com/) that houses resources and student examples of this approach. Design thinking is a human-centered process developed for approaching problems and opportunities with multiple stages that are said by it's proponents to lead to creative, innovative solutions (IDEO, 2012). Choice-based education is an approach in which students are given multiple avenues to learn and demonstrate what they know and are able to do (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009). Together, I believe that these two approaches will foster creativity in students as they endeavor to become innovative, entrepreneurial thinkers in the 21st century. Utilizing an action research approach that includes observations of classroom activities, weekly journaling, taking and analyzing photographs of student work, analysis of written reflections from my students and myself, and informal interviews with students, I have both fine-tuned and studied strategies for organizing and facilitating these two approaches (choice-based art education and design thinking) in my curriculum. Although mine was a small study (short in duration and taking place with only one class), I want art educators to understand the benefits of fusing design thinking as a creative process for students within a choice based educational environment.