The Immersion Process
There are many challenges facing K-12 arts education programs today. Limited resources and instructional time have resulted in arts programs that broadly cover as many media, techniques, artists, styles, and time periods as possible, with little opportunity to slow down and explore any one artwork, artist, or concept in-depth. The power of the arts to engage students on a personal level and to communicate ideas and emotions is often lost in the more analytical study of art elements and media skills. This approach denies students access to the joy and wonder of the arts, and to the powerful personal connections and meanings that individuals can have with works of art.
The immersion approach in arts education seeks to reverse this trend. The interdisciplinary curriculum units featured here demonstrate that devoting significant instructional time to a single work of art in K-12 classrooms can achieve major standards and curriculum goals while fostering students’ appreciation for the arts through deeper personal connections and meaning-making.
The National Endowment for the Arts provided resources and support for training teachers in the immersion approach using an anchor work. An anchor work is a work of sufficient intellectual heft and artistic merit to warrant careful aesthetic examination. The study of an anchor work begins with personal experience and is enhanced by scholarly research that yields multiple interpretations and greater understanding of the cultural context of the work. The Portland Museum of Art’s A Place for Art: Summer Institute for Teachers modeled the immersion process for teachers and provided the resources necessary to implement a unit of study in the classroom.
National Endowment for the Arts Anchor Work Definition
A work of sufficient intellectual heft and artistic merit to warrant careful aesthetic examination qualifies as an anchor work. Anchor works can be classic or contemporary, multidisciplinary or focused on a single discipline. Applied analysis and criticism will continue to yield deeper interest and engagement with the work. The work allows for the study of artistic principles, as well as revealing valuable information about cultural, civic, and/or social practices. Examining an anchor work requires that teachers and students take due time to reflect on one art piece that opens them up to conversations on a variety of topics, allowing them to practice looking in depth. Study of an anchor work is further deepened by examining the contexts that led to its production, meaning, and effect.
Fundamental questions about the human condition will naturally emerge from one's study of an anchor work. On many occasions, reflection on an anchor work will breed questions about aesthetic response, about intellectual traditions, about wrestling with the struggles of human existence. The conversation will be enriched insofar as the work yields multiple interpretations, even under scholarly scrutiny. The individual experience with the art form is crucial to begin to view the work, first, through a personal lens. Later, multiple lenses can be applied to the study of the work (i.e., history, politics, science are but a fraction of the possible lenses). Eventually, the anchor work provides participants with an immersion experience, whether in the creative process, specific ideas, a discipline, a historical period or an artist. The focus of the immersion experience will depend on how a teacher chooses to utilize the anchor work in the classroom. This immersion experience can be expanded by comparing two anchor works.
Other examples of the arts immersion approach
Creative Minds Program at the Massachusetts Cultural Council
Music Center: Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County