National Coalition for Core Arts Standards Release!!!

Guiding Framework Released

The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) has released a narrative framework document that details the rationale, goals, and strategy of the new National Standards for Arts Education that are currently being written by five arts discipline teams in dance, media arts, music, theatre, and visual arts. The National Core Arts Standards: A Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning will be formally released as part of a streaming video presentation during the January 18-20 meeting of the coalition’s leadership and writing teams at the New York City headquarters of The College Board.

The broadcast presentation is scheduled for Friday January 18th, at 4:00 PM EST, via the NCCAS wiki at http://nccas.wikispaces.com. Questions and comments will be fielded through a companion live blog. Arts Education specialists, teachers, administrators teaching artists, parents, and community members are encouraged to attend. Viewers should plan on signing into the stream fifteen minutes prior to start time for live attendance; archival video and blog comments will be posted on the site twenty-four hours after the event closes.

NCCAS, a coalition of nine national arts and education organizations, is committed to developing a next generation of voluntary, researched-based arts education standards that will build on the foundation created by the 1994 standards (and the 2005 Standards for Learning and Teaching Dance in the Arts), support the 21st-century needs of students and teachers, help ensure that all students are college and career ready, and affirm the place of arts education in a balanced core curriculum.

The framework document guides readers through the historical context for arts education and standards, the foundational research and philosophical basis for the work, and explores what it means to be artistically literate, based on the artistic processes of creating, performing/presenting/producing, responding, and connecting. The narrative also articulates the fundamental creative arts practices by which students learn in individual arts disciplines and transfer their knowledge, skills and habits to other contexts and settings.

During the video presentation, NCCAS framing committee members will walk the audience through the narrative document and its companion matrix—a template that provides a unified view of the standards for the five arts disciplines, while allowing the distinguishing characteristics of each discipline to be preserved. Leadership and the discipline chairs will also explain an updated timeline for the work and share plans for a draft review process that is set to begin this summer.

To learn more about the next generation of voluntary national arts standards, or to review video archives of previous presentations, please visit the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards website at http://nccas.wikispaces.com.

To download the Conceptual Framework please go to http://nccas.wikispaces.com/Conceptual+Framework and download the .pdf.