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Teaching World Culture Through The Visual Arts
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Teaching World Culture Through The Visual Arts

All curricular resources devloped from this workshop can also be found on our K-12 Curricular Materials pages for Elementary, Middle, and High School levels.

List of presentations

Using the Wild Wild Web to Learn about Art

Henry Pisciotta

Students Googling an artist or art form are typically swamped with sales hype, hobbyists, and obsolete information. How do you find the good stuff? Sharpening your search engine skills can help. Knowing about some of the best meta-sites for art can help even more. (Meta-sites select and link to the web’s best content.) Both of these approaches will be covered. It can also be helpful to provide students with a checklist for evaluating websites. There is even a meta-site for that!

Blue and White: A Case Study in Ten Centuries of Global Exchange

Charlotte Houghton, Ph.D.

This workshop examines the manufacture, spread, and cross-fertilization of blue-and-white porcelain production both as an example of multi-cultural exchange spanning a millennium, and also as a model for understanding global economic patterns today. It is a romantic tale. The avid 10th-century taste for blue and white ceramics in Persia led local entrepreneurs to outsource production to China, whose translucent, egg-shell-thin porcelain was then finest in the world. The “china” it produced spread throughout Asia and the Islamic world. When Dutch traders arrived in Asia circa 1600, they filled their emptied ships with Chinese export-ware as ballast for the return trip to the Netherlands, where it overnight became a highly sought-after luxury for well-to-do dinner tables. To compete with exotic eastern ceramics, the Dutch developed their own version, Delftware, which they then exported to the newly “discovered” Americas, where it in turn cross-fertilized with the Chinese “Persian style” porcelain reaching South America on the Manila galleons. Ever since, the blue and white terra cottas of Puebla, Mexico, have attested to the rich past of global interaction, while contemporary Chinese-produced “Delft Ware” witnesses a global cultural hall of mirrors.

Using the Arts in the Classroom to Enhance Cultural Awareness & Learning

Jennifer L. Vanada

Using the Arts of a cultural group in the classroom is one simple way to enrich curriculum as well as making life long connections to the world around us. Educators can help their students learn about & appreciate the similarities & differences in people, traditions & regions around the globe through exposure & hands on projects.

Impact Award Submissions

Additional Resources

Why teach global issues?

The integration of global education is essential for K-12 students to develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed for responsible participation in a democratic society and in a twenty-first century global community. The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) believes that an effective school curriculum must include global and international education. Global education is important because the day-to-day lives of average citizens around the world are influenced by burgeoning international connections. The human experience is an increasingly globalized phenomenon in which people are constantly being influenced by transnational, cross-cultural, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic interactions.

Therefore, In accordance with state and national teaching standards, this page will provide teachers with strategies for engaging students with the following goals:

  • gaining knowledge of world cultures;
  • understanding the historical, geographic, economic, political, cultural, and environmental relationships among world regions and peoples;
  • examining the nature of cultural differences and national or regional conflicts and problems; and
  • acting to influence public policy and private behavior on behalf of international understanding, tolerance and empathy.