Academics

Middle School : Visual Arts

Experience in the creative process is essential for all students. In the arts, this process involves solving problems with skill and imagination, discovering new questions, and producing new ideas, objects, or interpretations of existing works. Learning in, about, and through the arts develops each student's capacity to make meaning from experience, respond to creativity, and contribute to society.

Guidelines For the Arts Curriculum

1. The arts are essential to the education of all students
2. Students exercise and display multiple intelligences through the arts.
3. Understanding of human growth and development shapes effective arts curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
4. Comprehensive and sequential arts programs encourage students to make multicultural and interdisciplinary connections.
5. Authentic assessment in the arts is designed to demonstrate what students know and can do; it provides a model for assessing all complex learning.
6. Creating and sustaining high quality arts programs require partnerships among all faculty and between the school and community.

Ring Mountain believes that all students can discover that learning in, about, and through the arts is a demanding and creative process that can lead to a profound sense of understanding, joy, and accomplishment. We teach that in all cultures throughout history human beings have expressed insights about themselves and the world around them through dance, music, theatre, and visual arts. Our teachers understand that sequential experiences in "the practice of creating" enable learners to understand the arts and to express themselves in ways that do not depend solely on the written or spoken word. Consequently, we educate students to appreciate ideas and emotions conveyed in sound, image, movement, and words, and to speak the languages of the arts.

Visual Art

Visual arts and design education develops students who can perceive and shape the visual, spatial, and aesthetic characteristics of the world around them. Visual arts and design include the traditional "fine arts" of drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture; the design fields of handicrafts, industrial, textile, graphic, architectural, and landscape design; and urban, regional, and rural planning. Visual arts and design is a continuously evolving field that also explores the expressive potential of technologies such as film, holography, video, and electronic art.