During the school year, an artist and team of teachers meet to develop lesson plans built around performances or other works of art, and alternate teaching in the classroom. After the performance or viewing of the work of art, the students continue lessons in the classroom, building on what they have seen or experienced and further developing ideas from their earlier work. Students and teachers benefit from their Arts Are Basic study in many ways. The root of the word aesthetic is the Greek aisthetike, which means perception through the senses. The Arts Are Basic mission is to put artists and their works central to learning.
Arts Are Basic fosters the development of aesthetic education as an important part of learning.
Through the formation of long-term partnerships with schools and community leaders, the aesthetic dimension of the human experience will be explored through encounters with a broad spectrum of performing and visual arts. In order to serve teachers and students fully, Arts Are Basic serves as a catalyst not only to create a greater aesthetic awareness of the world but also to foster greater understanding of the world's peoples through culturally specific arts. It is a way of regaining touch with the process of learning something new, of being introduced to a medium never known in a particular way before. It is the incorporation of the arts across the curriculum in a way that fosters a heightened awareness of and appreciation for all that touches our lives. Since aesthetic quality is an aspect of all activity, perception, and intelligent thought, aesthetic education helps students discover new ways of looking at, listening to, moving in and speaking of their everyday experiences.