Throughout history the arts have provided essential for individuals and communities to express their ideas, experiences, feelings, and deepest beliefs. Each discipline shares common goals but approaches them through distinct media and techniques. Understanding artwork provides insights into individuals’ own and others’ cultures and societies, while also providing opportunities to access, express, and integrate meaning across a variety of content areas. Artistically literate citizens know and understand artwork from varied historical periods and cultures, and actively seek and appreciate diverse forms and genres of artwork of enduring quality/significance. They also seek to understand relationships among the arts, and cultivate habits of searching for and identifying patterns, relationships between the arts and other knowledge. The Arts as Means to Wellbeing Philosophical Foundations Lifelong Goals Participation in the arts as creators, performers, and audience members (responders) enhances mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. Artistically literate citizens find joy, inspiration, peace, intellectual stimulation, meaning, and other life-enhancing qualities through participation in all of the arts. The Arts as Community Engagement Philosophical Foundations Lifelong The arts provide for individuals to collaborate and connect with others in an enjoyable inclusive environment as they create, prepare, and share artwork that bring communities together. Artistically literate citizens seek artistic experiences and support the arts in local, state, national, and global communities. The Arts as Profession Philosophical Foundations Lifelong Goals Professional artists weave the cultural and aesthetic fabric of communities and cultivate beauty, enjoyment, curiosity, awareness, activism, and personal, social, and cultural connection and reflection. This fabric strengthens communities as a whole, enhances the lives of individuals, and inspires the global community. Artistically literate citizens appreciate the value of supporting the arts as a profession by engaging with the arts and by supporting the funding of the arts. Some artistically literate individuals will pursue a career in the arts, thereby enriching local, state, national, and global communities and economies. Organization of the Standards The California Arts Standards are organized by the five artistic disciplines of dance, media arts, music, theatre, and visual arts. For each of the five disciplines, there are four artistic processes, eleven anchor standards with aligned enduring understandings
and essential questions, and individual PK–12 student performance standards that are articulated as measurable and attainable learning targets. Elements of the California Arts Standards Figure 3 provides a unified view of the California Arts Standards for the five artistic disciplines. The figure shows the relationship among the elements of the standards. These elements, considered together, will assist local education agencies and individual schools in writing, adapting, or adopting curriculum and in addressing comprehensive assessment in arts education. Figure 3: Elements of the California Arts Standards Four Artistic Processes Eleven Anchor Standards Enduring Understandings and Process Components Discipline-Specific Performance Standards Creating Performing (for Dance, Music, and Theatre), Presenting (for Visual Arts), or Producing (for Media Arts) Responding Connecting 11 anchor standards: Describe expectations for general behaviors, artistic skills, and habits of mind Parallel across the artistic disciplines Enduring with related essential questions to guide student inquiry Process components that operationalize the standards PK–Grade 8 High School Proficient Advanced Implementation of the standards is driven by the philosophical foundations and lifelong goals that together demonstrate artistic literacy (see Figure 2.) They are made actionable through the artistic processes that are common across disciplines. Anchor and performance standards in each artistic discipline are driven by enduring understandings and essential questions. A more detailed description of each of these elements and how they connect to one another follows. Artistic Processes and Anchor Standards The standards are based on the artistic processes of creating; performing/ producing/presenting; responding; and connecting. These artistic processes are the