On May 18, 2015 the Arizona State Board of Education adopted revised Arizona Academic Standards in the Arts. The recently approved Arts Standards will replace the June 2006 Arts Standards; the 2015-16 school year will be a transition year, with full implementation of the new standards during the 2016-17 school year.
These revised Arizona Academic Standards in the Arts embrace the idea of Artistic Literacy – the ability of students to create art, perform and present art, respond or critique art, and connect art to their lives and the world around them.
The 2015 Arizona Academic Standards in the Arts have substantive changes from the 2006 Arts Standards in response to the needs of the field, including:
- Moving from 3 categories of standards – Create, Relate, Evaluate – to four categories better representing the larger encompassing idea of artistic literacy. The four categories are: Creating, Performing/Presenting/Producing, Responding and Connecting.
- Grade by grade level standards for each discipline, including 3 levels in high school. These standards will allow for greater differentiation of instruction and support better measurement of student learning.
- The inclusion of media arts standards, in order to support artistic literacy in the areas of film, animation, gaming and computational artmaking (writing software code to create an aesthetic experience). These media arts standards are meant to supplement any existing Career and Technical Education industry standards in the digital communications area.
- Embracing the use of Anchor Standards underneath the four categories listed above to create more consistency across the content areas within the standards.
You can view the new standards on the Arizona Department of Education Website.
