Assessing Expressive Learning was inspired by the concerns of its authors that thinking about and making art should remain one of the principal goals of Art Education in K–12 American schools. Furthermore, K–12 art teachers should be considered the ones most qualified to answer the question of what it is that children should know and be able to do in K–12 art as a result of their matriculation in the school art program.
Pressures from both within and outside the school in recent times have led some to question whether the goals of art learning should remain anchored to children being actively engaged in forming expressive objects of meaning or move more toward viewing the student as an active participant in an art world that makes art possible through a legitimizing theory where art is considered a production in a battleground for power struggles. What has further exacerbated this situation is efforts at national school reforms requiring the assessment of K–12 learning through standardized paperand- pencil, true-false, and multiple choice tests.
The principal goals of this effort were, therefore, to reaffirm the notion that the artworks created by students are objects of meaning that reflect artistic valuing and aesthetic intents that provide sensory perception and appreciation because they involve elements of human motivation and interactions between the student and his or her environment. What this effort reinforces is the need for students to be involved in artistic forming where culturally differentiated experience does not contradict the universal features of art and the art experience and where psychological involvement in the work seeks to qualify the relationships between the student and the art object. Furthermore, the project was designed to support school art experiences that contribute to the enrichment of conscious life experience through providing meaning on a symbolic level and affectively through feelings that contribute to the enrichment of sensory competence and cognitive enrichment.
