Monday, February 8, 2010

DARE to Educate

DARE (which stands for Digital Art Resources for Education) is an online education resource for contemporary international visual arts, which developed through the Digital Arts Education Research Initiative from 1998 to 2001.

The resource is aimed at a broad educational audience and is divided into four of areas:

Digital - This section includes a periodically changing selection of contemporary webart projects made specifically for the Internet.

Art - "Art" takes visitors to DARE's main resource area, where images and ideas of a diverse range of British and interntional contemporary artists are examined through themes of play, space + place and translation. The section also contains several ideas for project work and critical studies discussions as well as an image gallery of each artists' works, without contextualization.

Resource - Here, additional resources are listed. These resources include a compilation of related books, journals, CD-ROMS and education packs. Text and image resources' full bibliographies are included in this section, as is an extensive list of links to international contemporary artists organizations, galleries and education projects.

Education - The "Education" section has an overview of the approach to teaching and learning about contemporary art and critical studies used by DARE. There are also links to schools who have used DARE since its pilot phase.

DARE's unique in its mission to "ease the flow" between contemporary art practices and current art education. DARE aims to lessen the lack of teacher resources within formal education that teach critical and creative practices of contemporary artists from a diverse range of cultures. The website allows contextual issues to be considered while examining how artists have made their work. It also allows users to access and view work by artists who have not traditionally been looked at in the formal curriculum.

The School of Lifelong Learning and Education hosts DARE's website.