Author: René B. Javellana, SJ
Understanding, Valuing, & Living Art: Art Appreciation for College © 2018 is guided in its design and execution by the Commission of Higher Education (CHED)’s Outcomes-Based Education (OBE). This approach to teaching is modelled after an analogous approach to management like Management by Objective. The point of teaching is not to stuff students’ minds with a lot of material, hence, promoting rote learning, but rather to make students go through a learning process where the outcome is measurable. Learning is about competence in an area of knowledge, and the acquisition of knowledge linked to critical thinking. The college curriculum presupposes active learning, which has already been fostered by the K-12 syllabi and curricula. This active learning leads to skills.
This textbook covers all the essential points of the CHED Art Appreciation curriculum but does not follow its outline slavishly. For instance, instead of putting all the sections on art history together, history has been divided and placed after a discussion of an art form. An example, Chapter 3 on visual arts segues into art history from paleolithic art to the brink of Greco-Roman or Hellenistic art. The reason is that these two periods in art history reinforce the discussion on elements of art and the role of art in society.
This textbook has nine chapters, corresponding to the standard 18 weeks of the curriculum. Each chapter is taken over two weeks or over six sessions of class. The first two chapters place art in context. Chapters 3-8 discuss the art genres of the Visual Arts (Chapter 3), Architecture (Chapter 4), Music (Chapter 5 ), Dance (Chapter 6), Theater (Chapter 7), and Film (Chapter 8). The seventh art genre, literature, is not discussed because literature is more than adequately covered by other courses. The chapters end with a discussion on Creative Practices (Chapter 9).
About the author
FR. RENÉ B . JAVELLANA, SJ is currently Associate Professor of the Fine Arts Department at the School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University. He was director of Fine Arts from2003-2009.
He is also chair of the Board of Trustees of Jesuit Communications, the media organization of the Jesuits in the Philippines and province archivist of the Jesuits in the Philippines. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the Philippines since 2010 and actively engages in the Museum’s work of writing and curating.
He has written both scholarly and popular works. His most recent scholarly publications on Philippine colonial art, La Casa de Dios: Filipino-Hispanic Churches in the Philippines, was short-listed as a finalist for the National Book Award, 2011. In 2017, he published Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565-1850.
In 2013, he wrote an introduction to an exhibit of Japanese Namban Art in the McMullen Museum of Boston College, Massachusetts. He is currently working on the revision of the CCP Encyclopedia of Art,
projected publication in 2017, where he has contributed about 100 entries. In October 2017, the exhibit he curated “Early Naturalists in the Philippines” opened as an inaugural exhibit for the newly established National Museum of Natural History.