The GATE Visual & Performing Arts (VPA) Program is a Division of Special Education within the Department of Education and is partially funded by Title VI This program provides talented students with a curriculum which is emphasized the development of skills, concepts and creativity. Art experiences are designed to go beyond the regular classroom activities. The overall goals of the programs are:
- To identify gifted and talented students in the areas of dance, drama, vocal and instrumental music and visual arts/
- To provide individual and class instruction, practices and performance opportunities for identified students.
- To encourage young people to develop qualities of leadership and a sense of community responsibility.
- To recognize and encourage outstanding abilities in the arts.
- To provide in-service training to classroom teachers so that they may assist in the identification and development of talented students.
Preparing students to "Soar Beyond All Barriers" is carried out in all areas of instruction. Emphasis is placed on the higher levels of thinking in Bloom's Taxanomy, focusing particular attention on the categories related to abstract concepts, as well as creative and critical thinking. Through varied and challenging motivation, the GATE Visual and Performing Arts program aims to stimulate exceptionally talented students in learn to see more, sense more, recall more, and become more vitally aware of their changing and expanding environment.
Art is not anything a child draws, paints, sings or dances. Art is more than copying or reporting. Art involves learning a language of communication. Like poetry art is a highly expressiveness, full of discriminative choices, and has a structure and purposeful body of knowledge and skill to be mastered.
Through many planned art-life experiences, which are reinforced by exposure to art books, films, slides and visits to professional art programs, student gain awareness and knowledge of the arts. Art is an education. It enhances a student's imagination, creativity, skills in basic learning and perceiving, reading, analyzing , evaluating and building a vocabulary of self expression.
The Guam Visual and Performing Arts Program provides instruction in the following areas of talent.
