The Illinois Higher Education Art Association was organized in 1976 by faculty representing both two and four year art programs. The organization's purpose is to facilitate articulation among two and four year art programs in the state. While IHEAA dialogue has developed an atmosphere of collegiality, transferring of art credits still remains problematic with the student suffering. At issue are art courses that have similar course titles, approved for transfer credit, but in practice suffer from a lack of common content and experience.

During the past few years the membership of the IHEAA, seeing an opportunity to work with the Illinois Articulation Initiative, has been devoting their semi-annual meetings to developing content outlines for art courses typically offered during the first two years of the art major program to provide a common set of minimum expectations for these classes. The process has been intensive, typically engaging faculty presentations, preliminary drafts, reflection and revision, and finally adoption.

We recognize that each discipline within an art program has specific objectives that are routinely formulated by faculty within the discipline. These objectives are further defined and implemented by each faculty member during the course of teaching their class. It is not the intention of these skills and content outlines to impose specific course objectives, or approach or prescribe projects that is the domain of each individual instructor. These content and skills outlines, however, are intended to provide faculty with a set of minimum expectations to which specific individual objectives and approaches should be developed. Instructors may provide additional experiences, content and skills but they should cover what is outlined to assure continuity among courses with similar titles.