Issues in Art and Design Teaching

Nicholas Addison, Lesley Burgess, Nicholas Addison, Lesley Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134500253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Issues in Art and Design Teaching draws together a range of pedagogical and ethical issues for trainee and newly qualified teachers of art and design, and their mentors in art and design education. Arguing for a critical approach to the art and design curriculum, the collection encourages students and teachers to consider and reflect on issues in order that they can make reasoned and informed judgments about their teaching of art and design.
Among the key issues addressed include:

• challenging orthodoxies and exploring contemporary practices
• measuring artistic performance
• art history and multicultural education
• research in art and design education
• transitions in art and design education: primary/secondary and secondary/tertiary
• the role of art and design in citizenship education.

Part 1
Transitions and shifts in teaching and learning

Paradigm shifts

1 Recent shifts in US art education
KERRY FREEDMAN

2 Art and design in the UK: the theory gap
JOHN STEERS

1 Recent shifts in US art education

Kerry Freedman

Introduction

This chapter focuses on a transformation that is currently underway in art education in the United States of America. The professional field is changing in response to the new landscape of the visual arts and general educational reforms. The new perspective on art education involves an understanding of the curriculum as a conceptual space in which students develop their ideas with the aid of teachers who do not act merely as guides, but as critical partners. Curriculum is newly becoming understood as a form of mediation between and among students, teachers, and a wide range of texts and images from inside and outside of school.

In part, the change in art education is a response to the elitism and formalism of high modernism reflected in, for example, discipline-based art education. It is a broadly sociocultural approach that seeks to put back into art education the diverse meanings of art to human existence, and aid student understanding of the power of visual culture (including fine and popular arts and their interactions). It focuses on the complex and critical interaction between making and viewing that is at the root of learning in and through the visual arts.

Art education and the state

The public art education that has grown up over the past hundred and fifty years has had a profound effect in the US. Much more is generally known about art than in the past. Museum attendance has continually increased, becoming a major form of ‘edutainment’, and children’s artistic expression is generally considered part of healthy growth and development.

At the same time, however, US art educators have been forced to struggle to keep art in the schools and are constantly threatened with reductions in programming, personnel, materials, and so on. This is the case even now, when it is likely that students learn more from visual culture than from texts, because people are still not convinced that the visual arts are as important as literacy and numeracy. Each state in the US has different requirements for the amount of art offered in schools and site-based management has resulted in an increase in art education in some and its elimination in others. At colleges and universities, art programmes are often those with the least financial support and political clout although student numbers are high.

These conflicting values and disagreements about the importance of art education have fuelled debates concerning how much or how little the central government should control curriculum and assessment. The debates are similar to those in other countries, but unlike many other countries, the US has no single, government-controlled curriculum.

However, other forms of national curriculum exist. For example, state and national standards have been developed and testing in the arts has become prevalent. Teachers are expected to teach to tests intended to assess students’ memory of sometimes arbitrary and trivial art historical information and limited applications of elements and principles of design. In contrast to the flux and contradictions of actual knowledge and production in the arts, centralized curriculum standards and testing are based on what is hoped to be a consensus about the criteria and indicators of academic, including aesthetic, quality. The standards and testing suggest that curriculum can be made static and that change in the arts can be limited by putting regulated boundaries around it. The idea of an agreed national knowledge reflects the expectation that ‘local’ knowledge (of, for example, community and popular culture) is deficient and nationally defined borders delimit cultural (and epistemological) boundaries.

The conceptual horizons for state-controlled curriculum discourse and student assessment in art have been provided by scientific rhetoric, also promoting an implied national curriculum (Freedman 1995). Scientific rhetoric is not science per se and does not only apply to the study of scientific skills and concepts. Rather, it is an element of educational discourse that exemplifies common beliefs about the structure, certainty and applicability of science in all school subjects. Scientific rhetoric carries with it the assumption that social life may be systematically tested like the physical world. It reflects a belief that through testing, objective truths will be discovered and measured (or at least untruths will be revealed). It further reflects the assumption that science progressively moves towards a single truth by achieving better methods, technologies, and data. Scientific rhetoric is considered universally applicable, not only to the physical world it was intended to describe, but also to the social world, where it is used to prescribe. It does not carry with it a representation of the play of scientific ideas against a structural background of time and place. Rather, this rhetoric is considered neutral and self-contained, based on synthetic propositions, and unattached to historical crises and social transformations.

In part, the scientific rhetoric in US art education has resulted from the understandable, but misguided, conviction in the professional community that standards and high-stakes testing are needed to legitimize the field. It is also a result of the influence of the discipline-based art education of the 1980s and 1990s (Smith 1987). As a result, nationally published curriculum packages available to teachers are based on a discipline-based format. They focus on the structure and content of a few fine arts disciplines that both reflect a modernist aesthetic and echo scientific rhetoric; art is thus represented in pseudo-scientific ways. In effect these packages act as a national curriculum because they are used across the US. Most of them encourage teachers to break art objects apart, leading to a formulaic analysis of media techniques, decontextualized uses of elements and principles of design, and the study of names and dates of historical fine artists and ‘masterpieces’.

Such modernist responses to the postmodern challenges of contemporary life seem to ignore the pervasive and didactic influence of visual culture. What used to be considered ‘local’ and popular now functions at the national and even international levels and the boundaries between visual forms have broken down as new types of ‘edutainment’ have emerged. By means of mass production and newer technologies, students are now learning through the visual arts a curriculum that no one group controls. It is a seductive curriculum that provides important and enriching information while also teaching lessons of, for example, violence and stereotype. This curriculum may be particularly at issue in the US where more students watch a nationally broadcast television programme than are influenced by the same school curriculum. Visual culture has become the US national curriculum.

New directions in the professional field

The current educational reform in art education seeks to recapture the imagination and meaning of art, as well as respond to the increasingly profound influence of the visual arts in everyday life. This reform is, in part, a grassroots movement in contrast to the Getty Institute’s promotion of discipline-based art education or the topdown emphasis on national and state standards and testing. Teachers’ conceptualizations of the curriculum packages discussed above as resources, rather than as plans for practice, illustrate the rejection of artificial structures for learning in the art education community. The shift in art education revolves around a desire to relocate student experience, and contemporary realities concerning the visual arts, to the centre of art education.

Unlike many of the educational reforms that have taken place in the past, the current change is not just a shift in curriculum content or methods. It is a fundamental change in ways of thinking about teaching and learning in the visual arts and it is happening in schools, universities, museums, and other cultural institutions. At least seven new conditions of art education are shaping this change:

1. The domain of art education has expanded to embrace all forms of visual culture.
2. Research on interactive cognition is an important basis for educational planning.
3. Social perspectives to art education are paramount.
4. The realities of pervasive technologies are addressed.
5. Art education is understood as cultural identity formation.
6. The importance of contextualizing form is emphasized in both the analysis and making of art work.
7. Greater attention is given to constructive critique.

I shall briefly describe and explain each of these new conditions. Of course, some teachers have been attending to these conditions for a long time, but in the following I include related changes in practice that are receiving increased attention in the US.

Visual culture

The new domain of art education is visual culture. The forms of visual culture include all of the visual arts and design, historical and contemporary: the fine arts, advertising, popular film and video, folk art, television and other performance, the built environment, computer graphics and other forms of visual production and communication. Teaching visual culture is not just teaching about popular culture, nor is it a process of uncritical acceptance. It is a reasonable response to contemporary realities in which the visual arts from past and present, and from multiple cultures, are infinitely recycled, juxtaposed, co-mingled, and reproduced. Today, art education must have less to do with information distribution and more to do with ideas, analysis, and appraisal. Teaching visual culture is about students making and viewing the visual arts to understand their meanings, purposes, relationships, and influences.

Distinguishing among visual forms of culture is becoming increasingly difficult, in part, because the distinctions are no longer based on the quality of form per se. In the past, types of media, levels of technical skill, and compositional sophistication played a large part in determining whether an object was considered a work of art. However, such qualitative differences between visual forms have become less discrete. The old argument that fine art was the only art worthy of academic study because of its aesthetic qualities simply does not stand up any more because the same formal qualities can now be found in things both profound and mundane; what was once considered mundane, has become profound in its effects.

In postindustrial, advanced democracies the visual arts are increasingly understood as infused into daily life. Elite aspects of visual culture, such as the purchase of fine art objects have been historically linked to education, refinement, and good taste. Now, however, the ownership of these objects might be considered one relatively minor avenue of access to the visual arts among many, as geographical and institutional borders are crossed and boundaries between the visual arts blur. Fashion designers market scaled-down copies of their own haute couture to increase their visibility. Commercial and graffiti artists become fine artists who are then hired to make advertisements. The Mona Lisa has become a pop icon and the Star Wars exhibition has been shown in fine art museums.

Practices

Rather than struggle against this proliferation of the visual arts, we should embrace it because it means that the job of art educators has now truly become critical to students’ everyday lives. As a part of their education, students are being encouraged to develop a critical awareness of the visual culture they encounter every day. For example, they are beginning to use the methods of feminism to investigate representations of gender, investigating the ways in which men and women have been depicted in fine art and advertising. Through these investigations, students are beginning to understand the immense power of the visual arts in their capacity to seduce, suggest, and educate.

Teachers are addressing the changing visual world by developing educational strategies that focus on the wide range of visual culture and interactions between various cultural forms. Rather than starting with the belief that students cannot make art until they have representational skills, teachers are now planning lessons to promote expression through imaginative and communicative work. Teachers are beginning with students’ visual culture rather than the structure of the fine art disciplines.

Interactive cognition

The historical separation of knowledge from feeling as a foundation of western philosophy has devalued the importance of emotion to cognition and resulted in a lack of serious consideration of the arts in education (Eisner 1998a). Emotion in most school subjects other than art is considered best left at the classroom door, where cognition without ties to emotion, supposedly takes over. However, as Eisner (1994: 33–4) argues, the separation of the ‘ cognitive and intelligent’ from the ‘affective or emotional’ is absurd because our experience of the world is largely qualitative.

Since the early 1990s, cognitive scientists have become interested in the realm of the arts and the relationship of the arts to learning (e.g. Gardner 1991; Solso 1994, 1997). The connection between form, feeling, and knowing is becoming understood as an important part of cognitive processing, as in the role of expectation to the perception and interpretation of form. Expectation is an emotional state tied to knowledge, for example when a person one knows well is not immediately recognized when seen out of context. Emotion is a form of knowing and it shapes, even determines, the construction of other aspects of knowledge.

The importance of (emotional) relationships between people and objects to learning is becoming increasingly apparent as a result of the new cognitive research. Learning takes place based on cognitive connections, including those that relate to emotion, and more connections mean greater learning. To some extent, each individual constructs knowledge in their own way, based on their own interactions with and interpretations of information, building on previous knowledge.

Differences in individual constructions of knowledge must now be taken into account, but at the same time, group cognition and situated cognition studies tell us that people come to know in relation to human and environmental contexts (e.g. Prawat 1989; Cole and Engestrom 1993; Kincheloe and Steinberg 1993). For example, computers and other visual technologies have changed both what we know and how we come to know. When we learn through visual technologies that enable fictional images to look real, our thinking about the world is transformed.

Practices

In schools throughout the US, students are making and analysing videos and other time art works to understand the ways in which group meanings are embodied by form. In art classrooms where individualized learning has traditionally been emphasized, cooperative learning activities have increased, reflecting the importance of creative partnerships in contemporary visual culture.

The shift in thinking about learning includes a rethinking about the ways that some common art lessons have appeared to tear emotion from cognition. High school teachers are beginning to move away from, for example, student hours spent making colour wheels and doing other formal and technical exercises, towards lessons that enrich and extend meaning through narrative and other complex concepts. In these lessons colour is investigated by students in order to give form to their ideas. The colour wheel can be seen on the wall, but the students do visual research that demonstrates their own intellectual path, making emotional aspects of cognition transparent. Part of the art learning process is revealed in student writing and other types of reflection that leave cognitive footprints.

Social perspectives

The vast and complex social life of art is important as an educational topic because separating art from its intents and purposes, its interpretations and influences, and its power, can lead to a lack of understanding about the centrality of art to human existence. The task of describing social perspectives on art education is difficult because so many exist. These perspectives include attention to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, special ability, and other body identities and cultures; socio-economics, political conditions, communities, and natural and human-made environments, including virtual environments. The common ground among these perspectives is that they are based on the conviction that the visual arts are vital to all societies and that representations of art in education should be investigated to reveal their complexity, diversity and integral cultural location. Social perspectives on art education are not, as some have suggested, ‘just political’; they represent the lived meanings of visual culture and communities.

Art education has always been important for social reasons. For those of us who were brought up in the period of ‘art for art’s sake’ (which also has its social roots) the historical and social purposes of art might seem inappropriate. But what are the purposes of art if not to reflect and contribute to the life of the social animals who make, view, and use it? Art is, after all, for people’s sake. Admittedly, the particular purposes of the past are not those I would wish to support now; but art is a form of social production. For art education to represent art from a social perspective is simply to admit its profound social meaning.

Today, artists often make comments about various social issues and crossover the boundaries of form to perform socially responsible acts. For example, the performance art of Dominique Mazeud and her collaborating volunteers has become a monthly process of clearing garbage away along the Rio Grande that began in 1987.

The art of Peggy Diggs includes the Hartford Grandmothers’ Project, which began through the artist’s concern about the impact of gang violence on the lives of elderly women living in inner city Hartford, Connecticut, but ended as a dialogue between these women and local teenagers. Art educators perform socially responsible service every day in their work with students.

Practices

Even before students reach adolescence, they become increasingly aware of social issues and take part in an increasingly sophisticated analysis of them. They learn from social interactions, are influenced by local and media culture, and are immersed in the culture of their peers. They begin to place a greater emphasis on social rules and mores, and in the process, question as well as accept social boundaries. Teachers are beginning to deploy many methods of investigation to enable students to understand social aspects of art such as interviewing members of the community and researching local forms. At the secondary level, instruction in social issues and purposes of visual culture, as well as group forms of production, help to ensure that students do not lose interest in the visual arts in what may be their last, formal art course. Teachers are integrating more of the social meanings of art through activities that range from discussions about the look of toys, to analyses of the socio-economic conditions of museum exhibition, to online performances about students’ favourite television shows.

Pervasive technologies

The new global technology and unstable borders of culture have made popular culture pedagogical, as well as political (Giroux and Simon 1989). The fragmented, often contradictory, multidisciplinary and intercultural images that students interact with daily may have more to do with student understanding of art than does a curriculum based on the structure of the disciplines. An essential problem for educators is to help students eng...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction
• Part 1 Transitions and shifts in teaching and learning
• Part 2 Curriculum issues
• Part 3 Towards an ethical pedagogy
• References