(de)Fending Art Education Through the Pedagogical Turn

This article reviews the current state of higher education in light of the pedagogical turn in contemporary art. It starts with an overview of higher education and its current struggles, followed by an outline of some of the features of the pedagogical turn in art, which is both critical of institutionalism and symptomatic of the current state of higher education. These ideas are discussed within the context of an art education graduate seminar. Finally, the argument is made for possible critical practices that take place inside the institution and that are inspired by priorities inherent in education as art projects aligned with the pedagogical turn

Hosting the Occupation of Art Education as Aporia

This article articulates an ethics of hospitality within art education that adopts an uncertain disposition to visual arts learning and affirms the unforeseeable while inviting openings for the transformation of art education knowledges and associated subjectivities. Throughout, I endeavor to keep the question of whom we teach unanswered and open, while searching for spaces of possibility within unpredictable, aporetic entanglements inherent in normalizing frameworks of art education. I contextualize Derridean notions of aporia, hospitality, monstrous arrivant, undecidability, and responsibility within the specificities of art teaching that call on us to approach the field as contradictory and ambiguous so that we might imagine the field and ourselves otherwise. Art education as an aporia must be both rule-governed and unruly, open to what may arrive to occupy our household

We’re All Creatives Now: Democratized Creativity and Education

This article draws attention to and lays a critique against the relationship between creativity and neoliberalism within society, art, and education in order to both denaturalize and challenge its progression. I explore the following question: What might the implications be if contemporary education concerns itself with facilitating creativity for economic good at the expense of other conceptions of creativity? Here I confine myself to charting how creativity acts as a discursive term representing political, educational, artistic, economic, and social processes of our times. I maintain that creativity is profoundly transforming through processes of colonization and democratization associated with neoliberal economics and entrepreneurial innovation. In response to these changes, this article aims to re-appropriate creativity for education by pushing back against the current business bias with expanded meanings and purposes for creativity that do not align with creativity for industry alone

Inoperative Art Education

Increasingly, assessment has encroached on art education, inextricably linking visual arts learning to standardized performances wherein, art educators are becoming technicians accountable to the neoliberal state of education. Under these circumstances, the authors’ hearts and minds are understandably heavy for a postponement of art education as usual, proposing the question: Given the permission to escape art education’s current workings, what might art educators abandon, and how might they undertake this? IN order to delve into this provocation, the authors propose a limbo space of deferral in relation to art education that might inspire any predetermined usages inoperable. From this paradoxical zone, the final destination of art education under economic rationales may be suspended so that art educators might studiously play with its norms. The authors offer poetic and sculptural forms that misuse aspects of art education to explore its possible im-potentialities going against the grain of neoliberal logics