The Need for Openness in Art Education

Can art education tolerate art? It looks more and more like the answer is no. Art requires imagination, play, openness and critical questioning. Art education, as an institution, tends to produce practices inconsistent with imagination, play, openness, and critical questioning. The dominant practices of the field tend to define, to reify, to certify, to enshrine

Recognizing Social Issues in the Art Curriculum

It is a conventional assumption in art education that all experience with art contributes to the student\u27s educational growth. Yet recent art and media criticism suggest that the arts can also function as ideologies that restrict or mystify our views of the world, thus inhibiting growth. This problem suggests the need for curriculum designers, teachers, and students to recognize the social meaning in art. This paper identifies and critically discusses two kinds of social meaning: meanings inherent in the work of art (e.g., political statements in film); and meaning created by the design of the art curriculum (e.g., a monocultural or high-technology emphasis). By directing their critical attention to these social meanings, art educators may more effectively counter miseducational ideologies, and realize the potential of the arts for authentic expression and communication

Art Education in Social Context

Discourse about art, like other discourse, contains limits as well as possibilities for creating meaning about human experience. The following essay raises a series of questions about the difference between the discourse of most art education, and the discourse of contemporary art critics and artists. Why are these subcultures of the art world different, and what is the significance of their separation? Is art education systematically losing its capacity to make contact at the level of human experience? Has it alienated itself from larger social concerns? These issues are explored through general review of art education discourse and through the specific example of photography study in art education and art criticism

Marginal Images: Art and Ideology in the School

Art has come to connote something that is eclectic and unpredictable. Art may be concerned with the aesthetic organization of visual elements, or it may defy conventional aesthetics; it may seek to interpret visual experience, or it may interpret psychological phenomenon that have no visual manifestation; it may have significant social content, or it may not. Art defies generalizations about its form, but welcomes more readily a characterization of its spirit. Art is inquiring, open-ended, illuminating, often startling. Art is very close to the central concerns and experiential reality of the artist. While it is increasingly difficult to say what art is, it is not difficult to have a clear intuitive awareness of what art feels like in relation to other basic human activities. In the context of social mechanization and pervasive pressure to ideological conformity, the importance of this intuition about the artistic spirit may surpass the importance of particular works of art

Strife Among Friends and Foes: The 1958 Anglo-American Military Interventions in the Middle East

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Social Theory and Social Practice in Art Teacher Education

It seems clear that art educators must think clearly about the design of teacher education programs if social theory is to become social practice. The obstacles to successful integration of theory and practice are many, ranging from the logistics of engaging artist-teachers in theoretical studies, to the intrinsically different natures of theoretical and practical activities. And it is difficult to guarantee that such amorphous qualities as flexible dialogue, love, hope, and mutual trust can be made part of a teacher education program, even when a deliberate effort is made to do so. But while the model of teacher education discussed here is problematic to achieve, the reasons for working in this directions are compelling and inescapable. We do not want the gap between practice and theory to widen further; and we can not ethically close that gap except through the authentic participation of student teachers. The pedagogical conditions which can make this participation real are beginning to be identified; now is the time to make our practices live up to these pedagogical insights

Strife Among Friends and Foes: The 1958 Anglo-American Military Interventions in the Middle East

[No abstract