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Rethinking Visual Arts Education: A Convergence of Influences By Donovan R. Walling The changing priorities of schools -- in particular the ascendancy of math and science -- and the modernist notion of creative self-expression pushed art education to the fringe of the curriculum, Mr. Walling points out. Ironically, now science -- coupled with high standards, an altered world view, and new understandings about teaching and learning -- is pushing art education back to the heart of the curriculum. |
THE ARTS have long struggled to find an appropriate role in the school curriculum. It has been, and continues to be, a struggle not only of place but also of definition. The teaching of visual arts offers a lens through which to view this struggle.
A brief historical perspective is useful. Before World War II the arts -- namely, music, theater, dance, and the visual arts -- were a livelier, more pervasive presence in the school curriculum than they became during the war years and later. School arts, and the arts writ large, flourished during the first half of the century, even through the Great Depression. In fact, many of the New Deal projects centered on the arts, ranging from the Federal Writers' Project to WPA-sponsored orchestras and public artworks, such as the heroic murals still preserved in post offices and other buildings. And these efforts prodded schools to be similarly involved in arts education.
However, government support of the arts, which had helped to keep arts education strong in schools, dried up as priorities shifted during the war and in the decades that followed. Then, and particularly after the Soviet launch of the first Sputnik in 1957, the emphasis in American schools swung dramatically toward math and science. The marginalization of arts education crested in the early and mid-1970s as the aging of the boomer generation emptied classrooms and the energy crisis forced cutbacks in programs and facilities. Auditoriums were gutted and turned into cafeterias, music practice rooms were reconfigured as office spaces, and art classrooms disappeared, to be replaced by "art on a cart."
Among arts educators the crisis was clear. Arts education would need not merely life support but new life if it were to move from the outer edge of the curriculum back to the core. Thus in the late 1970s a movement began across the arts disciplines to push, pull, and drag the arts back to the heart of schooling. For the visual arts this effort has been stimulated and informed by five influences, whose convergence argues for a rethinking of how art is taught. These influences include: 1) national goals and standards, 2) discipline-based art education, or DBAE, 3) postmodernism, 4) constructivist teaching, and 5) new technology. Similar influences can also be seen in the teaching of music, theater, and dance.
National Goals and Standards
Getting the arts into the national goals was not easy. Spurred by the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 -- never mind that it was rife with errors and hyperbole -- the National Governors' Association made education its focus for 1985-86, under the leadership of Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who would later become secretary of education under President George Bush. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was the vice chairman that year. "By the time of the 1988 presidential election," Alexander recalls, "almost every governor was describing himself or herself as an 'education governor.' . . . George Bush announced in the midst of his campaign that he intended to be the 'Education President.'"1
President Bush's enthusiasm for national goals as an education reform strategy did not fire similar enthusiasm in Congress. The legislation he sent to the House and Senate (the America 2000 bill) gained grudging approval initially, only to be filibustered in its final form by conservative Senate Republicans.2
The arts did not figure in President Bush's America 2000. They had already been relegated to the periphery of the curriculum by the time that bill was crafted and so were "forgotten." It was not until 1993, 10 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, that a revamped set of national goals -- President Clinton's Goals 2000 bill -- gained sufficient congressional support for passage. By then, there had been a small but significant change in Goal 3: the addition of the word arts to the list of "challenging subject matter" in which all students should demonstrate competency. That small word did not appear by magic. It got there as a result of persistent lobbying by arts educators, artists, and art critics, historians, and theorists.
Once the arts were included in the goals, the stage was set to move toward activation of those goals by establishing complementary national standards. The next questions became: How many? And what kinds? Samuel Hope, executive director of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, argued that the best course of action would reify the language of Goals 2000 by placing emphasis on what students should know and be able to do. The national art standards should not prescribe processes, methods, or resources. They should be generic, rather than specific.3
Hope and others argued convincingly, and a consortium of arts organizations gathered to develop the national standards along broad lines, thereby leaving interpretation and specifics to state and local entities. National Standards for Arts Education: What Every Young American Should Know and Be Able to Do in the Arts, published in late 1994, was the work of the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations, which included representatives from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, the National Art Education Association, the Music Educators National Conference, and the National Dance Association.
The published standards are discipline-specific to dance, music, theater, and the visual arts. From six to nine standards are given in each field, and each standard is articulated across sets of grades: K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. The five general standards for the visual arts illustrate the tone of the document:
- 1. The student understands and applies media, techniques, and processes related to the visual arts.
- 2. The student knows how to use the structures (for example, sensory qualities, organizational principles, expressive features) and functions of art.
- 3. The student knows a range of subject matter, symbols, and potential ideas in the visual arts.
- 4. The student understands the visual arts in relation to history and cultures.
- 5. The student understands the characteristics and merits of one's own artwork and the artwork of others.
One standard is common to all the arts disciplines: The student understands connections among the various art forms and other disciplines.
The framers of these standards resisted the temptation to prescribe beyond general principles, thus, as Hope suggested, leaving the door of interpretation as open to innovation as to tradition. Curriculum makers may tailor local standards to match cultural, community, and individual needs and interests. But such tailoring must be influenced by other critical ideas as well -- for example, the idea of art disciplines.
DBAE Theory
For much of the 20th century visual arts education centered on one overriding goal, helping students realize "creative self-expression." This self-limiting philosophy, which eventually helped to push art away from the core curriculum, held increasing sway from the advent of modernism until the 1960s, when the post-Sputnik wave of reform washed ashore some new ideas. Jerome Bruner deserves credit for articulating the notion that students should gain "an understanding of the fundamental structure of whatever subject we choose to teach."4 Some arts educators -- Manuel Barkin of Ohio State University, for example -- took Bruner's ideas and began to examine how art education might be enlarged beyond the emphasis on creative self-expression.
The shift in philosophy was slow, but by the early 1980s the idea of discipline-based art education, or DBAE, had come into its own through efforts at the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, part of the J. Paul Getty Trust. DBAE theory proposes that art education focus on four art disciplines: art history, art criticism, aesthetics, and art making or studio art. Whereas the last of these had been emphasized mostly in isolation during the "creative self-expression" years, art education reformers urged greater attention to the other disciplines that undergird, inform, and extend efforts at art making. Dwaine Greer, one of the originators of DBAE theory, explained it this way:
Discipline-based art education, as a part of general education, aims to develop mature students who are comfortable and familiar with major aspects of the disciplines of art. The goal is amplified in this manner: Students will be able to express ideas with art media; will read about and criticize art; will be aware of art history as the chronological, geographic, and personal context of what they are seeing all around them, not just in galleries and museums; and will have an understanding of the basic issues of aesthetics.5
During the 1980s and 1990s DBAE made strides in art teacher education that extended the Getty Center's fledgling attempts in schools, so that in today's art classrooms the heavy, nearly exclusive emphasis on art making has finally begun to be displaced in favor of art making shaped by a study of aesthetics, art history, and art criticism. Complementary interest in extending art education through interdisciplinary studies -- across all disciplines, not just the visual arts disciplines -- has been driven by curricular currents that can be clustered under the rubric of postmodernism.
Postmodernism
The term postmodernism has been widely abused, so much so that even Jacques Barzun recently questioned it in the toss-off opening line of an essay about the influence of modernism.6 But the essential -- and useful -- attributes of postmodernism were first stated by Charles Jencks in his 1977 book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, namely, pluralism and complexity.7 These elements have not changed but have been amplified and extended to other disciplines. David Elkind, for example, contends that "the [postmodern] movement represents a fundamental paradigmatic shift in our abiding world view." Elkind suggests that in the postmodern period, which we now occupy, we value the articulation of sociocultural differences rather than linear social progress, cultural particulars rather than universals, and the irregular as being "as legitimate and as worthy of exploration as the regular."8
A postmodern perspective alters the "what" of the art curriculum. What art is universal? Which artists and works constitute the art history that students should study? What aesthetic, or whose aesthetic? Postmodernism is anticanonical. Thus it makes sense for the national standards to be unfettered by reference to a canon. Too narrow a detailing of content standards at any level will stultify the curriculum and bind instruction to rote, rather than reform. To be effective without being restrictive, standards must be broadly, even loosely cast -- true even at the local level -- in order to allow for diversity, for multiple visions of what art is and how art may be created and taught. Broad, basic standards are like a conductor who allows the musicians freedom to express themselves and yet still deliver up a symphony, rather than a cacophony.
Taken together, the national arts education standards, DBAE theory, and postmodern pluralism are urging educators to approach the teaching of art along three broad avenues: universals, the community, and the individual. Postmodern universals are pluralistic and complex. Communities are multicultural. Individuals cannot be regarded as mere types. And so some pertinent questions arise:
Educators in the visual arts -- and in music, theater, and dance -- are struggling to answer these questions in order to shape their teaching in new ways.
Constructivist Teaching
The three preceding influences are complemented by a shift in instruction from a behaviorist model of teaching to a constructivist model. This shift also began during the late 1970s, coinciding with the development of DBAE theory and the beginning of the postmodern period. The behaviorist model essentially discounted students' prior knowledge and knowledge-acquisition structures, which increasingly have come to be recognized as keys to effective learning. Robert Slavin defined constructivism in this way: "Constructivism is a view of cognitive development as a process in which children actively build systems of meaning and understandings of reality through their experiences and interactions. . . . Children actively construct knowledge by continually assimilating and accommodating new information."9
Constructivist teaching harks back to Bruner's idea of teaching for "an understanding of the fundamental structures," which undergirds DBAE. Seen through the lens of postmodernism, it also offers a way for teachers and students to manage pluralism and complexity -- to build Slavin's "systems of meaning and understandings of reality."
Constructivist philosophy also affects assessment in art education. Localizing goals and standards is a necessary component of designing assessment that is, for the most part, ends-driven. Teachers must have in mind goals that are measurable and then design instruction that will move students toward the achievement of those goals. This is a highly useful way of thinking about instruction, but in a postmodernist, constructivist environment this approach also has limitations and cannot (at least, should not) be used exclusively. In the visual arts, exploration and experimentation -- true "creativity" -- are valid ends as well, necessary ends if pluralism and complexity are to be addressed in meaningful ways. This is another thinking point with regard to constructivist teaching. As Maxine Greene suggests, "If there are to be standards or frameworks, I would like to see them emerge from the class itself -- spelled out in the light of what is valued."10
Orchestrating constructivist teaching is a complex challenge, and it is difficult at times for teachers to step back, to relinquish the directorial role for the facilitative one that such teaching requires. I am reminded of what the conductor Zubin Mehta once said in a television interview: "The secret of conducting is knowing when not to conduct, when to get out of the musicians' way." This "secret" holds true for effective teaching in the visual arts as well, and it is the only way to meld these various influences.
New Technology
Finally, there is technology, which has always affected both the study of art and its making. Albrecht Dürer, the master of the German Renaissance, used and created devices (technology) to assist with perspective, as can be seen in his woodcuts. Modern master David Hockney recently suggested that many of the Old Masters -- Holbein, Ingres, and so on -- drew so well because they used a camera lucida. Although his theory has been greeted with considerable skepticism, it was probably true for some artists.11 Today, overtaking all other technology -- not only in the arts but everywhere -- is the computer.
Even a brief discussion of computer technology in art education must address two themes: using the computer to create and to manipulate images and using the computer to investigate the visual arts. The first involves art making, while the second involves art history, art criticism, and aesthetics -- to use the component disciplines of DBAE theory.
Students who make art are finding many uses for the computer: to create plans for sculptures (or ceramics or anything three-dimensional); to produce finished "virtual" objects; and to render preliminary, intermediate, or finished two-dimensional works. For example, a student can make a sketch, electronically scan the sketch onto a disk, and then use a computer program such as Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the image. The manipulated image may be taken back to work by hand, or it can be refined solely by using the computer. The computer output could be an electronic "product" or a more traditional, "frameable" work. This computer-assisted manner of working has already revolutionized the field of commercial art and, consequently, altered the curriculum for students who plan to enter that field. But computer technology is also making changes in "fine" art, as students explore alternatives to traditional methods of art making.
Two forms of computer technology also offer resources for teaching aesthetics, art history, and art criticism: CD-ROMs and the Internet. CD-ROM versions of printed text and images, from encyclopedias to art collections, offer students and teachers a wealth of information. Often these CD-ROMs include sound clips and video clips, such as film footage of historic events, snippets of famous speeches, and so on. These "extras," not available in standard print resources, enliven and enlarge the resources, so that students do not merely read the information but experience it. Although CD-ROMs cannot replace the many books that provide useful, in-depth information about art, they frequently offer highly accessible basic information and excellent starting points for study. Most students also find CD-ROM resources motivating, because they are interactive and because the computer technology itself is engaging.
The number of schools with access to the Internet is increasing rapidly. From only 33% of schools in 1994, 78% of schools were connected to the Internet by 1997.12 As connectivity is extended into more individual classrooms, art educators in particular are finding the Internet to be an invaluable resource. A growing number of museums, galleries, archives, and libraries maintain websites, which are continually updated and expanded. The websites contain images of artworks, reference collections, online texts, and other information that can vastly expand the instructional reach of teachers. Many also include lesson plans and sample lessons to make teachers' work easier.
There are so many websites that it may take a considerable amount of time to search out those of most value. Three starting points worth mentioning are World Wide Arts Resources (http://www.wwar.com), which features more than 500 types of resources and provides links to nearly 1,000 websites worldwide of museums, indexes, galleries, art schools, children's resources, and more; World Wide Web Virtual Library, the museum pages (http://www.icom.org/vlmp), which are focused on art museums and other historical collections; and LibrarySpot (http://www.libraryspot.com), which serves as a gateway to the websites of more than 2,500 libraries around the world.
Teachers dealing with the pluralism and complexity of postmodernism and a constructivist teaching approach that encourages students to create and expand knowledge structures will find the Internet highly useful in many ways, not least to take students on "virtual" field trips. A number of institutional websites offer online field trips, or virtual tours, of their facilities, from the massive Louvre Museum (the tour can be taken in several languages for crossover language study) to more intimate collections, such as the Andy Warhol Museum, which is housed in a seven-story converted warehouse in Pittsburgh -- and on the Web (http://www.warhol.org).
Computer technology is a tool. When such technology is limited, it may be a tool simply for enrichment. But as the availability of computer technology increases, the potential also increases for that technology to be transformative, particularly when seen in the light of the other influences that I have outlined.
A Critical Convergence
James Bailey brings yet another perspective to bear on the interface between technology and art education: art must be a core discipline because the computer is effecting a revived linkage between art and science. "Humans and their communications technology," writes Bailey, "form an intellectual team and always have."13 Before the invention of movable type and the proliferation of books, contends Bailey, art and science were much more interchangeable. He cites Leonardo da Vinci, whom he calls "the last great Western mind before the onslaught of the book," as an example:
It is not just that art and science are interchangeable in Leonardo; so are word and image. He wrote about art; he drew science; and he often did so on the same page of his notebooks. He was at the forefront of two technical innovations within imagery itself -- one in the realm of dimensionality, the other in color. . . . Those who believe that the quattrocento revolutions in viewpoint and dimensionality had no enabling impact on the later science of Kepler and Newton can safely disregard the corresponding revolutions in color and dimensionality happening today.
On the other hand, writes Bailey:
Those who believe that painting the volume of space, known as ether to scientists, between viewpoint and object helped scientists to imagine it as filled with fields of gravitational force will be attentive to the breakdown of the fixed viewpoint that the techniques of virtual reality are bringing about. The advances in artistic dimensionality that are happening today are every bit as significant as those of the Renaissance.14
Bailey's point is that the science in virtual reality -- a virtual field trip? -- is inextricably linked to art. If, as Bailey claims, "the printing press drove a five-hundred-year wedge between science and art, pushing the latter to the brink of extinction in the curriculum,"15 then it is the new bits-and-pixels technology of the computer that will at last reunite science and art. Art classrooms, Bailey avers, are where the future lies for the high achievers of science and industry in the next century.
The challenge is creating those art classrooms at the core of schooling for all children. A December 1999 fact sheet from the National Center for Education Statistics points out that 22% of eighth-graders typically receive instruction in the visual arts less than once a week (5%) or not at all (17%). Another 25% have art only once or twice a week.16 The changing priorities of schools -- in particular the ascendancy of math and science -- and the modernist notion of creative self-expression pushed art education to the fringe of the curriculum. Ironically, now science -- coupled with high standards, an altered world view, and new understandings about teaching and learning -- is pushing art education back to the heart of the curriculum.
