UCAE Symposium

UCAE (University Council for Art Education) Symposium – Metropolitan Museum of Art, 9.25.09

The Future of Arts Education in This Time of Economic & Political Turmoil

The goal of the Symposium was to present an open dialogue on the continuing national standards based role of the visual arts in education. My colleague, Ian Williams & I found the event to be very rich, informative and worthwhile.

The presenters were:

Scott Pearson: Assistant Deputy Secretary, US Department of Education. In charge of the Office of Innovation and Improvement

F. Robert Sabol: NAEA President-elect and Professor of Visual and Performing Arts and Chair of the Division of Art and Design at Purdue University; a national Researcher on the impact that No Child Left Behind has had on Arts Education

David Rhodes: President of the School of Visual Arts, Commissioner Emeritus of Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Higher Education, Vice Chair of The Regents Advisory Council on Institutional Accreditation of the State Education Department/The University of the State of New York, Commission for Higher Education

Dennis Fehr: Director of the National Education Taskforce. Associate Professor of Visual Studies, Texas Tech University

They each spoke and participated in a panel discussion moderated by Judith Burton, NAEA Distinguished Fellow, Professor Art & Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Scott Pearson talked about our administration’s goal of identification & advancement of innovative programs. He described I-3: Investing In Innovation. Only 16% of students visited museums with their classes. We teach art not to support other areas, but because of its’ own intrinsic value”.

Bob Sabol presented findings from a study he conducted on the impact of NCLB on art education. The results were as I would’ve expected although I was a bit surprised that any art teachers would find even the minutest favor for any part of NCLB. I’m very grateful for Bob’s research (and that of others) since our field desperately needs research-driven decisions and policy. Later, during the panel discussion, Bob said, “Once you define personal expression, it isn’t personal expression anymore”.

David Rhodes presented a strongly worded opinion. I didn’t attempt to take notes because I was confidant he would email me his transcript later. (He did agree to). He talked about how art is popular in younger grades, but things shift when the notion of talent kicks in and people assume it can’t be taught so a student either has it or they don’t. If not then why take art? Another interesting phenomenon is when districts round up the “talented” and put them in a magnate schools. What does that do to the arts in “regular” schools and why would we want to perpetuate the myth of the “talented”, chosen few? He also mentioned the Flynn Effect. This is the idea that the average intelligence quotient rises over generations. David said the most profound increase is at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

Dennis Fehr strongly stressed that art education needs to change. He quoted Frederick Douglas, “never request, demand”. He said schools typically follow rather than lead change. Art fosters divergent thought rather than convergent thought. He talked about the critical filters that contemporary students need to develop. I really liked the comment that visual literacy leads to bilingual education. He described the four unifying theories of art education as Viktor Lowenfeld, DBAE, Social Theory and Visual Culture. He said teachers are the second line of defense after parents. We should divorce ethics from religion. We should study the visual beyond fine art. I would add that we should study the visual beyond optics. He referred to art classes as “recess in your seat” (nice!). He promoted fluency in reading our visual environment. I would add to that our material and cultural environment. He quoted Ed Kienholz, “you have to start with an unreasonable dream”. That completely resonated with me as I often feel as though I live an unreasonable dream.

I continue to struggle with the notion of standards in art education. I completely understand their political value, and if that is what it takes to keep art education I’ll be the first to trumpet them to the ears of policy makers. But when I shut the door I doubt. An interesting exchange took place at the end of Bob’s presentation. His PowerPoint had many pieces of student art that easily impressed the audience with technical and formal facility. They were all representational and easy to measure qualitatively. I reverted to my act school admissions days and suspected the work was all from the same high school and representative a few students. A sentence at the end confirmed that they were from the same high school. A woman seated on the other side of my colleague, Ian Williams, spoke in awe of the work and questioned us about being high school art teachers. It is likely we were the only high school teachers in attendance. She asked what we thought of the artwork and Bob’s study. I hesitated to answer truthfully as I often do with similar scenarios. I did anyway. I opined that the work was only representative of a portion of contemporary student work and that there were many other examples of very intelligent student investigations that would not hold up to standard measures of success developed for the type of work we had just viewed. I maintained that the work I referred to was at least as “good” as what we had witnessed, and the issue was not good work, but student learning. Even Elliott Eisner wrote that student learning might not be evident for ten years. The conversation hit a wall with a somewhat blank look of incomprehension and we moved on to the coffee bar. Interestingly enough, I read, just this morning, “The quality of a work depends on the trajectory it describes in the cultural landscape. It constructs a linkage between forms, signs and images” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.159).

Ian & I talk about this every single day that we see each other. The problem with art standards, as I see them is a lack of being influenced by student-centered thought, and experience in their contemporary world. The standards seem grounded in teacher teaching rather than student learning. I struggle because, at this point of my career, I no longer see myself as an art teacher. I see myself as an author of situations geared toward student discovery. I engage in interventions. My students no longer make art projects. They respond to questions relative to identity, class, power, context, gender, etc. through spoken texts, written texts and artifactual texts. What classroom art teachers need today is a bilingual vocabulary, one for in the classroom and one for outside of the classroom. Teachers who can speak to standards of administrative policy (on all levels) and to the developing minds of contemporary students will be the ones who foster trust on both fronts. They must go hand-in-hand to be successful. So I do see the need for art to participate in standards-based education, but it is to satisfy the policy-makers so they will be less likely to interfere with my efforts to author situations for learning. Perhaps this is my unreasonable dream.

Evans, D. (Ed.). (2009). Appropriation: Documents of contemporary art. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd.