A Need to Return to Conscience and Consciousness in Art Education

Art: New Perceptions and a Paradigm Shift
Anyone involved in art education for the past 50 years can document dramatic developments that have taken place in thinking about the nature of art and the role of art education in our schools. Indeed, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in the perceptions of art education in relation to community life. A major text for the field is John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). He emphasized transactional and transformative experiences in creating and responding to art. Life entails an ongoing process in which we act to bring about change; in turn, we are changed by these very experiences. Creating and responding to art therefore helps to change us. As art teachers, we help our students perceive and understand the joys and insights in creating and responding to art. All of this becomes more complicated when we become aware of all the forms and ideas admissible to the realm of art. In today’s world, the extent and magnitude of human-made forms engulfs us all. It can be said that we are all living within a work of art—our environment.

As Piet Mondrian (1947) observed, “This consequence brings us, in a future perhaps remote, towards the end of art as a thing separated from our surrounding environment, which is the actual plastic reality. But this end is at the same time a new beginning. Art will not only continue, but will realize itself more and more. By the unification of architecture, sculpture, and painting, a new plastic reality will be created.” (p. 62)

In his essay The Future of Art (1964), Ad Reinhardt made a prediction that resonates from the past into the future: “The next revolution will see the emancipation of the university academy of art from its marketplace fantasies and its emergence as a center of consciousness and conscience” (Rose, 1991, p. 62); so too this can be said for the field of art education. The magnitude of the challenges confronting us requires responses that are revolutionary—a paradigm shift! It does not suffice to tinker around the edges or invent a revised rubric for dealing with the same old categories. Teachers are stepping back, evaluating what they are teaching, and reflecting on how it fits with a larger pattern.

Art in the Marketplace(?)
Historically, art in the marketplace is a relatively new phenomenon. There is a much longer tradition in which artists were either not willing or able to sell their work as commodities in the marketplace. Oh, how things have changed! Think about how much attention is paid to the sale price of a work of art. The commodification of art has crept up on us so that people (including our students) innocently think of art as something to be bought and sold (and, of course, displayed). All of this has extended to our museums and galleries with powerful connections to government, community, and media. In this whole mix, the image of the artist has morphed into a range of individual talented and gifted producers who create forms (commodities) for an ever- expanding market complex.

This paper is a call for a return to the very roots from which artmaking emerged as a human activity, and explores how such a stance can influence the way in which art is viewed in classrooms across the country. In the beginning, there were no museums or galleries. Art was not thought of as an object for sale or display. Ritual, celebration, and the joys of shared experience were at the heart of artistic experiences. Present- day commodification of art has taken us down a slippery slope of commercialism and the conspicuous consumption of art. Worse yet, we are witnessing the commodification of cultural resources.

Art educators find themselves in the position to call for another kind of discipline and clarity in respect to what they conceive and how they teach. They often deal with intrinsic and extrinsic value. They have an opportunity to influence educators of other subjects, as well as concerned citizens in all walks of life, about the centrality of artistic experiences as integral components in their daily lives.

Through making and responding to art, students come to recognize and celebrate their own distinctive ways of seeing and doing. Sir Herbert Read (1949) envisioned the power of positive virtue that art education can offer: “Positive virtue is active virtue and active virtue reveals itself in a certain way of life, a natural happiness and playfulness which has almost disappeared from the world today” (p. 80). Art teaching and learning that emphasizes consciousness and conscience serve to connect art understanding and artmaking activity with personal values and actions. What our students are taught—and what they do with their abilities to understand the visual world around them and to create visual responses—is of the greatest importance.

Why do children need an effective visual art education?

The significant impact of popular art forms on children requires that a good arts education begins early in life. Children are influenced by advertising at a young age. Advertisers look to children’s interests for ideas about product development and advertising. Marketing companies work with focus groups of children to find out what they like to look at, and develop images and products based on their interests. At the same time, advertisements work to convince children that they want or need new products through imagery, sound, and words (Freedman, 2003).

A good art education will help children to view all images in a thoughtful manner. Through art education, children can come to understand the damaging effects of visual stereotypes. To promote social justice and cross-cultural understanding, children should begin to learn about the ways in which groups of people are represented in imagery. They can learn early in life how civic leaders use imagery to represent themselves and influence people’s voting choices. By learning the ways in which the visual arts can influence people, children are better able to make critical judgments, develop democratic ways of thinking, and become informed consumers prepared to decide how they will allow themselves to be influenced (Ballengee-Morris, Daniel, Stuhr, 2010; Bigelow, Harvey, Karp, Miller, 2001; Freedman, 2000).

Artists in all areas of the visual arts—from fine art to architecture; from fashion to computer-game design— influence people through their works. The creative industries currently make up the largest area of growth in the U.S. economy, so understanding the work of arts professionals can help today’s children prepare for future employment.

How do you know when a school in your community has a quality art program?
A good art program accomplishes the following goals:

What steps can you take to get quality art education programs in your community’s schools?

It is the organization of data that recasts it as new information capable of provoking unique emotional responses in addition to stimulating the formation of new public memories, discourse, and beliefs. In the wake of the Information Age, educational policymakers would do well to recognize the critical nature of visual arts and design practices in developing and expanding upon systems of information appropriate for learning in a visual age. By immersing learners in acts of creation and/or understandings of the simple and complex symbols, meaningful artifacts, cultural interfaces, and the social and technical networks that have become critical in the 21st century, visual arts and design theory and practice will continue to inform us as to who we are, where we come from, what our purpose is, and where we are going (Rolling, 2008). It is necessary to begin by attaining a clear conception of various systems for defining and teaching art, and rethinking how these different arts and design strategies are employed in organizing information about our common experience that can jumpstart American innovation. Art can be defined and understood through three very different models.

Three Models for Making and Teaching Art
One model defines art as a system of production, a cause- and-effect intervention resulting in a stockpile of natural and manufactured materials, with a focus on technical mastery “that has as its basic intent a cognitive interest in the control of objects in the world” (Pearse, 1983, p. 159). Within this model, arts and design practices seek to produce precious objects, using techniques to shape their beauty and aesthetics as validated by the arbiters of good taste (jagodzinski, 1991; Stankiewicz, 2001). An example may be seen in the oil paintings of the High Renaissance Masters collected at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Another model defines art as a system of communication, the expression of situated knowledge about a person’s relationship with his or her social world (Pearse, 1983, p. 160). Arts and design practices within this model express and reinterpret “the ways in which we immediately experience an intimacy with the living world, attending to its myriad textures, sounds, flavors, and gestures” through selected artistic media (Cancienne & Snowber, 2003, p. 238). An example may be seen in the body art of the Maori people, with meanings that are permanently etched and yet are as temporary as the human flesh they are tattooed upon.

Of these three models, the prevailing definition of the arts as a system for the production of valuable commodities has dominated in shaping art-teaching approaches, educational policies, and socio-cultural responses to the arts in the latter half of the 20th century (Rolling, 2008). However, Kearney (1988) explains that “modernity is where we grew up,” but “postmodernity is where we now live” (p. 18). A 21st-century art educator is not obligated to maintain a fixed model of practice that cannot flexibly address the fluctuating needs of contemporary life. Pearse (1992) suggests a dynamic model for defining art and practicing art education that reflects an era of competing models. Within a more pluralistic conception of art education, none of these three competing models of arts and design practice are obliged to represent the sole primary explanation or expectation for a definition or practice in art education. In fact, we may come to expect the unexpected as we contemplate learning in a visual age in an approach akin to Julia Marshall’s (2008) definition of arts practice as making “conceptual collages” (p.39). This approach to innovation in learning and the representation of knowledge creates new ideas from diverse and seemingly incompatible concepts.

A High-Quality Visual Arts Education is Informational
A pluralistic and adaptable framework for an art education curriculum reestablishes the informational quality of arts practices, infusing outcomes for arts education learning with greater meaning-making potential, and providing traditionally unrelated subject areas with greater cause to incorporate the arts as a resource during curriculum planning. Arts and design practices are self-organizing behaviors through which we combine meaningful information about our experiences and circumstances utilizing a range of medium- specific, language-specific, and/or critical methodologies. Thus, the methodology by which Edvard Munch organized information about human suffering in paint on a canvas in The Scream (1893) was different than the methodology Käthe Kollwitz employed for organizing similar information in her drawings and etchings of Woman with Dead Child (1903), and different again from Alvin Ailey’s methodology for organizing such information through his dance choreography surveying the African American experience in Revelations (1960). Each difference in approach recalls Charles Wright Mills’ (1959) claim that “(e)very

The Rosetta Stone (ca. 196 BC) contained one message in two languages and three scripts, including ancient hieroglyphics, a more recent vernacular Egyptian script, and Greek. It established a cultural interface allowing for exchanges of meaningful data from one system to another so that ideas might be traded and social understandings informed. Works of art that act as cultural interfaces—whether in visual, dance, musical, or theatrical forms—likewise provide us with arrays of emergent Rosetta Stones that inform the growth of connecting cultures across oceans, time, and potential barriers of understanding.

Even greater potential exists to draw diverse systems of meaning and cultural interfaces to work together within complex human social networks or hierarchies. Whatever the intent or situation, arts-based information always is organized with a recurring purpose: to be literally recognizable— recalled in cognition—so as to remain accessible to personal and public memory, and thus retain its social significance. The arts offer a complete integration of word, image, and life experience as data; information is thus networked for common points of reference. With these structures for learning in mind, educators in the 21st century have an opportunity to develop and elaborate on working models presenting human artistic and design behaviors as ways of both knowing and doing that are crucial to innovation, social progress, and entrepreneurship.

If we begin anew with the assumption that arts and responsibility in the securing and preservation of basic local and global human needs, the purpose of an adaptable and networking approach to the arts in education—one that favors no one particular model—is to give form to overlooked knowledge and unseen meaning; to inform the expression of new meaning-making and innovation; and/or to transform the many gaps in our comprehension of the rich human experience toward new inquiry and engaged possibilities.

A Pluralistic Approach to Learning
An adaptable and networking-oriented approach to the arts and design in education—one that favors no one particular model—also provides greater adaptability for connections across content areas and disciplines, as well as the opportunity to transcend the concepts and limitations in any one area. The greater effectiveness that educational reformers seek is best predicated on the clearly mixed origin of human understandings; there is no single best way to create and record new knowledge. By embracing the natural blending of many arts and design practices, no one model of knowledge acquisition is elevated above another, and opportunities for innovation and invention in between the creases is increased.

Viewing the arts as a system of production invites curricular collaboration with other disciplines that teach learners to think empirically in a medium or material. Art educators with an affinity for techniques and practices that generate beautiful forms, structures, and singular solutions find curricular kinship with industrial and interactive designers, as well as with architects, poets, filmmakers, and scientists.

Viewing the arts as a system of communication invites curricular collaboration with other disciplines that teach learners to think expressively in a language. When art educators exhibit an affinity for interpretive practices that navigate the signs and symbols humans make in order to convey valued signifiers, they find curricular kinship with writers of all kinds, mathematicians, musicians, dancers, and a multicultural array of ethnic, religious, and social communities.

Viewing the arts as a system of critical reflection invites curricular collaboration with other disciplines that teach and seek to understand the gaps in given knowledge. Art educators with an affinity for more-critical practices that question situated or embodied contexts find curricular kinship with feminists, iconoclasts, revolutionaries, cultural theorists, mass-media dissenters, political activists, and environmentalists.

A pluralistic and adaptable model for art education draws upon any and all of these prior models without partiality and answers Julia Marshall’s (2006) challenge for a more substantive integration of art disciplinary content with the humanities, as well as with other traditionally unrelated subject areas such as the sciences, technology, engineering, math, social studies, and entrepreneurship.

A High-Quality Visual Arts Education Develops Habits of Innovation
An adaptable and networking art education curriculum framework also aids in the development of persistent habits of innovation in an experiential learning model suggested by educational philosopher John Dewey. According to Dewey (1916/1966), a habit is an active, insistent, and immediate expression of growth; a capacity that enables a student to develop through continuous encounters with novelty as they “retain and carry over from previous experience factors which modify subsequent activities” (p. 46). Habits represent our “preferred modes of encounter and encountering, acting and interacting” (Cuffaro, 1995, p. 19). Habits are formed in the process of “trying and discovering, modifying and adapting” (Cuffaro, 1995, p. 19), and serve as evidence of enduring learning.

Dewey argued that character would not exist if each habit “existed in an insulated compartment and operated without affecting or being affected” by the interpenetration of other habits (Dewey, 1930, p. 37). An acquired adaptability to product-oriented, expressive-communicative, and critical- activist arts learning models and their interdisciplinary networks cultivates a powerful “continuum of habits in terms of the