Art Education
College of Arts and Architecture
School of Visual Arts
Yvonne Gaudelius, Mary Ann Stankiewicz, and Marjorie Wilson share excerpts from their presentation, "Program Revision in Art Education: Penn State as a Case Study" given at the International Society of Education in the Arts (InSEA) conference in New York City in August 2002.
During the last academic year, art education faculty at Penn State revised the undergraduate program to address critical theory, feminist issues and theory, and visual culture, as well as broader global definitions of art, cultural diversity, and the impact of digital electronic technologies. On Time magazine's Web site, Jay Cocks writes of Bob Dylan, "Bob Dylan couldn't wait for the music to change. He couldn't be only part of the change. He was the change itself." This sums up what many of Penn State's art education faculty had in mind when we began the process of restructuring the program in 1998. The decision to restructure the undergraduate program would probably be described differently by each of us. However, a number of features unified our efforts to restructure the program. Most prominent among these was a commitment to teaching future art educators so that they would best be able to be teachers of art in a variety of settings. We knew that the Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) structure under which we had been operating since its inception by the Getty in the 1980s had not only lost its edge, but had become a burden, an impossibly fragmented approach to teaching about art. We had not lost our belief that the world of art and artworks had become more complex and that the teaching of art must reflect that complexity. Nor did we believe any less in the importance of looking at the critical and philosophical foundations of artworks, but looking at them as separate and detached entities created a program that was becoming increasingly problematic for us.
After several discussions, we agreed on a set of common threads that we wanted to run throughout the program and to appear in individual courses in various configurations. Each of us, through the conversation about these threads, brought to the discussion elements about which we felt both passionate and uncompromising. In addition, the threads developed in such a way that we learned to respect the passions of others. Hence the threads that we developed do not represent a seamless realm of placid agreement. Instead, they exist as a negotiated deterritorialized space, a web of interconnections, overlaps, and disagreements (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The threads that run through all the courses include historical and contemporary issues in art education; teaching as reflective practice; language that is specific to art, visual culture, education, and art education; technology; opportunities for continuous professional and intellectual growth; interdisciplinarity; critical pedagogy; varied teaching and assessment strategies to help students with diverse abilities learn; understanding how developmental, social, emotional, intellectual, and other characteristics of diverse learners affect their learning; inquiry in art and visual culture; and collaboration with colleagues and communities.
One of the biggest changes in the new program is that it is sequentially spread over a student’s academic career. Rather than encouraging students to take an early clump of three art education courses and a final block of five or six immediately prior to student teaching, the courses in the revised program should be spread throughout the undergraduate years.
Another major change is the bringing together of our two undergraduate options. The Art Education program offers a degree leading to K-12 certification (Schools), as well as one that focuses on art education in settings such as museums and arts organizations (Museums and Cultural Institutions). Prior to our revisions, students in the two options had little contact with each other beyond their introductory courses. Instead of fragmenting art education in this way, our new program exists within a larger conversation about art education, one that takes place in a variety of settings. As a result, students in both the schools option and the museums and cultural institutions option will take many of the same courses, so these courses will address art education within a very broad context rather than narrowly focusing on K-12 schooling.
In addition to these courses and their general education requirements, students in the new program will have to select eighteen credits of electives relevant to their interests and their professional goals, drawn from one of the areas of Studio Art, Art History, American Studies, Women’s Studies, or Human Development and Family Studies. Students may instead choose to develop an interdisciplinary eighteen-credit grouping in consultation with a faculty advisor.
Each student will develop a teaching/learning portfolio, beginning in the first art education course and continuing to add pieces as they progress. Students are urged to analyze their portfolio selections in writing as a means to encourage reflective practice. At this point, we envision the students publicly performing their portfolios prior to student teaching as part of the capstone course and as a synthesis of their understandings from the program.
The Faculty Senate approved the revised program in spring 2002 and it is now in place. While the college dean happily describes the revised program as a model for others, we realize that full implementation will be challenging, revealing as-yet-unidentified snags and tangles in our tapestry.
Issues that we would never have thought of in our discussions will be raised by our students, by changes in the art world and the larger world around us, and by our colleagues in other parts of the University. Yet the base of dialogue and conversation that we established through our revision process provides us with a beginning point from which we can engage with the issues and with our differences. For further information or to express comments, please e-mail the Art Education Program at caw2@psu.edu.
References:
Cocks, J.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.