Activities that actively and deliberately support museum visitors’ engagement with art and promote learning occupy a distinct, though contested, place in the history and current framing of the art museum across the globe. Despite its many benefits, educational work in art museums has grown erratically, frequently without formal structures, systems, or strategies, and it has been critiqued in the past for lacking a robust theoretical framework and consistent methodological principles. It remains the case that the field is broad, diverse, and continually evolving; in the early 21st century, the boundaries are shifting, for example, between what constitutes curatorial practice and learning practice in contemporary art museums. This fluidity and heterogeneity has enabled the emergence of creative and responsive practice that encourages visitors to learn with, through, and about art, but it poses challenges when the goal is to present a coherent overview. Therefore any summary of this complex domain will necessarily be selective. Nonetheless, taking the practice as it has been developed in the United Kingdom and the United States, where this work has been theorized and communicated to the greatest extent (and with reference to the practice in Europe, Canada, and Australia), it is possible to identify common historical developments, shared philosophical and pedagogical principles, and collective challenges and opportunities that contribute to a comprehensible picture, albeit one that is replete with contradictions. As a field, art-museum education continues to define itself. And although valuable research and theorization have been undertaken, in part by practitioners drawing on their own experiences, further work is required, not least to broaden the understanding of the practice as it is manifest globally and to make explicit the increasingly important role of art education within the art museum.
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Teaching and Learning in the Art Museum
Emily Pringle
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Arts-Based Action Research in the North
Timo Jokela
The art-based action research (ABAR) method has its roots in action research, particularly in participatory action research (PAR) and action research in education and is clearly linked with international artistic research (AR) and art-based educational research (ABER). The ABAR methodology was developed collaboratively by a group of art educators and researchers at the University of Lapland (UoL) to support the artist-teacher-researcher with skills and professional methods to seek solutions to recognized problems and promote future actions and visions in the changing North and the Arctic. On the one hand, the need for decolonizing cultural sustainable art education research was identified in multidisciplinary collaboration with the UoL’s northern and circumpolar network. On the other hand, the participatory and dialogical approach was initiated by examining the pressures for change within art education stemming from the practices of relational and dialogical contemporary art. ABAR has been developed and completed over the years in doctoral dissertations and art-based research projects on art education at UoL that are often connected to place-specific issues of education for social and cultural sustainability.
The multi-phased and long-term Winter Art Education project has played a central role in the development of the ABAR methodology. During the Winter Art Education project, ABAR has been successfully used in reforming formal and informal art education practices, school and adult education, and teacher education in Northern circumstances and settings. Winter art developed through the ABAR method has supported decolonization, revitalization, and cultural sustainability in schools and communities. In addition, the ABAR method and winter art have had a strong impact on regional development and creative industries in the North.
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Postmodernism in Education
Marek Tesar, Andrew Gibbons, Sonja Arndt, and Nina Hood
The period of postmodernism refers to a diverse set of ideas, practices, and disciplines that came to prominence in the later 20th century. It is the overarching philosophical project that responds to and critiques the principles of modernity and challenges the established ways of thinking. It opposes the ideas that it is possible to rationalize life through narrow, singular disciplinary thinking or through the establishment of a universal truth and grand narratives that strive for the value-neutral homogeneity that defined Enlightenment thinking. Postmodernism questions ontological, epistemological, and ethical conventions, and it opens up possibilities for multiple discourses and accepting marginalized and minority thoughts and practices. Openness to diversity is a key outcome of the multiplicities arising in postmodernity across a range of fields, including, among others, art, education, philosophy, architecture, and economics. Through its rejection of the totalizing effects of metanarratives and their intentions to achieve universal truths, goals, outcomes, and sameness, the postmodern condition opens an ethical responsibility toward otherness, to allow for diversity, and thus to elevate those who have been subjugated or marginalized in modernity. Postmodernism has been playing a significant role in what sometimes is termed the equity approach in education. While postmodernism may be eventually overtaken by other “posts”—post-qualitative, post-truth, post-digital—it still remains an important part of philosophy of education scholarship and broader understandings and conceptualizations of education.
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Arts-Based Pedagogy and Gender Equity
Mindi Rhoades
Arts-based pedagogies hold incredible promise for education. Arts-based pedagogies provide unique, compelling pathways for teaching and learning that can permit entry to and support the success of all students regardless of gender, race, sexuality, religion, linguistic diversity, ability level, socioeconomic status, and other identity categories. Arts-based pedagogies can form the foundation of a transdisciplinary educational approach that centers contemporary understandings of multiple and multimodal literacies and meaning-making strategies useful to teachers across disciplines and in more integrated teaching and learning contexts. Crucially, when implemented through a critical framework, arts-based pedagogies can be equity-based pedagogies, allowing for the translation of research, teaching, and learning into awareness, understanding, creation, and activism.
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Lateral Thinking and Learning in Arts Education in the Post-Internet Art
Lynda Avendaño Santana
Lateral learning in the last two decades can be seen in peer-to-peer learning that is being promoted by new technologies where there are apps that allow students to work together in real time through virtual space, a method which thereby shifts the focus from the solitary self to the interdependent group which lives an educational experience of a collaborative and distributed nature, whose focus lies in instilling the principle of the social nature of knowledge.
The ideological bases of lateral thinking are sustained by issues such as emancipation of the student from the authority of the teacher, the relationship of collaboration, permitting the development of individual appreciations and ideas, based simultaneously on those of their peers, on the democratization of knowledge, and so on, which ultimately refers to a collaborative creative education, to a democratic education, and to an education for democracy that assumes the new technologized context in which we live.
Because of this, lateral thinking is increasingly influencing everyday life and areas such as education and the arts, as it happens in the post-Internet art, and more specifically net.art (i.e., an online art), which is a collaborative creative experience that has become an instrument which allows us to see a “new type of art in the 21st century.”
Net.art, Internet art and the most experimental design, therefore constitutes a community experience that hypertextualizes computerized languages and generates poetic perspectives as artistic practices of lateral thinking. It has bestowed upon us a series of mechanisms to devise collaborative development strategies for lateral learning based on those creative ludic educational experiences of using and interacting with new technologies.
This is essential to bear in mind because, as Jeremy Rifkin says, collaborative learning helps students to expand their own self-awareness, including their “self” in reference to diverse “others,” and promotes in-depth participation in more interdependent communities. It extends the territory comprised within the boundaries of empathy.
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The Artist-Teacher
Esther Sayers
Artists who teach or teachers who make art? To explore the identity of the artist-teacher in contemporary educational contexts, the ethical differences between the two fields of art and learning need to be considered. Equity is sought between the needs of the learner and the demands of an artist’s practice; a tension exists here because the nurture of the learner and the challenge of art can be in conflict. The dual role of artist and of teacher have to be continually navigated in order to maintain the composite and ever-changing identity of the artist-teacher. The answer to the question of how to teach art comes through investigating attitudes to knowledge in terms of the hermeneutical discourses of “reproduction” and “production” as a means to understand developments in pedagogy for art education since the Renaissance. An understanding of the specific epistemological discourses that must be navigated by artist-teachers when they develop strategies for learning explicate the role of art practices in considering the question: What to teach? The answer lies in debates around technical skills and the capacity for critical thought.
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Cosmopolitical and Biopolitical Aesthetics as Philosophical Approaches to Art Education
Modesta Di Paola
Cosmopolitanism is an ancient idea with a wide theoretical and critical history. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences have been examining the meaning and trajectories of this concept, showing how it spotlights ways in which people can move beyond mutual understanding and cooperation. However, cosmopolitanism does not have to refer to a transcendental ideal but rather to the material and real condition of global interdependencies. Cosmopolitanism has been connected to the philosophical concept of “becoming-world,” which develops this idea in the context of plural and ecological societies. Under this approach, cosmopolitanism turns into cosmo-politics, which fuses notions of educational and cultural creativity. From the philosophy of education and artistic education in particular, cosmopolitics seeks to outline the advances of new creative educational theories, which center on globalization, hospitality ethics, politics of inclusion, and the ecological connection between human beings and ecosystems; overall, this concept reveals the possibilities for moral, political, and social growth in the encounter with the other (human and natural).
Cosmopolitics is, therefore, associated with the idea of educating with creativity, even proposing the elaboration of new pedagogical methods. Here, cosmopolitics has arisen as a crucial artistic educational orientation toward reimagining, appreciating, and learning from our common world.
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Curriculum and the Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics
Donald Blumenfeld-Jones
Curriculum Studies has an abiding concern for creating curriculum that leads toward the good society. Typically, this concern has taken either a technical approach to citizenship education or political projects, redressing society’s ills and wrongs. The citizenship approach attempts to establish correct citizenship behavior. The political approach attempts to reorganize the structure of society. Neither approach attends to the inner ethical life of the person. A third approach also exists in the Curriculum Studies literature: how ethics and aesthetics are grounds for educating for a good society through cultivating the inner ethical life. Asserting the intersection of ethics and aesthetics has an old history throughout the world. In the European tradition, it begins with the Greeks, who theorized that one of the major areas of inquiry, axiology, actually was two areas of concern, asking two conjoined questions, “What is ‘the good’?” and “What is ‘the beautiful’?” They recognized that these two questions had intersecting concerns but went no further than a cursory mention. This insight has continued, in various forms, to this day. The Chinese tradition, which began before Confucius, theorizes a similar connection.
Contemporary Curriculum Studies literature takes two approaches to the ethics–aesthetics intersection. The first approach favors studying how people encountering already made art may be aided in developing an ethical life through those encounters. This literature uses three ethics systems: pragmatism, affective education (akin to naturalism), and utilitarianism. In this approach, the relationship of aesthetics to ethics is basically instrumental: encountering aesthetic objects is an instrument that can lead to an ethical life. The second approach makes art-making central to cultivating or enlivening ethical consciousness. To varying degrees, this approach treats the experience of making art (cultivating an aesthetic consciousness) as a “door” to ethical consciousness such that one cannot necessarily pass through the door without it. Art-making only means making art, which all people are capable of doing (rather than a focus on training professional artists).
Both approaches offer a significant opportunity to rethink the contribution aesthetics and the arts can make to fostering the good society. They also offer an opportunity to rethink what it means to do Curriculum Studies by considering the place of body and aesthetics in all of Curriculum Studies.
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Postmodern Curriculum
Karen A. Krasny and Patrick Slattery
Postmodernism is a mid-20th-century response to 18th-century Enlightenment rationality. As a movement that developed across a diverse range of disciplines, it is not so much defined by a distinct chronology but rather is predicated on a recognition of the past and has come to represent a way of operating. The late Italian semiotician and writer Umberto Eco argued from an ideological point of view that every period in history has had its postmodernism. Architect and critical theorist Charles Jencks further polemicized postmodernism as a specific form of cultural resistance. In his view, postmodernism operates as a communicative set of values to address the needs of a society, and he cites architecture’s response to the pressing need for mass housing and large-scale urban redevelopment as an example of postmodern innovation. Inspired by postmodernism as a critical movement in the arts, architecture, and philosophy, postmodern curriculum similarly works to reject the universalizing ideals of modernity. It shares Jencks’s polemic stance and would have us reimagine the literal and metaphorical bricks and mortar of schools, colleges, and universities to advance a broader understanding of curriculum with the aim of addressing the need to provide fair and equitable access to education. The postmodern notion that the past has everything to do with the present is central to decolonizing efforts aimed at acknowledgment and reconciliation of the devastating and oppressive ends of curriculum as institutions. For example, government-sponsored residential schools in Canada and the United States stand as a glaring example of the abject failure of modern education to embrace the communicative ideals of postmodernism in its response to First Nations people. Postmodern curriculum is committed to a decentering and challenging agenda aimed at exposing and undermining master narratives of truth, language, knowledge, and power. Dynamic and responsive, postmodern curriculum’s holistic and ecological approach to education works to dissolve the artificial boundary between the outside community and the classroom to celebrate and honor the interconnectedness of knowledge, experience, international and local communities, the natural world, and life itself.
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Aesthetics of Leadership
Fenwick W. English and Rosemary Papa
Aesthetics of leadership pertain to leadership activities and actions in contemporary educational settings, expanded to include a range of human sensory experiences, from clothing and cosmetic choices to pragmatic somaesthetics, an area of human decision making that involves choices regarding norms and prescriptions in all human contexts. Considering aesthetics in leadership runs up against a long tradition in educational administration and leadership of conventional social science methods of inquiry and what is considered evidentiary. There are at least six dimensions of organizational issues that are judged to be cultural: determination of normative procedures; organizational rituals, rites, and ceremonies; organizational myths, stories, and legends; statements regarding mission, vision, and philosophy; personnel issues such as mentoring, recruitment, promotion, and role modeling; and architectural and physical structural issues. School culture emerged as a concern of educators and policy change agents engaged in introducing a variety of alternatives in education. It soon became apparent that to be successful, proposed changes in human behavior had to move beyond trying to persuade through the use of facts, data, and logic. Human behavior is in part responsive to psychosocial norms. Only a few of these norms may be written; the majority may be unwritten and learned through living them on a daily basis. The unwritten rules and rituals of a group such as a school or university department, when considered holistically, may be called a “culture.” The art of leadership is not contained by the science of management; it is found in aesthetics, somaesthetics, and connoisseurship, and is embodied by human elements, or accoutrements.
Article
History and Microhistories of Social Education in Spain
Victoria Pérez de Guzmán, Juan Trujillo-Herrera, and Encarna Bas Pena
Social education in Spain has become increasingly popular in recent decades as both a socio-educational action/intervention and as a profession. The history of social education is a combination of various microhistories that have evolved within different areas. In order to understand the “micro” component of these histories, we need a perspective of the “macro,” while also keeping in mind that the microhistories are essential to understanding the true development of social education on a general level. The goals of this research are: to approximate the key historical antecedents that have influenced the development of social education in Spain as both a socio-educational action/intervention and a profession, to demonstrate the importance of analyzing the history of social education through microhistories, and to indicate the key elements and criteria necessary to carry out our microhistory of social education. Our methodology is the state of the field documentary research modality, which facilitated our study of the collective knowledge addressing a pedagogy of social education. This qualitative-documentary and critical-interpretive methodology followed these steps: contextualization, classification, and categorization. The main conclusion will indicate the definition of key points as well as the criteria necessary to be able to carry out a microhistory of social education.
Article
Refugee Girlhood and Visual Storied Curriculum
Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis
Decolonizing girlhood illuminates an attempt to refuse and recover the pathological representation of Indigenous refugee girls by going beyond the discourse of the Western construction of girlhood. It takes an anticolonial, critical race feminist approach to the understanding of girlhood that challenges the intersectional, racialized exclusion and the deficit representations of Indigenous refugee girls, which are often reinforced by humanitarian schemes of embodied vulnerability. The digital visual fiction stories created by Karen tribe refugee girls in a media arts summer workshop reposition their presence by creating spaces in which they can speak their own desires, share their imaginings, and portray their struggles. Through this experience, these girls challenge colonial social realities and the fantasies of democracy. Ultimately, their futuristic visual fiction acts as a form of counter-storytelling that illustrates an alternative curriculum space and flips the hegemonic script for empowerment.
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Tools of Conviviality: Art in the Postcolonial Imagination
Cameron McCarthy
Key arguments regarding the relationship between postcolonial art and aesthetics and the emancipatory imagination have implications for pedagogical and curriculum reform in the era of globalization. Postcolonial art, aesthetics, and postcolonial imagination are, and invoke paths through and exceeding, dominant traditions of thought in critical thinking on the status of art. These dominant critical traditions have led us to what Cameron McCarthy calls the “forked road” of cultural Marxism and neo-Marxism: the antipopulism of the Frankfurt School and Habermas and their contemporary affiliates versus the populism of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and those insisting on the nearly virtuous engagement of the First World working classes with contemporary consumer culture. These approaches have tended, McCarthy maintains, to generate critical apparati that silence the historically specific work of the colonized inhabitants of the Third World and the periphery of the First.
In beckoning curriculum and pedagogical actors in a different direction, toward postcolonial art and aesthetics, McCarthy argues that the work of the postcolonial imagination dynamically engages with systems of domination, authority over knowledge, and representation, destabilizing received traditions of identity, association, and feeling, and offering, in turn, new starting points for affiliation and community that draw on the wellspring of humanity, indigenous and commodified. Key motifs of postcolonial art (literature, performance art, sculpture, and painting) illuminate organizing categories or new aesthetic genres: counter-hegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and utopic and emancipatory visions. These ethically informed dimensions of postcolonial art and aesthetics constitute critical starting points, or tools of conviviality, for a conversation over curriculum change in the tumult of globalization and the reassertion in some quarters of a feral nationalism.
Article
Détournement as a Qualitative Method
James Trier
The term détournement is most associated with a European, mainly Paris-based avant-garde group called the Situationist International (SI), which was founded in 1957, went through three distinct phases, played a key role in the May ’68 massive general strike in France, and eventually dissolved in 1972. Guy Debord was the SI’s singular leader and its most important theorist. Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle is the best-known work produced by an SI member. In it, Debord develops his theorization of what he called the Spectacle, which is capitalism in its economic, political, social, and cultural totality. Debord argued that culture—especially visual and popular culture—played a central role in transforming citizens into consumers and passive spectators in all spheres of their lives. In societies saturated by seductive visual representations and permeated by an endless staging of spectacles, all that matters to those in power is that people consume commodities and become politically malleable and stupefied. The Spectacle works to transform everyday life into a continuous experience of alienation, passivity, mindless consumption, and political non-intervention. An apt cinematic reference for the Spectacle is the film The Matrix.
Debord’s theory seems to preclude any possibilities for challenging or contesting the Spectacle, but Debord also theorized that such possibilities (situations) could be created in everyday life, and détournement was the critical anti-art that Debord and his friends practiced for the purpose of critiquing and challenging the alienating, pacifying, spectator-inducing, socially controlling forces of the Spectacle. For Debord, détournement was by definition an anti-spectacular action and creation that sought to subvert the debilitating effects of the Spectacle’s life-draining power. During the SI’s first phase (1957–1962), members of the SI created many détournements that contested the dominance of what they believed was a crucially important sphere within the Spectacle—that of the Art World. The SI’s détournements took many forms, including films, comics, paintings, graffiti, novels, and public interventions and scandals. Eventually, during its second phase (1962–1968), the SI called for a détournement of the streets and of everyday life through strikes and protests. Of their role in the events of May’68, the SI wrote that it brought fuel to the fire. During those events, ten million people walked off the job, engaged in wildcat strikes, and brought the country—and the Spectacle—to a standstill. For Debord and the SI, May ’68 was the ultimate construction of a revolutionary situation in which détournement contributed to the radical transformation of everyday life, if only for a brief time. So détournement is an important practice in the service of combatting the Spectacle and dismantling capitalism. In terms of qualitative research, détournement has a set of resemblances to several qualitative methods and perspectives, including the aesthetic and arts-based research approaches of bricolage, collage, critical media literacy, and public pedagogy, to name a few.
