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RETHINKING Preservice Teacher Education I n January 2017, within the first week following the recent presidential inauguration, the transition team for the new President of the United States began circulating a budget blueprint recommending the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as an austerity measure to decrease the size of the federal government (Zerega, 2017). Yet, given that expenditures on the arts through the NEA’s $148 million budget represent only about 0.025% or three one-hundredths of one percent of federal non-defense related discretionary spending (NEA Arts Investment Fact Sheet, 2017), it’s reasonable to ask why, in this day and age, the arts and design practices are still being left behind in top-level educational policy considerations and in their apparent relevancy to the everyday concerns of common U.S. citizens?
Very simply, those who readily dismiss public funding support for the arts as a national priority or social necessity also have little reason to value a meaningful art education for our nation’s schoolaged population. This is because our mental models become the stories we live by. The current status of the arts and art + design education is the product of a paradigm of valuation reinforced every time a famous painting is auctioned off at Christie’s or Sotheby’s for a new record multimillion dollar amount, every time we tape one of our children’s drawings to the refrigerator and tell them how pretty it is without asking what it means, every time we are reminded by a museum guard to maintain a safe distance lest we brush against an original work by a famous artist, every time we go as a tourist to buy a piece of the local flavor as a souvenir. I am referring to the general perception that art is a commodity shaped by lone creative geniuses detached from common concerns—precious objects to be collected or commissioned, displayed either as decoration or tokens of power, artifacts handcrafted and polished only to be bartered over in the marketplace. Works of visual art are thus modeled to the masses as private merchandise, cultural capital, or staid family heirlooms—strangely inert objects in an Information Age that prioritizes streaming data, high download speeds, hyperlinks, and multiple windows-based graphical user interfaces operating simultaneously to provide for the most visceral and interactive entertainments possible. A second prevailing perception is that visual art is little more than another form of self-expression or cultural performance, clearly at odds with a knowledge economy that prioritizes tangible and consistently measurable outcomes over those that are abstract, open to interpretation, or productive of widely varying emotional responses. Accordingly, such strong public perceptions have long-term consequences. Moreover, the entrenched dismissiveness and
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underestimation evidenced in the current public perception toward both the arts and art + design education will likely continue to convert to crucial policy decisions affecting both what the readers of Art Education do for a living and to simply feel alive. Ralph Smith (1978) described policy as an enterprise “always addressed to actions” (p. 37). In other words, policy-makers and legislators call it as they see it, designing policies that “determine, organize, regulate, or systematize activities in order to bring about that state of affairs which marks a policy’s purpose” (Smith, 1978, p. 37, emphasis in original). What then is the role of the classroom art instructor and their preservice teacher educators in creating learning outcomes that provoke policy-makers and legislators to rethink the way they see the art + design practices, so that a supportive state of affairs is constructed for the ensuing generation? In this issue of Art Education, Christina Bain and Joana Hyatt rethink how best to help their preservice students better understand the complexities of pedagogical practice through scenarios grappled with in their Worst Case Scenario Art Game, drawn from authentic teaching experiences of experienced art teachers. In a course intended for preservice elementary education majors, Li-Hsuan Hsu invites her students to rethink, reflect on, and share their own cultures with others as they collectively create a culture-based curricular kaleidoscope. Amy Workman and Frances Vaughan rethink the possibilities in utilizing peer teaching in preservice education as a provocation and enticement both to promote learning through peer relationships as well as challenge the conventions of student social interaction in art + design learning contexts. Based on a case study of three fifth-year art teachers in Texas and Arkansas, Christina Bain, Jeff Young, and Deborah Kuster explore and rethink the role of mentoring in preservice teacher education. Through the use of pop-up books in art instruction,
In a recent visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I encountered this provocative rethinking of the preamble to the Constitution of the United States spelled out phonetically in the form of vanity license plates from all fifty states and the District of Columbia in their alphabetical order. Preamble, 1987, by Mike Wilkins, painted metal and vinyl on wood. Photo by James Haywood Rolling Jr. Alyssia Ruggiero works to rethink ways for bridging the divide between theory and practice for preservice art + design education students struggling to develop best practices for constructivist, emergent curriculum-making. Sarah Ackermann presents a rethinking of the use of instructional technologies within early childhood classrooms through the creative use of tablet computers. Finally, Andrea Kantrowitz, Michelle Fava, and Angela Brew rethink the potential of research in drawing and cognition as a creative and critical practice for drawing ideas and people together across disciplinary, cultural, and geographic borders. In conclusion, the arts are what they have always been. The arts ensconce our designs for living and the best ideas we have to offer those who will follow after; the arts are public memory, preserving the stories our generation has lived by; the arts partner with the sciences as a means “to give an organized account of the universe—to connect, to fit together in logical relations the concepts and statements embodying whatever knowledge has been acquired” (Rudner, 1961, p. 112). Once the present community of art + design educators comes together in solidarity during the difficult days ahead to rethink preservice teacher education, instructional practices will inevitably be redefined or renewed, as policies reflecting the age-old relevance of the arts begin to reveal themselves. But policy-makers and legislators can’t see it unless we show it—not just the aesthetic qualities of artmaking or the emotions stirred, but the stories of how our collective
creative activities are renewable resources, refreshing old ideas and nurturing new innovators, saving lives through sustainable design strategies, all while maintaining a human, accessible scale for navigating the explosion of information we navigate daily (Rolling, 2008). —James Haywood Rolling Jr., Editor References NEA Arts Investment Fact Sheet. (2017, January). National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. Retrieved from www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Grant-Making/ NEAFactSheet0117.pdf Rolling, J. H. (2008). Rethinking relevance in art education: Paradigm shifts and policy problematics in the wake of the Information Age. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 9(Interlude 1). Retrieved from www.ijea.org/v9i1 Rudner, R. (1961). An introduction to simplicity. Philosophy of Science, 28(2), 109-119. Smith, R. (1978). Justifying policy for aesthetic education. Studies in Art Education, 20(1), 37-42. Zerega, B. (2017, January 26). Trump team circulating budget blueprint to eliminate NEA and NEH, gut EPA. Retrieved from http://venturebeat.com/ 2017/01/26/trump-team-circulating-budget-blueprint-to-eliminate-neaand-neh-gut-epa
James Haywood Rolling Jr. is Dual Professor and Chair of Art Education in the School of Art/College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the Department of Teaching and Leadership/School of Education, Syracuse University, New York. E-mail:
[email protected]
May 2017
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