Art & Pedagogy
Art & Pedagogy
Art & Pedagogy
T hree authors, all art teacher educators, explore the essential qualities of pedagogy
that make teaching an art form in its own right. Pedagogy is first looked at from
a social perspective, as a special kind of relationship between teacher and learner.
Continuing the belief that understanding be embodied in praxis, teaching is then
considered as performance. The third part expands on the theme of pedagogy as
transformation, drawing from the author’s conviction that she and her art education
students are participants in a community of artists who teach. The three parts interact
in an attempt to rediscover and reclaim the art in teaching.
T rois auteurs, tous des formateurs d’enseignants en art, étudient les qualités
fondamentales de la pédagogie qui font de l’enseignement une forme d’art
à part entière. La pédagogie est examinée en premier lieu du point de vue social,
à titre de relation particulière entre l’enseignant et l’apprenant. La pédagogie est
ensuite examinée en tant que performance, conformément au postulat voulant que
la compréhension naisse de la pratique. Le troisième volet est consacré au concept
de pédagogie synonyme de transformation, l’auteure étant convaincue qu’elle et ses
étudiants appartiennent à une communauté d’artistes qui enseignent. Ces trois points
de vue interagissent afin de redécouvrir l’aspect artistique de l’enseignement et de se
le réapproprier.
Before we can find something, we have to know what it is that has been lost. We also have
to know where it was last seen. Furthermore, we need to know where we are now. And, as my
mother used to say: “If you were that lost sock, where would you be?” So we begin by asking
some questions:
What is Pedagogy?
How can we say that it is an art?
How can we say that it is lost?
Where and how might we find it?
Let’s start with the last question. A good place to start looking is in the field of art education.
A good point of view from which to look is a social perspective. Some socially responsive art
educators sense the need to re-orient the field to its roots in pedagogy, which for now we can
assume to mean “the art of teaching.” In recent years art education has focused its attentions on
subject matter (disciplines) rather than on pedagogy, the act (and art) of teaching. This concern
with subject matter is best exemplified by a preoccupation with standardized curriculum content
and the resulting ramifications for accountability, student and teacher assessment, and teacher
preparation. In the process, we have lost sight of what good teaching is about, no matter what
the subject. What had been overlooked are the larger pedagogical concerns those qualities that
make teaching an art form in its own right. What is “social” about this concern? All learning, be
it between individuals, in-school classes, communities, or other groups, has a social dimension.
The essence of learning and teaching is relational and its context is always social (and the
social is always contextual); human beings acting with each other and acting in, with and upon
their world. The quality of these interactions will be a concern of this paper.
One of the foundation blocks of social theory is the notion of “praxis,” or the reciprocity of
thought and action. In praxis, theory enlightens practice. Practice, or life, always comes first and
theory comes later as a result of reflection. Pedagogical praxis refers to thoughtful action: action
full of thought and thought full of action (Van Manen, 1986, p.54). As we shall see, praxis is an
essential quality of pedagogy.
Although rooted in the word for child (or boy), the essence and nature of pedagogy can
extend beyond leading, escorting or teaching children. Being a child can be an attitude, a state
of mind. It is being innocent, curious, open to learning. On the other hand, being a teacher is
being open to letting the learner learn. This essence lies in Rudolph Arnheim’s observation that
“pedagogy is at its most powerful when the truly wise serve as teachers to the truly youthful”
(Arnheim, 1986, p.291). As Heidegger would say, the “truly wise” teacher is one who “lets learn”
or who in the words of a writer and pedagogue, Max van Manen, is sensitive, and full of thought
and tact. Pedagogy then, is a way of being.
Max Van Manen is currently a Professor of Education at the University of Alberta, Canada,
where he teaches curriculum studies, phenomenological writing and research methodology.
He has been an elementary and a secondary school teacher in the Netherlands and Canada.
He is an author, a teacher and a parent. To Van Manen, “pedagogy is the activity of teaching,
parenting, education, or generally living with children, that requires constant practical acting in
concrete situations and relations” (Van Manen, 1990, p.2).
Van Manen uses four words that I would like to explore to help us locate pedagogy tone,
tact, thoughtfulness, and hope. These are not words one often hears in school staff rooms (at
least not often enough). As pedagogues, says Van Manen, we need to strike the right tone with
children. To find the right pitch, to be in tune, we must be tactful. Tact is a particular sensitivity
and attunement to situations. Pedagogical tact is having a sensitivity to what is best for each
child, for each learner, and having a sense of his or her life and his or her deep preoccupations.
To Van Manen, “True pedagogy requires an attentive attunement of one’s whole being to the
child’s experience of the world” (1986, p. 50).
Not only is pedagogy about a relationship between teacher and learner, it also encompasses
a relationship of both with a subject. To know a particular subject means not only to have
knowledge in that domain but to know something of the way it relates to us and we to it. To know
a subject means to love and respect it for what it is and the ways it lets itself be known. Says Van
Manen, “it is in this letting us know that subject matter becomes a true subject: a subject that
makes relationships possible” (1986, p.45). This responsiveness to the subject is the essence
of the relationship between student and subject matter. The relationship between subject matter
is of course, just as integral and reciprocal.
... there is deep truth in the statement “you are what you teach”. A math teacher is not (or
should not be) just somebody who happens to teach math. A real math teacher is a person
who embodies math, who lives math, who in a strong sense is math. (Van Manen, 1986,
p.45)
For math, we can substitute art a real teacher “embodies art.” Stated this way, we have finally
cleared up, once and for all, and laid to rest, the question of whether or not an art teacher must
be a practising artist. This is not the point. The point is that as art teacher, an art pedagogue,
must embody art. Or to use another of Van Manen’s words, an art pedagogue must be attuned
to art.
To Van Manen, another important quality for pedagogy is hope. Hope refers to all that gives
us patience, tolerance and belief in the possibilities for our children, our learners. Hope is what
distinguishes “a pedagogic life from a non–pedagogic one” (1986, p. 27). Van Manen offers a
new definition of pedagogue:
Those who are inhabited by hope are true fathers, true mothers, true teachers to children.
Pedagogic hope animates the way a parent or teacher lives with a child, and it gives
meaning to the way an adult stands in the world, represents the world to the child, takes
responsibility for the world, and embodies or stylizes the forms of knowledge through
which the world is known and explained to children. (1986, p.26)
Thus, he says, “hope gives us pedagogy. Or is it pedagogy that gives us hope?” (1986, p. 28)
Back to my mother’s question and my lost sock: "If I were the lost art of pedagogy, where
might I be?” Well, a good place to look would be in the classrooms of thoughtful, attuned, and
hopeful teachers like Cynthia Taylor and Amy Brook Snider.
We who call ourselves EDUCATORS have attended to the pedagogical imperative all too
well. By our well-meant efforts we have transformed the ancient and honourable calling of
TEACHER into an exact science. We have examined roles and delineated tasks with the bright
intelligent eye and the efficient manner of clinicians (psychologists, sociologists, pathologists,
time management consultants, and economists). We have learned to provide rationales,
to hone critical skills, to develop and market slick curriculum packages, taking some pride
in declaring them “teacher proof.” We have focused on target groups (the children), learning
centers (the classrooms), resources and materials in a bewildering array. We can analyze and
manipulate behavioural patterns and develop effective questioning strategies. As art educators
we find comfort in the oft-repeated assertion that we are the purveyors, even the guardians,
of EXCELLENCE in education. We, the communicators, provide it-clean, tidy, and without
blemish. We even provide the content, market-researched and precision-tested: art history and
aesthetics are “scanned”, studio classes are planned for and delivered without a hitch. And
without doubt, our stature has been increased in the eyes of the bureaucrats. We have become
“accountable.”
But what have we lost? We have replaced MYTHS with exact science; MAGIC with
methodology; and MYSTERY with mastery. We no longer yearn for the shadowy, formless
world of passion and pathos, or for the “something wild, out-of-hand, something that for the rest
of the world is dynamic, which demands endless adjustments in a relationship that can never be
permanent” (Brook, 1989, p.39). In this “time of the world’s night” we pedagogues have turned
away from that “something” which has given us meaning, and provided us with the source-
material for understanding our life-work: ART.
The more rigorously the IDEAL is reached, the more likely it is to be disastrous: a
bright, intelligent eye, full of exact images, set in a head of the most frightful stupidity.
(Hughes, 1988, p.39)
I am not convinced, however, that acquisition of art concepts and skills: will lead to
experiences of expansion, or to ‘creation and re-creation’, or to the kind of encounter
that sets beholders or listeners or readers ‘in motion’ breaking with the fixed and the
ordinary, transforming their lived worlds...I want to see a curriculum that allows for the
risks―and for surprise. (Green, 1989, p.223)
In education, failures are more important than success stories. There is nothing so
dismal as a success story. Teach on the verge of peril. (Schafer, 1978, p.11)
There are a few (but only a few) art educators who by their example and in their writing plead
for a change in how we envision our view of what it means to teach:
Year after year, I prepare my students to go into classrooms. They are good students, and
serious. I ensure that they can follow all the rules, and can apply the best principles drawn from
various curricular approaches as they plan for lessons which meet objective criteria. They can
describe learning tasks and write realistic goals. They show themselves capable of program
planning, they polish their rationales and brainstorm ideas for lessons that appear (on paper) to
be rich and full. Their lesson plans are models; their materials are carefully laid out in advance
of every class; traffic patterns and clean–up chores are worked out. I fulfill MY pedagogical task,
and have every reason to believe that my students will be well-trained, well–prepared teachers.
And yet, year after year, I watch lessons which are dull and lifeless; about, but devoid of
ART. Clockwork-true to the lesson plans, they are delivered by harried student teachers (who
have an eye on the clock more than the students), at break–neck pace, and with voice soft and
apologetic or rising shrilly to unbearable pitch. Delivery is often rushed or pedantic; the students
stand at the front of the class, rigid, eyes glancing off notes which rustle in shaking hands. They
write on the board in large looping letters which look familiar. Of course! They are modeling
Last spring, for the first time, an elective course titled Teaching as Performance, was offered
at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It represented my attempt to address the very real
problems we face as a result of our culture’s long–standing urge to make scientific method the
center of all our work. Since the mid–eighteenth century, we have assiduously attended to the
separation of mind from body, lived experience from knowledge, sense from nonsense. For too
long we have fragmented experience, and have learned to place little faith in ancient ways of
knowing, which saw the body as the locus of the soul, and the heart as the seat of the intellect.
This negation inherent to our technological civilization must be resolved; and since
it cannot now be resolved in work, it must be resolved in the development of the
only impulse that is left underdeveloped in our civilization; aesthetic play. The only
development of the play impulse that is adequate for this task of reconstruction is its
development into creative art (Read, 1960, p. 59).
In this course, as it was introduced to and played out by a small, brave band of students,
there was a conscious attempt to initiate activities specifically designed to reintegrate our dis-
membered natures, primarily through PLAY. My goal was to encourage us to learn and celebrate
our bodies, listen to our own voices, and to relate to each other as vibrant, interconnected
beings. Through this course I wished to make a beginning, to re-claim the ART in pedagogy.
The intention was, of course, that the students (once they had been freed from fixed patterns
and habits) would be enabled to apply the insights to their teaching practice.
Reflecting on experience, we discovered that serendipity has a place in learning; that art
knows no particular form; that life, though rife with ambiguity and uncertainty, is for celebrating.
We (for I was as active a participant as any other course member) sang, we danced, we
laughed, we played, we learned the extent of our capabilities as we exposed our frailties. We
learned to take risks.
Mostly though, we were encouraged to risk our own self-understanding: to lose ourselves,
in a sense, in the interest of composing our lives afresh. As teachers, we are still artists: our
emerging selves will connect with those of learners as we embody art at work in our teaching:
If we are convinced that art is a transformative undertaking, and learning is a fluid, dynamic
process, I beleive what we must do is to act. AS IF our lives are ongoing works of art. By our
art-full acts, we will reintegrate the various aspects of our natures. As art educators, we must
discover ways to help our students exemplify the art of teaching. Let us revivify teaching as an
art form, by embodying our understanding in praxis.
Philip Jackson (1986) has identified two approaches to pedagogy: the transformative and the
mimetic. He characterizes the former as “teaching capable of accomplishing ...a transformation
of one kind or another in the person being taught a qualitative change often of dramatic
proportion, a metamorphosis” (p.120). In my work as a teacher of undergraduates studying art
education in combination with art, design, and occasionally architecture, I help students find or
name something which has been ignored or lost to them: self knowledge, a critical component
in the process of making or teaching art.
One of the courses I teach, Twentieh Century Ideas about Art and Self, is a course which
defines itself in the space between the studio, the art history lecture, and the classroom. It
provides a forum for all that is missing from the traditional studies in art and art education. It
has become a class unlike any other I teach or have taught before because it is a place where
miracles have been known to occur.
From the beginning, the students and I define ourselves as a community in which we
are free to present ourselves without fear of censorship and transform what was previously
considered ordinary into what Ellen Dissanayake (1990) had called the “special”. We tell
stories about memorable childhood experiences, engage in collaborative art projects, construct
autobiographical performances, and study the work of artists and artisans considered marginal
to the mainstream art history in our textbooks. In the process, connections are continually being
made between different realms of educational experience as well as between art and self.
Previous choices are reconsidered; new art forms are tried on; risks are taken. Students learn
to see beyond the categories which they had always used to demarcate their life worlds. But
perhaps most important, we start to shed initial prejudices about each other and see beneath
those superficial assessments we usually live by in all human relations.
The following is a narrative, one of the three elements in transformative teaching identified
by Philip Jackson, which exemplifies my work as an artist who teaches. As I reread a chapter
by Howard Gardner (1973) describing the creative process as problem-solving in a medium, I
focus upon these words as if for the first time:
In previous years, our readings and discussion of this chapter was usually informed by
observations of children painting in neighbourhood pre–schools followed by collaborative art
activity (my antidote to Gardner’s portrait of the creative process as solitary). Since this group
studio work usually ended up being a lot of fun and resulted in some highly imaginative pieces
of art, I may have been unconsciously thinking about the role of play in creative process all
along. But now I want to bring my understanding of play to a more conscious level. I begin my
preparation, that is, my research, by:
1–Going through my library and finding readings related to the subject in a variety of
disciplines: anthropology, psychology, art, and poetry (the more outside the field of
art education the better.)
2–Picking out quotations for the quotography (a form of bibliography I devised that
stimulates thinking on the subject).
3–Having students read aloud their observations of pre-school play while we identify
distinguishing characteristics and create a taxonomy of play.
4–Bringing in children's books, slides of children's art, modern and contemporary
artists inspired by children's art, and toys and reproductions of toys.
5–Bringing in photographs of children playing.
These are the elements which I arrange and rearrange in an effort to provide the class with
the material to approach the question: “What is the relationship between play and the creative
process?” Doing it once will not be enough. I keep making adjustments and talking about it
with my colleagues in the department. It is hard to predict how long before my “text” is written
in this transformative collaboration I call teaching. And there is more evidence that once it
does work, new “texts” will have to be written. Textbooks are not useful in this process, for if I
were to follow a prepared text filled with pre–digested, selected, and received knowledge, such
discoveries would be impossible. All the real work involved in this messing around in material
or information would have been done by somebody else and I would be sleepwalking through
these creations without being called upon as a participant. And God knows what my students
would be doing! The “I” is safely removed from a “teacher–proof” experience, for teaching within
such a paradigm is serious business, anything but fun and certainly not messy.
A fitting conclusion to this paper and this search, is a quotation from a book published in
1917 written by Herman Harrell Horne called The Teacher as Artist: An Essay in Education as
an Aesthetic Process:
That the standard here set up for the teaching process is high, perhaps too high for
general attainment yet awhile, is admitted; yet we may steer by the stars. My idealistic
writings on education have been criticized for lifting the standards too high, ‘putting the
teacher on a pedestal’, and seeing philosophical significance in ‘mere pedagogy’. The
charge is well founded―unless you who read, having the eternal perfection in your hearts,
prove otherwise by your beautiful work in shaping individuals and society. (p.iii)
References
Abbs, P. (1989). The symbolic order. Barcombe: The Falmer Press.
Arnheim, R. (1986). New essays on the psychology of art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brook, P. (1989). The culture of links. The symbolic order. (P. Abbs, Ed.) Barcombe: The Falmer Press.
Dissanayake, E. (1990). What’s art for? Seattle: The University of Washington Press.
Egan, K. & Nadaner, D. (1988) Imagination and education. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
Gardner, H. (1973). The arts and human development. New York: John Wiley.
Ghandi, M. K. (1953). Towards new education. (B. Kumarappa, Ed.) Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
Greene, M. (1989). Art worlds in schools. The symbolic order. (P. Abbs, Ed.) Barcombe: The Falmer Press.
Heidegger, M. (1966) Discourse on thinking. New York: Harper and Row.
Horne, H.H. (1917). The teacher as artist: An essay in education as artistic process. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The Riverside Press.
Hughes, T. (1988). Myth and education. Imagination and education. New York: Teachers College Press,
Columbia University.
Jackson, P. (1986). The practice of teaching. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
Read, H. (1960). The third realm of education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schafer, R.M. (1978). Rhinoceros in the classroom. Toronto: Berandol Press.
Szekely, G. (1988). Encouraging creativity in art lessons. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
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Webster’s. (2002). Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Merriam Webster.
It is gratifying to see what has been called the “lost art” of pedagogy being discovered again,
twenty years later. Of course, the art of, or more to the point, the art in pedagogy, was never
really lost, although it might at times be hard to find. As I noted in the article, it was alive and
well in the classrooms of artful educators, such as Cynthia Taylor and Amy Brook Snider, who
approach teaching as thoughtful social interaction, inspired, informed performance, and a path
to transformational self–knowledge. In their pedagogical explorations, actions and transactions,
they embody art. Re-reading the article that was written so long ago, the three of us agree that
while our approaches to the art of writing may have improved, what we wrote still generally
reflects our values, feelings and ideas about the field and its possibilities for transformation.
The past twenty years has allowed us to observe the results of our practice in the careers of
our former students, many who in conversation and by reputation, appear to share and practice
the pedagogical approaches we espouse and embody. They say that our teaching has made a
difference to them as teachers, artists and persons. The impact of Amy’s teaching and ideas on
her students and the field was affirmed when she received the "NAEA’s June King McFee award
in 2002. At the recent CSEA conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick in October, 2011, both
Cynthia and I were recognized for our teaching accomplishments. Her Gaitskell Address was an
inspiring testament to a life–long, ongoing and passionate commitment to teaching as art and
as performance. Most significantly, three of the other award winners were our former students!
After 30 years, Amy has stepped down as Art Education Chair at Pratt Institute to devote
herself to full–time teaching. Although Cynthia and I are retired or semi–retired, we are still
active pedagogically in various capacities, both formal and informal. It is said that artists never
retire. The same can be said for artful pedagogues. Perhaps the complement to life–long
learning is perpetual pedagogy.