Understanding Art Education: Engaging Reflexively with Practice
By Nicholas Addison, Lesley Burgess, John Steers, Jane Trowell
What is distinctive about art and design as a subject in secondary schools?
What contribution does it make to the wider curriculum?
How can art and design develop the agency of young people?
Understanding Art Education examines the theory and practice of helping young people learn in and beyond the secondary classroom. It provides guidance and stimulation for ways of thinking about art and design when preparing to teach and provides a framework within which teachers can locate their own experiences and beliefs.
Designed to complement the core textbook Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School, which offers pragmatic approaches for trainee and newly-qualified teachers, this book suggests ways in which art and design teachers can engage reflexively with their continuing practice.
Experts in the field explore:
The histories of art and design education and their relationship to wider social and cultural developments
Creativity as a foundation for learning
Engaging with contemporary practice in partnership with external agencies
The role of assessment in evaluating creative and collaborative practices
Interdisciplinary approaches to art and design
Developing dialogue as a means to address citizenship and global issues in art and design education.
Understanding Art Education will be of interest to all students and practising teachers, particularly those studying at M Level, as well as teacher educators, and researchers who wish to reflect on their identity as an artist and teacher, and the ways in which the subject can inform and contribute to education and society more widely.
In choosing to become a teacher of art and design in secondary school, you have moved from one field of practice (art, craft and design) to another (that of pedagogy). By making this choice, you have signalled a wish to help young people learn in and through a range of valued practices. These practices gain their value because they provide people with the means to shape the made environment, the world in which we all live, and to explore and celebrate beliefs and identities, thereby extending what it is to be human through imaginative and creative transformations. The fact that you have been immersed in this field, that you may have a ‘passionate attachment’ to it, is significant. This attachment is likely to inform the type of teacher you will, or have, become. In this sense, your understanding of the field is central to your personal history and identity and is something that you may be intent on sustaining throughout your career as a teacher; indeed, you may see yourself as an artist teacher or a teaching artist, someone who moves across and between fields. As this identity has been so significant for you, it is important that you communicate this to students and that you encourage them to recognise the vital contribution of art, craft and design to the making and remaking of culture. We therefore pose a series of questions to help you look at the specificity of art, craft and design both in education and within society more widely.
How does learning in and through art, craft and design allow students to
construct forms of knowledge that are marginalised in other areas of the
curriculum?
Can the subject provide ways of thinking and doing that enable students to
navigate the rapid changes in contemporary society, both local and global?
How can art and design develop the agency of young people, enabling them
to participate, collaborate and contribute to these transformations?
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