Real-World Readings in Art Education

Things Your Professor Never Told You

Dennis E. Fehr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780815335412
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136534355
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection of essays focuses on such topics as the daily experience of teaching art in today's public schools; the tradition of honoring only the European patriarchal canon; structural change in school policy and curriculum and teaching.

PART I

Real-World Classroom Voices: Protesting the Rules

KAREN KEIFER-BOYD

School authorities often intend their rules to be unquestioned. Yet the authors in Part I protest the perceived rules of art teacher expectations and art content. Rules are unquestioned theories that guide practice. Theory underlies all teaching. Our beliefs about children, about what teaching means, and about what we teach encompass our teaching theory. Part I can help us reflect on our teaching theory and practice. It will help us protest the rules that impose teaching contexts.

Real-World Readings in Art Education begins with teachers' stories in Kathleen E. Connors's chapter, “Familiar Voices and the Need for Reform,” that protest the rift between the theories that they learned and their lived experiences as teachers. These teachers protest the dangers that their students encounter daily. They protest the loss of art facilities, the need to hide gay identity, the horrors of children's home lives, and the heaviness of grief that envelops their daily experience of teaching art in today's public schools. Some decide to move on, others to passively accept the situation. Some choose to stay closeted for their safety and to protect their reputations as good art teachers. However, others, by joining forces, networking, and “visually listening,” tell how they protest with proactive practices that have made a difference.

In Chapter 2, “Making a Difference,” Elizabeth Manley Delacruz provides a glimpse into the professional life of an art teacher and reveals the difficulties in achieving professional satisfaction and self-worth. Delacruz's goal in this chapter is to inspire art educators with suggestions for renewing professional aspirations. She offers suggestions for self-efficacy based on her own and other art teachers' needs, successes, and failures.

In Chapter 3, “Feminist and Critical Pedagogies: Intersections and Divergences,” Yvonne Gaudelius protests teaching in which patriarchal constructions of knowledge dominate teacher practice. She distinguishes between critical and feminist theories and argues that teaching that does not include feminist issues promotes gender terrorism. Feminist theory applied to art teaching derives knowledge from women's contemporary and historic perspectives and practices. Debate, argument, and authority, by contrast, are critical pedagogical devices that are at odds with feminist pedagogy.

Gaudelius describes how theory informs practice and practice informs theory. She defines pedagogy as theoretically informed practice, and radical pedagogy as understanding teaching as a cultural practice. She argues that teachers not only need to examine critically the formation of knowledge but also work toward social and political equality. Gaudelius's postmodern writing moves from personal to political and back to personal, depending on how we read her parallel monologues, which join theory and practice to reveal how gender politics defines power in art education.

In Chapter 4, “Deconstructing Media Images of Postmodern Childhood,” Paul Duncum challenges the sentimental and manipulative adult views of childhood that the corporate world propagates. Media constructions of childhood innocence influence art educational theory and practice. Mass-marketed images of children such as Precious Moments, Teletubbies, and Beanie Babies ignore the real lives of children. Duncum describes Anne Geddes's photographs as one of the best-known examples of this genre. Duncum proposes art curricula that make teachers and children aware of these media fictions. He asks the reader to notice two alternative views of children: the aesthetic child and the all-knowing child. In place of a singular view of the innocent child, this postmodern perspective conceives of childhood as varied fragments in search of coexistence.

CHAPTER 1

Familiar Voices and the Need for Reform

KATHLEEN E. CONNORS

Each teacher's narrative related here expresses a sense of betrayal by the promises of their training programs and certification requirements. These teachers describe how the daily inequities and inadequacies of their schools make it difficult to do their jobs. Their training programs required competence in creating art with a variety of media, as well as theoretical knowledge of education, psychology, and art. They learned to write art curricula. They acquired comprehensive knowledge of the European art canon. They trusted that this training prepared them to give to their chosen field. They believed they would help their future students begin lifelong relationships with art and meaningful encounters with self. They believed this because their university diplomas and state teaching certificates tacitly promised that they would be able to practice what they had learned. They would have eager students, adequate facilities, appropriate equipment, sufficient supplies, and enthusiastic support from parents, administrators, and faculty. Then they discovered the reality.

Not all art teachers tell this story, but too many who have taught during the past fifty years offer their variations on a familiar theme. Our teachers prepared us to work in ideal climes, but we find ourselves working in schools with manifold flaws. Typically, it is not the professors who misled us. In fact, professors often arrange field-based “real-life” encounters that contrast with the idealistic purview of textbooks, planned curricula, and state and national tests.

When I became interested in inner-city teaching in 1970, one of my professors arranged for me to visit a school in Boston's Chinatown. A high metal fence with barbed wire at the top surrounded the school. A guard admitted visitors. The interior of the school looked like an elementary school I attended in the late 1940s—bolted-down desks and a cursive alphabet above the chalkboard in each room. The Chinese students (many non-English-speaking) sat facing forward, silently listening to a teacher lecturing in English from behind his desk. All of the building's teachers were English-speaking Anglos. Most were near retirement. The curriculum offered no art courses. The school's first goal was to maintain order. At that time no college course or professional exam took into account such a setting.

In 1971 I began student teaching in a school in Newton, Massachusetts, considered one of the state's exemplars of educational excellence. I expected an outstanding art program. What I found was that my supervising teacher taught 850 students every other week, traveling to two different schools. One school had no art room. We taught art in the hallway. The other school's art room was in a dark basement in what was once a gymnasium. The few lights that worked were fifteen feet above our heads. A constant din emerged from a doorless kindergarten room adjacent to the “art room.” Our room provided the only access to the cafeteria, so teachers and children continuously paraded through the art room. My supervising teacher said this would be her last year to put up with such nonsense. Soon she would be certified to teach third grade. She could then have a room of her own, teach art every day, and finally learn the names of all of her students. The fact that she wore black every day spoke volumes.

The narratives that follow offer a small sampling of innumerable such events in our field. Each illustrates the rift between teacher certification programs and what we encounter. I chose to write these vignettes in the first person to convey the personal impact the situations had on the teachers. In all cases the versions are not verbatim, and the names are fictitious.

FROM A FIRST-YEAR TEACHER

This teacher wrote her story in one of my graduate seminars.

I was a pregnant first-year teacher, traveling between two elementary schools and teaching from a cart in both. One school had three stories and no elevator. I had to move the cart up and down the stairs. As my pregnancy progressed, a janitor took pity on me and moved the cart for me. The classroom teachers were mostly indifferent to my situation. Some even criticized me in front of their classes as I struggled to arrive on time and full of enthusiasm. I was afraid I would lose my job if I complained. My first year was pure hell.

CULTURE SHOCK IN THE INNER CITY

This teacher also wrote her story in one of my graduate seminars.

There I was, a blonde, blue-eyed, midwestern Protestant who had never seen an African American in person. I was about to begin teaching in a school with a student population that was 80 percent African American, 19 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent white. This was my third year of teaching but my first in the inner city, where I had always wanted to work. The school was across the street from a government housing project notorious for drug trafficking and drive-by shootings. The project was home to most of my students. Furthermore, I had recently married and converted to Judaism. These two personal events, combined with my new job and the neighborhood it was in, created much inner turmoil.

On the second day of school, a neighborhood gang shot a seven-year-old student of mine in the legs. This child was an innocent victim of a neighborhood gang war. Others in the school considered this incident tragic but common. To me, however, it was incomprehensible. I couldn't sleep. I felt that I was a member of no culture, yet obligated to many. I had wanted to teach in the inner city, since I believed in the power of art education to help make a difference. Yet most of my colleagues were burned out. They advised me simply to keep order in my classes and do holiday art.

As I came to know my students, I became aware not only of their neediness but also of my own. Many came to school without breakfast. Few wore clothes adequate for the cold weather. Most were from single-parent families and were labeled at risk.

Realizing that my students could not learn art until their basic needs were fulfilled, I recruited some other faculty to help me find organizations to assist families with parenting skills, conflict resolution, self-esteem, diversity, and issues of race, gender, and class. Our efforts resulted in a breakfast program and after-school workshops for parents.

After weeks of agonizing over how to heal myself and become the art teacher I hoped to be, I persuaded some teachers to cooperate with me on an interdisciplinary project I named The Big Book. The students in the project would write and illustrate a book about themselves, their lives, their families, and their heritages. The book would be “published” and kept in our library. The pages would be twenty inches by thirty inches—the size of poster board—giving the children plenty of room to tell their stories. Students and teachers began to stay after school to work on the book. It became a focal point of joy in learning and tolerance.

The finished book was a hit. Students who had not been involved wanted to make a book of their own. The book was only the first of many positive changes that occurred over the next few years. When a “better” school offered me a teaching position, I found the decision difficult. If only my university art education training had prepared me for this!

FOR THE GOOD OF THE FEW

This teacher also wrote her story in one of my graduate seminars.

The school where I taught art for fifteen years was built at the turn of the twentieth century. It had high ceilings and great windows. My art room had no sink, but the natural light was perfect. I was content, knowing some teachers in our district traveled between schools and taught from carts. Also, my school was in a residential area with lower crime. “Count your blessings,” I told myself.

We always lacked art supplies. We relied on creative recycling and donations. Nevertheless, our students loved art, and their work impressed our administration, faculty, and parents. We art teachers received frequent praise for our students' accomplishments, especially those of “difficult” students whose art experiences taught them to love learning. I received the Teacher of the Year award in the same year that I lost my art room to the special education program. My replacement room was half the size, in the basement, separated from other classrooms, and next to the gym. The sounds of bouncing basketballs and screaming kids accompanied my classes. I did, however, have a sink.

I taught in the basement for five years, after which I transferred to an urban middle school in the same district. Some of my middle school students had been my students in the elementary school. One of the most surprising things I discovered was that few of them remembered the skills I was sure they had learned. Some acted as if they had never studied art. Their work had lost the spontaneity of elementary school. Was this simply a developmental phenomenon? Had the constant din from the gymnasium affected their long-term memory? Was their forty-minute-a-week schedule inadequate? Perhaps the message that art is not important is stronger in middle school. I wish I knew the reasons.

THE CLOSET AND TEACHING ART

The author of this narrative told it to me directly.

I teach high school art and coordinate the talented and gifted program in a large midwestern city. The student population in my school is primarily African American. I am white, Jewish, and gay. Nearly everyone in my school knows I am Jewish. No one knows that I am gay. Teachers who come out of the closet in my district eventually leave because of homophobic and heterosexist prejudices. My district has seen repeated instances of gay bashing and one murder. This is not surprising given the ease with which students can obtain weapons. Deaths, both accidental and intentional, have occurred in the district because students brought firearms to school. Consequently, I choose to remain in the closet. I also believe that I could no longer be an effective teacher if students, faculty, and administration defined me as a queer instead of as an art teacher. Outside of my profession I am out of the closet, but I don't feel that the time is right to come out at work. I love teaching art, especially when I see it change my students' lives. I feel a sense of accomplishment when my students, talented or not, begin to see the world as a positive place. I wait for the day when it is positive enough for me to come out.

THE CHILD FIRST?

This narrative came from a teacher/graduate student who sought my advice on how to handle a case of child abuse.

I had been teaching elementary art for seven years when Joey arrived at our school. His mother's trial for murdering her husband and daughter a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Teaching as Transgression
• Part I Real-World Classroom Voices: Protesting the Rules
• Part II Real-World Aesthetics: Breaking the Rules
• Part III Real-World Art Lessons: Ignoring the Rules
• Part IV Real-World Structural Change: Rewriting the Rules
• Contributors
• Index