Conference Proceedings 2010 [pdf] - Art & Design Symposium ...

contemporary art education demands a curriculum framework that helps students make sense of it all, such as
a thematic approach (Anderson, T. & Milbrandt, 2005; Sandell, 2009; Stewart & Walker, 2005).
Art educators have responded to the forms, content, and concerns of contemporary art and postmodernism in
other ways as well. Some contemporary art educators share a desire to use art education to effect equitable
social change (Anderson, T. & Milbrandt, 2005; Gaudelius & Speirs, 2005). Marshall advocates teaching the
“myriad of techniques, materials, forms and art genres, including experimental and interdisciplinary genres”
(2006, p. 18) used by contemporary artists. And Gude (2004) proposes a new set of “postmodern principles”
(appropriation, juxtaposition, recontextualization, layering, interaction of image and text, hybridity, gazing, and
“representin”) that reflect the content and strategies of contemporary art and expand on the modernist
elements of art (line, shape, color, texture, form, space, and value) and principles of design (balance,
emphasis, unity, variety, movement, rhythm, and proportion).
The emphasis on meaning, thematic instruction, authentic conceptual and material artmaking strategies, and
connections to life that are found in contemporary art education models leave a great deal of freedom and
corresponding responsibility to individual classroom art teachers. The expansive domain of art across time
and cultures precludes any notion of “covering it all.” Judicious choices of artworks, themes, and curriculum
frameworks by individual art teachers at the classroom level are what make art education meaningful to
students.
Exemplary Art Education in Urban Schools
Drawing from the literature on exemplary urban teaching and exemplary art education, it follows logically that
exemplary art education in urban schools is equitable, culturally responsive, emphasizes the construction of
meaning in making and receiving art, is approached thematically, and reflects the authentic content and
strategies of contemporary art. Even with the constraints of national and state standards for student
achievement in art, individual art teachers at the classroom level have wide latitude to choose artworks,
themes and curricular frameworks to make art education meaningful, relevant, and responsive to their
students’ needs, interests, and concerns (Anderson, T. & Milbrandt, 2005; Stewart & Walker, 2005). Because
of their extraordinary freedom of curricular choice (in comparison to most general classroom teachers) art
teachers in urban schools are uniquely positioned to develop culturally responsive curricula using actual
cultural products (i.e., artworks, artifacts, crafts, aspects of visual culture, popular culture, etc.) that are drawn
from an inexhaustible plethora of artworlds.
A culturally responsive art curriculum does not mean a mono-cultural art curriculum that solely includes art
from students’ home cultures. Contemporary art education theories clearly advocate a pluralistic, crosscultural
art curriculum that ennobles and dignifies art and other visual cultural products from a great variety of
art traditions throughout history and around the world (Anderson, T. & Milbrandt, 2005; Gaudelius & Speirs,
2005; Gude, 2004; Marshall, 2006; Sandell, 2009; Stewart & Walker, 2005). In order to be culturally
responsive, the curriculum should reflect low-income, urban students’ lived experiences and frames of
reference; but in order to be equitable, the curriculum should also empower them to navigate the dominant
culture (Achinstein & Aguirre, 2008). Contemporary art frequently deals with social themes that can be
catalysts for students to develop a critical understanding of our culture’s power structure and our own cultural
outlooks, and explore ways to make our world more equitable (Knight, 2006). One of contemporary art
education’s most important acknowledged purposes is teaching students to understand and create meaning in
art. This characterizes art students’ role as not merely a passive receiver of meaning, but an active maker of
meaning in their own production. A “critically conscious purpose” (Duncan-Andrade, 2007, p. 625) for urban
art education, then, is to empower urban students to create culture that can act as “a social instrument for
improving people’s lives” (Anderson, T. & Milbrandt, 2005).
References
Achinstein, B., & Aguirre, J. (2008). Cultural match or culturally suspect: How new teachers of color negotiate
sociocultural challenges in the classroom. Teachers College Record, 110(8), 1505-1540.
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