Questioning secondary art education
Maria
I am new to this site. I am a high school art teacher who has
recently taken up graduate studies in art education. I have to say,
it has been an eye opening experience. I have discovered that the
discipline based art courses that I have been teaching are quite
archaic. The new thrust is visual culture and a rejection of the
Canon of traditional art history. I am now questioning my past
approaches to art education and to evaluation in my art classes. I
would love to hear from anyone else who has been undergoing a similar
evolution. What changes have your teaching and curriculum undergone
to create an art program that is more current and more relevant?
Maria
Kevin Karplus
You are unlikely to make a high-school art program more relevant by
copying what graduate schools in art are teaching. The main goal of
high-school art should be to provide students with the skills they
need (drawing, painting, sculpting, photography, ...) to be able to
realize their visions. These skills do not change much from decade to
decade---pencils and charcoal have not changed much (though
photography has recently been changing a bit as digital photography
changes some of the constraints on the technology).
A solid basis of skills will serve the students well whether they
become artists, scientists, business people, or whatever. Being
indoctrinated into a particular school of art will only serve them
well if that school of art still thrives when they turn 30.
Leave the art-world fads to the colleges and concentrate on developing
the basic skills. Don't worry about teaching art appreciation and art
history in high school except as aids for teaching technique---most of
the kids won't really appreciate it much anyway, no matter what spin
you put on it.
I know I would have been better served in school if the teachers had
tried to give me rudimentary sketching skills rather than art history
lessons and "developing my creativity". I don't remember the art
history they tried to teach, but I sure wish I could draw as well as
my 8-year-old son. (Note: I did not have any art lessons in high
school---those were not readily available to students on the
accelerated track and my elementary school had left me with such weak
art skills that I had no interest in even trying.)
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Kevin Karplus kar...@soe.ucsc.edu http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Senior member, IEEE Board of Directors, ISCB (starting Jan 2005)
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