Always the New: Paradigms and the Inherent Futurity of Art Education Historiography

Abstract

This article focuses on the use of paradigm as a historiographical concept in art education research from the 1980s onward and examines what kind of understanding of time and history it has promoted. While Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory has lost its relevance for the current historical research in art education, art educators still continue to use terms paradigm and paradigm shift when proposing new approaches to teaching art or alternatively articulating the difference between past and present practices. Kuhnian paradigm theory and the post-Kuhnian “postparadigmatic” era have helped to approach the historical contingency of art education’s epistemologies, but have not challenged the linear and chronological time of scientific knowledge production. By using the term paradigm to examine the temporal modalities of art education research, this article seeks to question more generally what kind of understanding of time and history art education researchers put forward.