Art Education as Cultural Practice

Abstract

The M.F.A. in Visual Art Program at Vermont College is designed to focus on the relationship between art and societal values in order to help students recognize the inevitable conflicts and contradictions of being an artist/cultural producer in today's world. Just as important, the program provides an opportunity for adults to obtain their M.F.A. degrees while remaining within the communities in which they live, work, and make art. Six basic concepts shape the program's structure:1. Art is not value-free, nor is art education. Both must be considered within the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that necessarily define and condition the production and reception of art.2. Just as the process is an essential part of the product in art making, how one teaches is what one teaches.3. Self-actualization should be encouraged through a student-centered pedagogy in which the students create their own individualized curriculum.4. A student's self-evaluation and faculty evaluations of a student's work should not be based on abstract program-generated criteria but on the student's own experience and the creative process he or she has undertaken within the program.5. All subject matter of study and artistic inquiry should be approached from a multidisciplinary view of knowledge and art practice.6. The educational milieu should be as nonhierarchical as possible and serve as a model for other artistic communities.