Art Education Progress: A Field of Dichotomies or a Network of Mutual Support.

Abstract

The challenge to prepare the Studies Lecture for 1990, combined with freedom from daily academic concern, has given me more opportunity to reflect on my perspective on art education. Like all of us living through this extraordinary period in world history, watching intense social, political, and cultural readjustments, while contemplating their implications for this society, has been impelling and stirring. We have been forced to reassess our basic assumptions about the world and our interrelations with it. requires flexibility with ideas to see these evolving connections in this transitional social arena. Not only the world scene but many aspects of our own society require rethinking. We are finally recognizing that this nation is far more diverse than we have been willing to accept; that minorities as a whole are no longer the minority in many urban areas; that the influx of new cultures is far greater than immigration data document; and that the basic ingredient of our society, the family, is undergoing transitions which ripple affect society as a whole. Being off campus we have missed dialogue about these tumultuous events with colleagues and students. I have missed discussing their impact on art and education, so I particularly welcome this invitation and your reactions. During my years of teaching, thoughtful graduate students often raised the question, Just what is art education? Trying to impress them with the importance of their own inquiry, my answer, in content, was It is what we make it become. Years before, just after finishing my dissertation at Stanford, I went to an NAEA convention in New York City. There I first met Kenneth Beittel, and we shared our excitement with graduate research. He asked to take my dissertation to his great teacher Viktor Lowenfeld to read and then to meet with them the next morning. Lowenfeld's response was much the same that we were in our infancy as a field and that many steps, including mine, were needed to develop it. He was encouraging about the inquiry I was pursuing. This impressed me because, even though his perspectives were quite different than mine, his concepts of the field were more inclusive. is in this more open context that I will pursue my presentation here.