Circumventing the Imposed Ceiling: Art Education as Resistance Narrative

Abstract

This article stems from a story of arts education advocacy in the midst of a bureaucracy that misunderstood the purpose of art education at the launch of a new elementary school. Contemporary visual arts education practices overlap a unique period of change in neighboring social science disciplines, a turn of the tide that involves the embrace of narrative methods to rewrite prevailing working models and paradigms of social science practice. Here at the start of the 21st century, art education continues to be practiced in the thrall of a scientific paradigm that misunderstands the greater potential of the arts in education, often imposing a ceiling ill-fitted for arts praxis, arts-based research, or arts pedagogy. The author argues that art education is also at a turn of the tide and surmises some of the unexpected outcomes when new and ex-centric stories of learning and a “pedagogy of possibility” are more thoroughly explored, allowing practitioners to fully rethink an art education practice without taxonomic ceilings and within the shelter of the unexplored labyrinth.