My Desire for Art Education

Abstract

Jerri [an art student]: Are you living your dreams Mr. Jellineck?Mr. Jellineck [the art teacher]: Well, I'm an artist.Jerri: Well, aren't you a teacher?Mr. Jellineck:Yes, Jerri, but I get the best of both worlds. I get to teach you youngsters how to create and I get to spend my summers thinking about wanting to paint.Jerri: Wow, must be nice to hope for the thing you wish to want.Many art educators may read this quote and hesitantly laugh, imagining themselves in the same position of the art teacher, commiserating with his lackof time to create while fulfilling his duties of teaching art. This short scene from an episode of the former cable TV series Strangers with Candy (Colbert, Dinello, Sedaris, & Lauer, January 31 , 2000) is, however, about more than just an interaction between a high school student and her art teacher or the teacher's perceived lack of time to create personal artwork. It is a glimpse of what is inherently missing from the art education literature about teaching future teachers of art - of addressing nascent teachers' personal, pedagogical, and professional desires. In the parodie scenario, the art teacher's desire is toward his own artmaking, but when I speak of teachers' desires, lam not limiting this to desires of balancing one's teacher and artist identities and wishing to paint more often. Instead, I am considering teachers' desi res for power and recognition, their desires to love and be loved, and their desires to save and be saved - all in addition to their desires about their own identities, and all within the context of their art classrooms and populations of art students (Hetrick, 2010a).Are we so afraid to address the subject of future teachers and their desires? Do we, as a field, fear to mention those two concepts, teachers and desires, in the same sentence for what it may connote in today's society? While desire is a concept that can be considered in a more colloquial sense as sexual appetite or urge, the connection between lovers, an unsatisfied longing or craving based on lack or lust, it also can be understood in a different, productive sense, such as motivating educational forces, including the proclivity to help others, the passion to learn, or the inclination to teach and form connections with students. Often, when desire appears in educational scholarship 'It is most likely to be in relation to student-related concerns about sexual harassment... rather than a teacher's desire to teach, (McWilliam, 2004, p. 137).Perhaps the word desire is troubling for some individuals due to its socially implied and sexually explicit connotations; mention the word in the context of education, especially involving teachers and students in the classroom, and it is misconstrued as something akin to blasphemous. This is unfortunate because [d]esire is a crucial aspect of the pedagogic process (Watkins, 2008, p. 1 1 3). Desire, for me, is not necessarily defined as a sexual appetite or urge but rather considered as both a probable Lacanian desire of and lack in the Other (Stavrakakis, 2007) and also as a Deleuzoguattarian productive, transformative force that runs in a flow that is continuous and is always (Zembylas, 2007, p. 336). 1 Desire is what motivates us to teach and, interestingly enough, to return to teaching after those really bad days we have all lived through (jagodzinski, 2002; Stavrakakis, 2007). Art teacher educators should stop avoiding the term in classroom discussions, hang up reservations in addressing the topic, and bring desire - personal, professional, pedagogical - to the forefront, especially in preservice preparation programs and pedagogies.As a current art teacher educator, I have noticed that teacher education programs and their accompanying texts usually contain tips about becoming newteac hers and often address concerns of curriculum, getting to know and manage the student population, and dealing with everyday situations in the classroom (Salas, Tenorio, Walters, & Weiss, 2004; Schwebel, S. …