Soft Boundaries: Re-Visioning the Arts and Aesthetics in American Education

Abstract

Soft Boundaries: Re-visioning Arts and Aesthetics in American Education Detels, C. (1999). Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. 264 pages. ISBN 0-89789-666-1. Hardback $57.95. Reviewed by Barbara McKean, University of Arizona While standards movement may have reached its political apex, real work of curriculum and instruction remains. District curriculum directors and teachers face tough work of incorporating identified standards and benchmarks in various subject areas into daily curriculum of our schools. Arts educators' success in securing a place in standards for public school curriculum has resulted in careful descriptions of what a comprehensive, K-12 arts curriculum might actually look like. However, while call for standards and increased accountability for teachers and students seems at times deafening, other voices from academy are raising critical questions about nature of education, realities of standards-based reform of curriculum, and kinds of understandings students will need to participate in global and technological societies of 21st century. These questions have led many to consider ways to bring what is taught in our schools more in harmony with realities of world outside of school. In Soft Boundaries: Re-visioning Arts and Aesthetics in American Education, Claire Detels tackles such questions and offers a new paradigm for thinking about in general and arts in particular. At heart of Detels's book is concept of interdisciplinarity, a term which covers a range of experiences from the simple communication of ideas to mutual integration of organizing concepts, methodology, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data and organization of research and in a fairly large field (Klein, 1990, p. 63). While by no means new to education, interdisciplinary curriculum continues to push on edges of deeply entrenched paradigm of disciplinary organization of public school curriculum. These disciplinary constitute what Detels calls hard boundaries of academic specialization that have left humanities-and, in particular, arts-on margins of curriculum. Ironically, we love and need arts because they go beyond simple words and clear definitions in their ability to communicate deeper meanings and values. Yet, for that very reason, arts inevitably suffer under a hard-boundaried paradigm of education. (p. 14) What in arts offers, Detels argues, is a way to move across these to prepare students to grapple with essential human questions concerning who we are, where our place is in larger culture, and what our opportunities are for expanding our ways of communicating and developing our imagination, perceptions and judgments about world in which we live. Detels begins her book with a short history of arts and aesthetics placed within historical development of single disciplinary curriculum in American education. She argues that arts have participated in this curriculum by organizing themselves single disciplines, stressing courses of individual study in music, visual art, dance and drama, to extent that opportunities for learning about arts and aesthetics in an interdisciplinary, integrative manner have been lost. These individual programs of study force a reliance on disciplinary specialist positions that are at a high premium in our nation's schools. Single course requirements in arts in our high schools and colleges perpetuate isolated experiences in single arts disciplines. Furthermore, single disciplinary position, she states, operates as a classic vicious cycle in which inadequate for one generation leads to more inadequate for next (p. 28). What is needed is what Detels calls soft boundaries a new paradigm for revisioning position and power of arts and aesthetics in American education (p. …