Themes of Curriculum Theory that Define the Content of Art Education
For example: Victor Lowenfeld and Franz Cizek who focused on child study and the psychological development of the child. In art, the emphasis was on , personal expression and creativity.
DBAE theorists felt that this emphasis lacked the rigor of disciplinary study and sought to define what are the disciplines of art and art education. This search continues today. Michael Day, from BYU, Barkan, Elliot Eisner, Brent Wilson and Jerome Bruner were involved in these discussions. The research that Brent Wilson did (Brent, by the way, is from Utah, and taught junior high in Utah before ending up at Penn State) did research of child art and found that it was always influenced by the surrounding culture. It was never innocent and untouched by adult or other children's ways of making images. DBAE theorists put the work of art at the center of the curriculum, not the child, and placed art criticism, art history, aesthetics and studio work as the central disciplines of the field of art education.
Critics of DBAE, including Brent Wilson, Paul Duncum, and Judith Burton (my teacher at Columbia) felt that the focus on art was too limiting, especially since museums and museum art was often esoteric, Euro-centric and exclusive. To remedy this, they proposed Visual Culture Studies as the content of art education. Visual Culture studies included popular visual culture such as comics, movies, built environments that were studied in their social cultural context using the lens of critical theory.
Meanwhile, many art teachers adhered to Modernist ideas about art making such as creativity, originality, the grand history of art, and especially the formal elements and principles of art, which were seen as universal ideas in all art. Arthur Wesley Dow and the Bauhaus are important touch stones that place the elements and principles of design at the center of art education content.
Olivia Gude, among others, criticized this approach as being anachronistic and not relevant to contemporary art practices and proposed postmodern principles for art educators including hybridity, re-contextualization, appropriation and the primacy of the social and cultural contexts of art, art-making, and children.
Others, including Nick Jaffee and Judy Burton felt that the exploration of materials, art mediums, and processes is the best way for children to find a way to express things that are important to them.
Recently, the idea of Design Thinking has become important in art education as a way to structure curriculum and learning.
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