Nov 20th Session 5B

Presentations 1 & 2: The Story of Vizcult: The Feeding and Care of a Crazy Idea, Kerry Freedman & Laurie Hicks

OBJECTIVES OR PURPOSES:

The purpose of this presentation is to tell the story of Vizcult, a gathering of art education scholars interested in concepts, skills, and forms of visual culture and the role they play with regard to art education theory and practice.  Starting in 2001, and continuing for over a decade, Vizcult came out of a need for direct and engaged conversation based on past and emerging scholarship as well as the quest for change in the field based on this scholarship. This took place in a gathering of scholars interested in a broad and inclusive understanding of visual culture and its relationship to the interests and everyday lived experiences of teachers and students. The group was formed as Freedman’s book, Teaching Visual Culture (2003) was going to press.

Vizcult started over coffee in NYC and took its first step around a kitchen table outside Chicago. As a gathering of art educators representing diverse universities from around the US and Canada, the group met annually for over a decade considering and debating issues related to visual culture and its role in art education.  Many of these conversations found their way into presentations and publications becoming part of the emerging discourse on visual and material culture as a critical foundation for the development of art education theory and practice.

This presentation is based on oral history methods involving interviews of Vizcult members and deep reflection on related personal experience by Freedman and Hicks (who are submitting this proposal and who were the original organizers of Vizcult). “Oral history interviews seek an in-depth account of personal experience and reflections, with sufficient time allowed for the narrators to give their story the fullness they desire. The content of oral history interviews is grounded in reflections on the past as opposed to commentary on purely contemporary events” (Oral History Association, 2009)

The reporting of first-hand experience by Freedman and Hicks will allow reflection on the origins of the group, its purpose, development, evolution and contributions to art education.  The interviews of members of the Vizcult group will also provide evidence for the presentation.

Meeting over the course of two days the Vizcult group, originally consisting of 13 scholars, discussed how issues of visual culture could be understood and applied to the structure and content of art education. Out of this discussion came a set of concepts and goals for considering visual culture within the context of art education. The National Art Education Association published the resulting document, Art Education and Visual Culture, in 2002. The group, in various forms, continued to meet each year until 2012, exploring diverse and evolving concerns associated with visual culture.  The group continued to grow, doubling in membership each year for several years, until it began to function like conference reaching over 350 participants.  At that point, the original members decided to go back to a smaller group to better facilitate discussion.  

Early on, the group established two criteria for successful implementation of the incorporation of visual culture forms, concepts, and skills into art education.  First, NAEA presentations would become infused with discussions of visual culture, not necessarily revealed through the use of the phrase per se, but rather by revealing the inclusions of visual/material culture forms, concepts, and skills. Second, all of the major teacher education programs would have visual culture components and/or perspectives.  

This presentation will provide insight into the nature of this particular group and what came from its formation and efforts.  However, it also reveals ways that reform can emerge in art education through grassroots community-building in high education.  It demonstrates the importance of research, theory, and leadership in higher education and how that leadership supports innovative practice in the field.  The presentation will include images and stories from the meetings, as well as scholarly analysis.

Presentation 3: Visualizing Art Education in the 21st Century: Mapping the Themes of Art Educators through the NAEA Convention, Circa 2000-2015, Juan Carlos Castro & Clayton Funk

In this paper we present a critical analysis of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) annual conference programs, from 2000-2015, to provide an understanding of the themes and discourse that art educators, from K-12 to Higher Education, are engaged with in the 21st century. The NAEA convention catalog represents a broad survey of the field, including presentations by art educators from classrooms, museums, higher education and other educational contexts. The NAEA journals Art Education and Studies in Art Education represent ideas and themes in the field. Likewise, historical works (e.g., Efland, 1990; Stankiewicz, 2001) provide significant insights into the intellectual and thematic development in the field. We propose a third stream of historical data to both triangulate established patterns and trace the contours of absent or marginal discourses in our field.

Data visualizations can assist in making visible certain patterns of the cultural mind and, like a drawing of negative space, traces the contours of absence, or what is excluded or otherwise absent. This is a strategic framework adapted from critical cartography in that we attend to both what is present and absent (Crampton & Krygier, 2003). When a data set is visualized, for example, relationships in size reveal proportions of data. With size and scale in visual form, viewers can quickly ascertain what data has more prominence in relationship to other data, which would lead to other, say, social or political connotations that would not be revealed in verbal or tabular form (Few, 2009; Tufte, 1997).

In our research we have compiled the titles and short descriptions of every conference presentation at the NAEA convention from 2000-2015. From our initial comparative analysis, using data visualizations of conference presentations in divisions devoted to practice and theory we have found that the division between those exploring theory (e.g. Higher Education, Caucus for Social Theory in Art Education, Research, etc...) and practice (Curriculum and Instruction, Elementary, Middle, Secondary, etc...) in presentations is not as wide a gap as commonly perceived. We, as a field, and across organizational divisions, are most concerned with 1) the teaching of art, 2) student learning in art, and 3) art education in schools. Regardless of the trends that are perceived from decade to decade these are the persistent concerns of our field. Looking to the future we see the following trends of emerging importance from the divisions of practitioners 1) Advanced Placement (the 2D, 3D, Art History, and Drawing high school college Placement exams) and 2) studio practice. In both practitioner and theoretician populated divisions there is lately a growing interest in the role, function, and activity of community based art education. Guided by considerations of earlier changing trends, we seek to locate new and emerging forms of art education research and practice and, thusly, a vision of future possibilities.