I'm going to begin with Eisner, because he wrote one of the greatest, truest things I ever read about education when he stated on page 3 of his book The Arts and the Creation of Mind that "Experience is central to growth because experience is the medium of education." As both a learner and a teacher, I know from my own experience in the classroom, in both roles, how much more I learn through experience and by DOING. I have also seen such a difference in my students when I am able to connect what I'm teaching them to what they already know and have experienced with their classroom teachers and/or in Music, P.E. or in their lives. In continuing my reading of Eisner, I began to find some connections to the first chapter Freedman's Teaching Visual Culture as well, particularly when he discussed communication patterns and how they provide opportunities for members of a culture to grow. These communication patterns sounded a lot like Freedman's "mediated quasi-interaction" in which the audience responds to a one way transmission of information in many ways; examples of these one way transmissions are books, films, TV, the internet, and fine art among many others. According to Freedman, classes like ours would include all three types of human interaction: face to face because we are meeting and having interaction in the same space and time, mediated because we also interact online through our blogs and class website (and not in the same time and space) and finally mediated quasi-interaction because of how we, as the audience, respond to our various readings, videos, presentations, etc. Staying with Freedman still, one of the great points I got from the first chapter in her book in the idea that "Education is a process of identity formation." This also tied back in with the Eisner reading and the importance of experience, as Freedman states that because we change as we learn, our learning also changes our subjective selves.
In Chapter 2 of the Eisner book, he broke down different forms/visions/versions of Art Education but the version that resonated the most with me, and not necessarily for good reasons, is the most well known: Discipline Based Art Education. Currently, the Elementary Art Curriculum is almost solely discipline based, and though there are positive aspects in that kind of art curriculum, not all of them make sense with all grade levels. For example, I know that cultural and historical understanding of particular types of art/art forms is important, but I don't know that there needs to be such a strong emphasis in the 2nd grade curriculum the way there is right now. A lot of focus has been placed on understanding the connection between both Native American art and culture and Egyptian art and culture, and even though my students understood the storytelling of cave paintings, I feel those topics would be a much better fit with slightly older students. I include as much visual culture in my lessons as I can, and because I teach at a S.T.E.M school I also teach a lot of integrated art, but I would really like to see more of Eisner's versions of Art Education in the actual art curriculums of our schools.
MAKING WAY FOR AWE
Moving on to Imagination First, the first practice that really caught my attention was Practice 4: Making Way for Awe. The first paragraph of this chapter says it all:
Nurture humility and the wonder that comes with it. There is nothing like knowing it all to kill the imagination. When we become expert, or think we have, we get the benefit of intellectual shortcuts and far greater processing efficiency—but we suffer the cost of closed-mindedness. Having seen it all, we stop looking. Having been there, we stop going. Having done that, we stop doing. To rekindle the imagination we would do well to rediscover the sense of awe—of wonder—that every child comes equipped with and that seems to seep out along the trip to adulthood.
The GeoDome David McConville created is most definitely awe inspiring as it takes visitors to places they never imagined they could go, flying through the constellations, and as stated, "This is not your father's planetarium." McConville created brand new experiences for people and that is something I began doing last year with my students in their S.T.E.M. art classes, through experimentation; in our case, Art Experiments. For example, my kindergartners had a great time marble painting because they didn't know what their creation would look like until they were done, and they loved that they could make a painting without using a paintbrush. A new lesson I haven't had the opportunity to try with my younger students yet (or myself!) that I'm really excited about is something I found online that involves ice, salt, liquid watercolors. I'm in awe of this image, so I can only imagine what it will be like when I (and my kiddos) actually get to try it out.
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