Top 3 Readings: Spring 2017

Efland, A. (1990, December). "Change in the conception of art teaching," Australian Art Education, 14, 2, 1-11.

Arthur Efland writes this article on conceptions of teaching art for the Australian Art Education magazine. In this article, Efland looks at four different art education theories and the perceptions of them. He starts by orienting the reader to the four theories and their primary theorists. Starting with Walter Smith and his imitation of nature or mimetic theory, Efland moves chronologically through Arthur Dow and formalism, Harold Rugg and Ann Shumaker and their creative self-expressionism, and ends with Melvin Haggerty and pragmatic theory. Using these historical theories, Efland relates them to four models of art teaching; mimetic, pragmatic, expressive, and formalist. He contends that each of them coincides with differing social views. After exploring them each in depth, Efland looks to use them to explain postmodernist ideas and the plurality of the art of today.

Walker, S. (2005). Chapter 2. “Making it Count: Unit Foundations”

Sydney Walker and Marilyn Stewart co-wrote this chapter for the book Re-thinking Curriculum. In it, Walker and Stewart look at enduring ideas and how they can serve as a foundation to a quality art education curriculum. They support enduring ideas as a way of taking education to the students and relating it to meaningful things. They state that teaching in this way makes the content “meaningful to students beyond the bounds of school subjects and is advanced by a focus on "real life" issues.” They refer to Efland and others about past and current theories in art education. While talking about different theories, Walker and Stewart advocate for the use of more social reconstructivist work. They quote Walker and Parson saying, that it provides "more of an opportunity to capitalize on exactly what makes the arts powerful and significant, their ability to convey the complexity and ambiguity of human values, beliefs, interpretations about life." Walker and Stewart go on to write about how enduring ideas can be incorporated in educational curriculum, giving direction on how to incorporate enduring ideas and essential questions into unit and lesson planning.

Wiggins (1998) “Promoting Student Understanding” Chapter 4, Educative Assessment, Assessment in Art Education, Chapters 1

“Authentic tasks and better feedback will improve learning only if we assess all that we value instead of what is merely easy to test.” Dr. Grant Wiggins writes this chapter, Promoting Student Understanding for his book Educative Assessment. He pushes for assessing what we value and talks about the failings in current assessment practices. He looks at the problems of confusing knowing and understanding. In this he talks about how a student can know a fact (which can result in a correct answer on a test) but they can simultaneously not understand the fact (which can result in a failing to apply the knowledge). Understanding is not just knowledge. Understanding is a complex beast that moves, wiggles, and is hard to grasp sometimes. It shows itself in many different ways but always challenges the one who wishes to wrestle with it. Wiggins writes of five overlapping aspects of understanding; Sophisticated explanation and interpretation, Contextual performance know-how and sensitivity, Perspective, Empathy, and Self-knowledge. He uses these five aspects to talk about how “Understanding is not just about coverage of knowledge… but about uncoverage - being introduced to new ideas and being asked to think more deeply and more carefully about facts, ideas, experiences, and theories previously encountered and learned.” If knowledge is about standing and looking at where you are, understanding involves asking more questions and moving forward.

Bonus Reading: Towles, Amor. A Gentlemen in Moscow