Arts Education as Tacky Craft Activities

Despite valiant efforts by arts education advocates over the last several decades, and real gains in arts education policy and practice, the current reality is that the visual arts education that most American children receive in schools consists primarily of tacky craft activities presented to them by classroom teachers. I actually have a great fondness for many of these activities, but that has more to do with lingering nostalgia for childhood than it does with aesthetic education. Most classroom teachers simply do not have sufficient access to their school’s visual arts teacher (if there is one) or to visiting teaching artist partners (if there are any). Knowing that their kids love and need art, they fake it as best they can. It’s a good sign that most classroom teachers understand that access to the arts is essential to their students’ development, but hardworking teachers across the country find themselves grossly underprepared to address this crucial need. What were their university pre-service programs thinking? There are a series of promising, countervailing forces at work here that are supporting classroom teachers in providing genuine access to the arts: the arts education partnership movement, the arts integration movement, the aesthetic education movement, models (such as has emerged in some middle schools) for co-planning between arts specialists and classroom teachers, etc. The widespread commitment to technology programs is also increasing engagement with the arts through programs in video, audio, graphic arts, website design, etc. Nonetheless, most classroom teachers have very few arts arrows in their educational quiver, and fall back on a set of materials and activities that I, in a ruthless and dictatorial mood, would love to see BANNED FROM SCHOOLS: NO MORE TEEPEES: Native American cultures have an almost endless range of historical and contemporary incarnations. I would be very happy to never again see this incredibly rich and complex set of histories reduced to brown construction paper circles, slit and shaped into cones supposedly representing Indian villages. NO MORE AFRICAN MASKS: Most schools I visit have some student-made “African Masks” on display. Many schools have different “African Mask” activities every year, each one thoroughly disconnected from any other “African Mask” activity in any other grade. Of course, this is a fantasy version of Africa that completely dismisses the particularities of the actual cultures on the African continent, the meanings and uses of masks in those cultures, and contemporary and historical African cultural expressions beyond mask making. NO MORE SEURAT: Even while writing in a “ruthless and dictatorial mood”, I feel a little mean attacking the beloved and widely implemented assignment of duplicating a Seurat painting with Q-tips and watercolors, but I’ve always been mystified by the number of teachers who ask whole classes to copy a well-known painting from a well-known museum collection (usually Seurat, Van Gogh, or Picasso). The primary consideration seems to be the painting’s famousness- an exercise in narrow cultural literacy à la Allan Bloom. Biographical curiosities about the painter are often included in the lesson, but investigation into what made the painting great (or at least famous) in the first place, what was the history and context of the artist’s choices, what were the studies and sketches and failures that led up to the painting, are often left out of the picture. Technically skilled students shine. Technically challenged students feel like dopes. I would love to see more students applying the concepts underpinning these classic paintings in new original works of their own, but I just don’t see the value in whole classes copying a famous work. And Georges Seurat did not use Q-tips OR watercolors. His entire experiment was about the optical effect of fully saturated oil painting broken up into the pixels of his day. NO MORE COTTON BALLS: Too many hallway displays have depended on bunnies created by pasting cotton balls onto construction paper. Enough already. Fabrics and fibers are extraordinary art materials, and students need to explore multi-media collage and the dynamic between two dimensional and three dimensional composition, but an endless parade of Elmer’s glue and cotton balls doesn’t cut it in my book. NO MORE POPSICLE STICKS: I know of very few adult artists who use Popsicle sticks in their professional work, and those tend to be a very few very eccentric outsider artists and folk artists. Let’s give kids some real materials. NO MORE PREFAB BULLETIN BOARD BORDERS: Teacher stores sell very attractive prefabricated borders for bulletin boards. They look good. However, after the 3rd or 4th bulletin board with the same border, the aesthetic returns diminish- rapidly. Student-created borders are an opportunity for students to take responsibility for the public presentation of their work. They are called “Public Schools” after all. Students need to participate in and make aesthetic decisions about the look of displays that make their work public. NO MORE PHOTOCOPIED COLORING BOOK PAGES: I hope to never again see hallways with row upon row of identical outlines of Martin Luther King, or of Christopher Columbus’ ship, or of spring umbrellas, or of turkeys or of bunnies colored in with crayons. Never again in my life. This “art activity” is incredibly persistent, even in schools with sophisticated and varied arts programming. Bottom line: individual classroom teachers, even in the best arts infused schools, don’t have enough options and scaffolding in the arts, and I will see those same rows of MLK’s and ships and umbrellas and turkeys and bunnies in almost every excellent school I visit this very afternoon. Now, if students and teachers used photocopying the way practicing artists use photocopying: enlarging, reducing, copying copies until the image degrades in unexpected ways, and/or students used clip art images to develop their own original images, like James Rosenquist or Henry Darger, something really interesting might emerge. NO MORE CONSTRUCTION PAPER: I’m going out on a limb here. Construction paper is beautiful, and is strong enough to actually construct things (hence the name?) It’s just that paper, in all its varieties, is an amazing medium that is way under-explored, and the reliance on construction paper short-circuits this exploration. Maybe a temporary “moratorium” on construction paper? NO MORE “PAPER PLATE” ART: No big theoretical take here. I just think they’re ugly.