What happens to art education when the national school curriculum in Israel follows a 'core subjects' policy? Allocating only two hours for all five art subjects (visual arts, music, drama, dance and cinematic arts) that remain outside the core curriculum increases the socialeconomic gap between children whose parents can fund their art education privately and children whose parents cannot afford this. This also has worrying consequences for art teachers (most of them women) deprived of job security.
Herbert Read's Education through Art (henceforth ETA) is a pioneering attempt to provide empirical evidence for the need for art in the public school system. Rooting for art education, Read applies the conclusions of the newly evolving psychological research to his thesis on education, which he holds to be a contemporary revival of Plato's educational theory. Psychological research proves, Read believes, that art is required for the healthy cognitive and emotional development of the child, thereby creating a stable and productive society. ‘Education through art’ nurtures each individual's potential, so that every professional direction one would later take would be ‘art'. Since its publication in 1943, art‐education enthusiasts seem to hold that Read was on the right track, but that ETA suffers from a lack of evidence – a mere technicality that can be amended when research advances. Contrariwise, I argue that Read's thesis is inherently problematic, rather than empirically inaccurate. Psychological research may never suffice for the justification of art education, if ‘art education’ is both substituted for ‘creativity’ and expected to produce testable – immediate and quantifiable – results. My interest is not only in Read's theory per se, but in this form of justification. To wit, the discussion examines ETA as a case study in the empirical justification of art education.
Universities and colleges around the globe struggle to find ways to improve students’ academic writing skills. With the goal of tackling students’ writing skills on an institutional level, we set out on a 6-year journey to seek ways of enhancing the teaching of academic writing on a wide selection of courses. Here we describe and analyze the challenges entailed in implementing an intervention in a teachers’ college in Israel. We found that as the implementation process evolved, a shift from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach resolved three different challenges: (a) The management challenge, which comes into play when leading any type of change; (b) The challenges specific to the academic work environment; and (c) The challenges of providing effective pedagogical tools for the implementation of the change. The one-on-one advising system, constituting the final stage of the process brings about the desirable change in broader terms. Based on the Tpack model, we offer AWpack (Academic Writing—pedagogical and content knowledge) as a strategy for implementing an institutional pedagogic change in the case of academic writing. Moreover, we show that as a working strategy within an academic institution it may facilitate other sought-after pedagogic changes.
From the perspective of art education, the worst‐case philosophical scenario is the hedonist‐subjectivist account of art. If we measure art by the pleasure we gain from it, it may seem senseless to attempt teaching the reception of art. David Hume's ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ provides an argument for the art‐education enthusiast, explaining that—even on a subjectivist account—art education crystallises our own preferences.
While I refer to a historical debate and provide a close reading of an 18th‐century essay, my goal is to offer a philosophical solution to an ongoing dilemma; I use Hume's essay to ground the justification of art education.
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