4: What Educational Developers Need to Know about Faculty–Artists in the Academy

Abstract

Both educational developers and faculty-artists share the same goal: significant learning. Yet effective dialogue and collaboration between the two can be undermined without the educational developer's knowledge of signature pedagogics and discipline-specific terminology in the various disciplines ofart. We examine several assumptions about artists and how these assumptions can be overcome for the benefit of educational developers, faculty-artists, and students. To this end, we provide suggestions for generating dialogue about teaching and learning with faculty-artists and for making these dialogues fruitful. o 55 TO IMPROVE THE ACADEMY The work of faculty who teach art in the academy (for example, theater and dance, fine arts, creative writing, music) is often misunderstood by nonartist educational developers. As a result, educational developers are less likely to learn about the signature pedagogies of various artistic disciplines, as defined by Shulman (2005), and are less likely to be able to deeply or broadly support faculty-artists in their teaching and scholarship. This misunderstanding is reflected in, if not influenced by, the promulgation of artist stereotypes in popular culture. In most films, for example, artists are portrayed as self-absorbed, mentally unstable, morally suspect, and highly skeptical of institutions, the academy most of all. Such stereotypes extend to the work faculty-artists do in the classroom. We might be tempted to believe such work is unplanned and undisciplined, privileging intuition over reason (and is thus immune to assessment or evaluation and so not to be taken seriously). In the film Barfly (1987), Mickey Rourke plays a poet named Henry Chinasky, based on real-life poet Charles Bukowski, who lives in squalor and spends most of his time drinking, fighting, and writing. The film Pollock (2000) depicts the painter Jackson Pollock as essentially tortured, alcoholic, and self-destructive. Amadeus (1984) portrays Mozart as a rebellious savant with wild mood swings whose dedication to his work led to exhaustion and an early death. Many other popular films about art and artists highlight or exaggerate the darker realms of the artist's psyche-to name just a few,