Revealing and Creating Shapes of the Field

Studying in the Dark: Notes on Poetic Historiography for Art Education

“…Not only a question of form, poetic historiography ought to be understood as writing where the time and narrative of history are at stake--writing where memory and learning are both suspended from a linear narrative of origins and ends, thus asking us to rethink the very transmissibility of the histories we write. The end that a poetic historiography qua a study of the past resists is narrative coherence, an idea that narratives--historical or not--always give a coherent and clearly communicable form to the experience they represent (Hyvärinen, Hydén, Saarenheimo, & Tamboukou, 2010 Stankiewicz's (2017) question "Why is historical research significant to art education?" (p. 3).…”

“…It is here where Stankiewicz's (2017) question concerning the timely significance of historical research in art education and the ethics of memory that Clift (2014) critiques can be grasped in educational terms. A pedagogy of memory that sees the past as an absent object of learning that the present lacks establishes what Jacques Rancière (1991) calls an explicative order of education: the past needs to be absent in order for it to become a source of knowledge that historians can first conjure in the present and then explain to those who are trapped in its darkness.…”