The Arts and Education: Knowledge Generation, Pedagogy, and the Discourse of Learning

Abstract

W ithin the past 20 years, the arts have gained increasing prominence in educational discourses as well as public arenas. At the same time that traditional genres of art (e.g., music, visual art, and performance) are being taught as part of school curricula, the study of the arts in education has taken on new venues in supporting learning and teaching through technology and multimedia (Carey, 2005;Eisner, 2002; Flood, Heath, & Lapp, 2005). These new foci are especially critical in bridging the local and the global, and in linking cultures and worlds across age, time, and space that in earlier periods in history would have been virtually impossible to connect. Moreover, they portend opportunities for enhancing learning and improving pedagogy and practice (Bresler, 2001; Bresler & Ardichivili, 2002). They call attention to the ways in which these opportunities are constructed across place and culturally diverse groups, how knowledge (and what counts as knowledge) is defined and shaped within and outside of formal classrooms, and the ways in which reciprocal relationships across different settings are (re)formed and sustained. In short, they prompt us to examine critically how patterns of practice in areas outside of the arts are supported through the arts. They urge us to take up questions about the role the arts play in linking students' knowledge outside the classroom with the knowledge gained through the official curriculum and, in turn, about how such knowledge contributes to the formation of student and teacher identities.This chapter focuses on the arts within a social-cultural-contextual framework, examining their role as a (re)source in educational theory, research, and practice. Rather than highlighting individual disciplines within the field, typically referred to as "the arts," the chapter is concerned with the changing nature of the arts and what counts as the arts. 1 The chapter has a six-part structure that begins with an overview of issues that are central to redefining the relationship of the arts and education. This is followed

Investigating the Effect of Teaching Aesthetic Skills to Faculty Members on Development of Their Effective Teaching Performance1

“…They must also discover the aesthetic dimensions of teaching in higher education and effective ways to implement them. This way they will become a practical guide toward the theories of aesthetic education (Gadsden, 2008), and this will be realized only in the light of utilization of teaching methods based on the aesthetics principles and criteria by faculty members. Applying these skills in teaching and learning processes will provide a sustainable and active learning opportunity to share experiences and enjoy learning, and this way teaching and learning activities will become interesting and exciting activities for students and professors.…”

The Significance and Role of Aesthetic Education in Schooling

“…Supporters of this perspective see arts education as a way of encouraging pupils to be the co-creators of the education process and not only passive recipients of knowledge from others. These give equal weight to the artistic and human experience, to those individuals who create and those who live in an environment in which such experiences are created-the artist and audience (Gadsden, 2008). As Reimer (1998) warns, the ultimate goal of aesthetic education is introducing us to art, undergoing aesthetic experience, and not just acquiring knowledge of art.…”

Dancing onto the page: Crossing an academic borderland

“…We have heard the assumption that "artists don't write, they do" presented by those crossing the academic border from professional practice, and by those within the academy who would seek to excuse practitioners from engaging in rigorous scholarly discourse (Stout, 1999). Consolidating the walls of this threshold, further theories suggest that academic discourse in a particular discipline should adopt a particular vocabulary and reference particular theorists who have been identified as relevant to that discipline (Gadsden, 2008). This can construct a forbidding threshold, which suggests that to be a writer, a practitioner must not only learn a new language to express the ideas that they are already familiar with from practical experience, but also comfortably identify how these ideas have been previously expressed by particular theorists.…”