Art is more than creative expression, which has been the dominant theme of art education for much of the twentieth century. Expression is important, but researchers are also finding connections between learning in the visual arts and the acquisition of knowledge and skills in other areas. According to a 1993 Arts Education Partnership Working Group study, the benefits of a strong art program include intensified student motivation to learn, better school attendance, increased graduation rates, improved multicultural understanding, and the development of higher-order thinking skills, creativity, and problem-solving abilities.
Curriculum Developments
Art education has its roots in drawing, which, with reading, writing, singing, and playing an instrument comprised the basic elementary school curriculum in the seventeenth century. Drawing continued to be a basic component of the core curriculum throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when educators saw drawing as important in teaching handwork, nature study, geography, and other subjects. Art education later expanded to include painting, design, graphic arts, and the "plastic arts" (e.g., sculpture and ceramics), although art continued to be seen primarily as utilitarian.
In the twentieth century, with the advent of modernism, art education in the United States edged away from a utilitarian philosophy to one of creative expression, or art-making for personal development. Art continued to be valued, although less often as a core subject, during the early decades of the century and then declined in importance with the advent of World War II. In the postwar period, particularly after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, core-subject emphasis shifted dramatically to mathematics and science. Art education reached a low point in the 1970s, when a shrinking school-age population (the graduating baby boomer generation) and a serious national energy crisis brought about many school closings and program cuts. Art programs were among the first to be reduced or eliminated.
But the 1970s also ushered in a period of intense work by art educators to revive interest in art education. At the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, for example, work began on the implementation of a transformational theory: discipline-based art education (DBAE). This theory proposed that art making (or "studio art")–the thrust of creative expression–needed to be extended and informed by attention to the complementary disciplines of art history, aesthetics, and art criticism, even when teaching the youngest pupils. DBAE theory, most observers now agree, has been instrumental in reinvigorating art education and gaining a place for art in school reform.
Interest in the general quality of U.S. education rose during the 1980s, especially after the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The commission's report spoke of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in K–12 schools and ushered in ongoing school reform efforts at all levels. National attention reached a peak in 1994 with the passage of the federal Goals 2000: Educate America Act. This act led to the formation of goal-setting groups, among them the National Coalition for Education in the Arts, which took up the task of ensuring that the arts, writ large, would assume their rightful place within the basic curriculum. This coalition included, among others, the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, the National Art Education Association, the Music Educators National Conference, and the National Dance Association. It defined arts education broadly as "the process of teaching and learning how to create and produce the visual and performing arts and how to understand and evaluate art forms created by others" (Arts Education Partnership Working Group, p. 5).
The National Art Education Association took a central role in defining the expectations for art education, which were written into the national standards: Students should understand and apply art media and processes; use visual arts structures and functions; choose and evaluate a range of subject matter, symbols, and ideas; understand art in relation to history and cultures; reflect upon and assess the merits of their own work and that of others; and make connections between art and other disciplines.
This view of art education coalesced with other theories, which became generally accepted during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Three are noteworthy. First, constructivism supplanted behaviorism as a guiding instructional theory, drawing on work by educators and researchers, such as Jerome Bruner (1960), Jean Piaget (1974), and Lev S. Vygotsky (1978). Constructivism posits that learners play a crucial role in "constructing" their own knowledge. Where behaviorism tends to see the teacher as a dispenser of knowledge, constructivism views the teacher as a facilitator who helps students acquire understandings and put them to individual use.
Second, postmodernism became the successor to modernism. First identified in architecture by Charles Jencks (1977), the unifying feature of postmodern theory is the absence of cultural dominance. In art education this led to greater emphasis on multiculturalism and expansion of the traditional canon.
Third, the multiple intelligences theory, developed by Howard Gardner (1983), points out that children think and learn based on individual intellectual strengths. Gardner initially identified seven intelligences–musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal–and later added others. Art education, particularly as viewed through the lens of DBAE theory, taps intelligences that are not typically used in other core subjects.
By implementing arts curricula based on these theories, many arts educators believe that "students can arrive at their own knowledge, beliefs, and values for making personal and artistic decisions. In other terms, they can arrive at a broad-based, well-grounded understanding of nature, value, and meaning of arts as a part of their own humanity" (Consortium of National Arts Education Associations, pp. 18–19).
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