Dilemmas in Art Education

My months acting as a classroom observer and teaching assistant (and, as of today, an official substitute teacher! MAKING THE MONIES!!) have illustrated to me two divergent trends in art education--the one I am decidedly more familiar with and the one that my host school employs. The latter approach emphasizes technical prowess and "high-brow" artistic endeavors like naturalistic still life drawings and oil paintings of serene landscapes or architectural facades. More often than not, the drawing and painting students turn to Google Images for "inspiration," finding an interesting image and then copying it as accurately as possible on their own canvas. The freshmen in the Art I: Foundations course are taught to draw true verticals and true horizontals, perfect circles and ellipses, and the proper way to create a gray scale and a color wheel.

I want to say this explicitly: This is not a bad way to teach art.

In fact, in many ways, this approach ensures that students of art have a solid foundation on which they can rely when they strike out and attempt more daring, more creative projects in the future. Such a teaching style embraces the most commonly seen and appreciated art forms and there is no fault in an undertaking like that.

That being said, I must say that this approach is not to my personal taste. But for you to understand this sentiment, I guess I'd have to explain a bit of my own artistic background. I can't remember a time when I wasn't drawing. I remember color blocking with crayons in elementary school, "designing" dresses in my sixth grade religion class, and obsessively inventing fantasy heroes, heroines, and creatures in eighth grade Latin. In high school I continuously drew human figures--faces and torsos, mainly; I avoided hands and feet at all costs. Occasionally I used preexisting art or images for my source material, especially in detailing human figures, but most of what I drew sprang from my deeply overactive imagination and my uncanny ability to recall visual minutiae from memory.

It should also be noted that I have a history of disliking formal art instruction. In school, art teachers would occasionally take a pencil and draw on student work to illustrate a point. If this happened to my work, I would be furious for the rest of the day. Also, I refused to take a technical drawing class until I was 19 years old and craving a creative outlet. The use of a "right" and "wrong" judgment system in art drives me crazy. So it shouldn't surprise you that I vastly prefer a creative, self-expressive approach to art.

This approach is sadly lacking here in my class placements.

And I feel like the students would appreciate more creative projects too. They seem disheartened by the technicality of their assignments and they continuously look for the easiest, quickest way to complete the projects and move on to the next thing. I don't think they're making work that they're proud of or that they connect to, which I, as a teaching assistant, find disheartening. All around, it's not the best creative environment.

Stay tuned for my next post--I'll be continuing this discussion by introducing two art education websites and their pedagogical theories and approaches. It'll be so FUN!


Should I leave you with some art? Yes, of course!!

Pencil Alphabets, Dalton Ghetti

This man will blow your mind with his pencil graphite sculptures! See more of Dalton Ghetti's art here.