when the going gets weird... (this I believe)*

We live in a time when rapid progress in technology is driving the habits and understanding of successive generations further apart at the same time that it is bringing the distant corners of the Earth closer together.  As Howard Gardner points out, “We should, for sure, think globally, but we should, for equally strong reasons, act locally, nationally, and regionally” (Gardner, 2009, p 18).  This puts educators in a sticky situation, with the duty to reach students who have been born into a whole new world while that world raps loudly and deservingly at the door to the classroom.  As teachers we must develop habits of mind and methods of working that reflect a far-reaching and inclusive attitude toward culture and knowledge at the same time that we evolve pedagogy capable of keeping pace with the changing needs of our students.

I believe that we in the field of art education can lead the way into this exciting new educational landscape.  As Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown point out in their chapter ‘Knowing, Making, and Playing’, recent changes in technology and culture call for a new kind of literacy—one in which context is the locus of meaning (Thomas & Brown, 2011).  Olivia Gude’s postmodern principles describe a variety of specific techniques used by artists that provide avenues of creation, play and communication through the manipulation of an object or symbol’s conceptual framework (Gude, 2004).   The techniques she describes are not new, Gude has begun the task of recognizing and describing them, but professional art practice has arguably reflected the sensibility of contextually directed meaning for nearly a hundred years now.  Art educators have the wealth of their discipline’s past century of work to draw from as they move to meet the needs of today’s students.

With our eyes toward the past century (and, indeed, the centuries and millennia before), I believe we must work toward what T.S. Eliot once referred to as a need “to purify the dialect of the tribe.”  With advances in technology, visual culture, like written language before it, has moved from the hands of the elite to become a collective property.   But all too often the dialogue is saturated with manipulation and the residual meanings of an antiquated power structure that is fighting to squeeze whatever it can from this apparatus before the reins are pulled completely away.  As workers in the field of visual culture—as artists—our tribe is truly global.  As educators our greatest responsibility is to reveal to the students that pass through our doors the rights and responsibilities that are attendant on their own membership.  By studying visual culture and the works and methods of great artists, and by facilitating deliberate and reflective art making in the classroom, I hope I will be doing my part to empower my students and to help them become respectful and effective members of the global community.

Gardner, H. (2009). Five minds for the future. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Gude, O. (2004). Postmodern principles: In search of a 21^st century art education. Art Education, 57(1), 6-14.

Thomas, D, & Seely, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, KY: Createspace.

*Bonus rant.  I just can't stop synthesizing.  This title is the first part of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson.  The quote popped into my head as I began to write this statement at just about the same moment that I knew I needed to lead toward the T.S. Eliot quote.  The two references together help explain my transition from a student of literary to artistic discourse and the original motives behind my desire to become an art educator.  In my time as a student of the English department at MU, the term 'text' had already come to describe just about any phenomena that would bear close-reading and interpretation.  Thus, images were a suitable subject for study and reference in the papers we wrote as students of English and I quickly spread my interests to Art History and used my understandings of each discourse as a buoy for the narratives and analyses I constructed there.  But, as I wrote and wrote and wrote I began to become dissatisfied with this relatively passive approach to visual culture.  To be an informed and critical consumer of visual culture is all well and good, but it is still only consumption.  As advances in technology have moved the elements of visual design to an integral role in the production of nearly all media--written and otherwise--the time seemed ripe to broaden our understanding of Eliot's conception of literary tradition.  The word is still vital and active but it is rarely encountered or considered au naturel anymore, nor does it need be: the visual idea is now as easily transmitted as the verbal (see my discussion of this shift in THEVERYMANY blog entry).  

The idea that literacy now involves a simultaneous engagement with verbal and visual disciplines sometimes strikes me as an anachronistic novelty.  It’s as though the high-piled evidence of 20^th century culture has belatedly triggered recognition, one decade deep into the 21^st century, that cultural artifacts have undergone a dramatic remodel.  Perhaps this helps explain the muddled aspect of English/language arts pedagogy over the last quarter of the 20^th century: film (the original multi-media recording format) was already generating a tremendous library but nobody was quite sure what to do with it and certainly some film directors deliberately shifted their productive efforts from literature over to the new medium.  Pier Paolo Pasolini provides one of the most dramatic examples, describing his transition from writing to film as “an explosion of my love for reality.”  In retrospect, Pasolini looks like a secular prophet.  His statement reflects a fundamental shift in the dynamics of authorship that occurred with the advent of film: if the author’s act of recording was motivated by a particular love of or engagement with the phenomena of life, why struggle with the intermediary any longer?  A more perfect medium had been invented.

But, of course, that interpretation is a bit naïve.  There are difficulties wrapped up with the medium of film as well.  Reality is immersive; film can only capture targeted aspects of that immersion.  And in some respects, the shortcomings of film edified the functional shorthand of language, just as the shortcomings of photography fortified the expressive qualities of painting.  Regardless, the manner of knowing and understanding life had changed dramatically and irrevocably.  Now, in the medium of hypertext, the choices to be made about how best to represent one aspect of reality or another is no longer a matter of choosing the best word only, but of choosing the best format as well.  This is what is now required to “purify the dialect” and to do it we must study, experiment, and play, in the variety of formats available and we must teach our students to do it too.

Gardner suggests that it takes ten years to achieve mastery of a discipline and I’m sure that he has a mound of theory and research to back that up (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26ideas.html for a recent, interesting discussion of the shortcomings of science), so the code-switching I suggest may seem daunting, but I’m not at all convinced that a standard for mastery is justifiable or necessary.  And even if it is, when one stops to consider the rapid exponential improvements in technology that lie at the heart of our changing culture, do the time frames studied really apply anymore?  It seems unlikely.

We live in weird times and when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.  Who knows?  Maybe in the next five years art will become the discipline that leads policy and pedagogical discussion.  Stranger things have happened.

(And just one more little aside: if you’ve never read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, I strongly, strongly, oh so strongly recommend it: http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/  My quote comes from the Fourth Quartet when Eliot encounters the ghost of a poet that could be any--even his own. The Quartets are sequential, with references that build on each other, so reading the whole thing helps it make better sense than the lone segment, but it’s strong meat and you can probably pick and choose profitably too [although Joni Mitchell resigned from the task of whittling them down for a composition by Charles Mingus, saying that it was like trying to cut verses from the Bible])