Revealing and Creating Shapes of the Field

Why is historical research significant to art education? Four decades ago, Mary Erickson (1977) urged fellow art educators to learn historical research methods in order to exploit the discipline of history “in the service of art education” (p. 22). Two years later, she described four justifiable uses for history: (1) to induct new art educators into the field; (2) to examine ambiguous terminology to eliminate confusion; (3) to “serve as a basis for formulating worthwhile questions to ask about our present and our future” (Erickson, 1979, p. 5); and (4) to rid ourselves of ghosts from the past, a purpose that might have motivated Tavin’s (2005) analysis of specters haunting approaches to popular (visual) culture.

Canadian art educator Don Soucy (1985) argued “art education historiography is beginning to mature” (p. 15), which Karen Hamblen (1988) interpreted as a call for conscious awareness of history and a self-reflexive stance as prerequisites to professional maturity for the field.¹ Historiography is an ambiguous term, sometimes referring to the history of history writing: “what at one time or another historians have written about the past” (Hexter, 1967, p. 3). On the other hand, many art educators use the term to refer to written history, or “the discipline of history writing” (Soucy, 2013, p. 20). The first version, Historiography-A, examines historical scholarship, how histories are written, methods historical researchers use, and how historians influence each other over time to produce bodies of work accepted as meaningful. Historiography-B, writing history, produces narratives that can be studied by those who do Historiography-A. Hamblen (1988) declared: “Written histories both reveal shapes of consciousness and create them” (p. 79).

What might shapes of consciousness look like in art education? Hamblen (1988) applied her insight to identify patterns of development in the field, analyzing articles published in Art Education and Studies in Art Education from the journals’ origins in the late 1950s into the mid-1980s. Building on Soucy’s (1985) five categories of historical writing in art education, “convenient pigeonholes” (p. 11) for sorting and analyzing written histories, Hamblen (1988) proposed six hierarchical categories indicating the field’s maturity. Combining their work allows us to make finer distinctions.²

Overviews attempting to construct basic historical frameworks constitute Hamblen’s first and least sophisticated category. Soucy’s first category was the somewhat more sophisticated “narrowly focused thesis” (p. 11). Authors who focus arguments more clearly have the potential to contribute significant chapters to the larger history of the field when others apply that thesis to different researches.

Soucy and Hamblen agree on what comes next: biographical research. While history is more than biography, historical studies focused on the lives and ideas of individuals might describe facts or interpret a broader issue. Soucy noted the need to examine lesser-known art educators and investigate leaders, asking new questions leading to revisionist interpretations and more comprehensive understandings. Hamblen split Soucy’s biographical category into two: Person-A and Person-B. Person-A biographies describe role models; Person-B histories use biographical research, but interpret lives and works in relation to a theme or thesis, demonstrating greater research sophistication in their narrower focus.

Soucy labeled his third category “the paradigm” (p. 13); certain subjects of biographical research or sites of professional development might be interpreted as exemplifying the larger profession. Hamblen’s parallel category is program histories, or institutional case studies. Soucy located critical analyses of books or articles as a subset within the paradigm; Hamblen referred to these as reviews. When authors position examples of earlier professional literature in social and historical contexts, their essays move away from simple literature reviews and closer toward doing history.

Soucy’s last category is the rarest. Accounts of theories, institutions, or how a leading art educator taught are more common than descriptions of “actual classroom situations” (p. 15). In contrast, Hamblen (1988) positioned metahistories as her final, most sophisticated category, which included critical examinations of research processes, assumptions, and premises that signal the self-conscious, reflexive historical research that marks a mature field. Metahistories might be examples of Historiography-A. The spread between Soucy’s desire for historical writing that describes, interprets, and explains actual classroom practice, and Hamblen’s notion of metahistories reflects differences between art educators who do archival research and those who write more speculatively on Historiography-B.

For Hamblen, decreasing numbers of historical overviews and increasing publication of Person-B biographies and Metahistories mark growing maturity in the field. She and Soucy agreed that sound historical narratives are more than strings of dates, events, people, and places. More sophisticated accounts situate past particulars into broader cultural, sociopolitical, and economic contexts. Authors move beyond simple descriptions or attempts to construct causal chains by bringing theoretical frameworks to bear in their interpretations and re-interpretations. Hamblen and Soucy further agreed that Historiography-A is more than a literature review. They offer us not a paradigm for historical research, but an apparent paradox: Sound histories begin with more narrowly focused theses, then interpret evidence in relation to broader contexts.

Christine Marmé Thompson’s 2015 Studies in Art Education Invited Lecture, “Listening for Stories: Childhood Studies and Art Education,” opens this issue as both a historical document and a call for critical examination of childish ghosts in the art education machine. Thompson argues art education research and teaching should be informed by Childhood Studies, a field that investigates children as active agents in a world of relationships and embraces previously unrepresented voices. Social constructions of childhood shape adult interpretations of what children do; the historical child has been ignored. Thompson asks art educators to acknowledge children’s competencies and listen.

In “Education, Administration, and Class Struggle at the Museum of Modern Art, 1937-1969,” Jean A. Graves explains that although education programs at MoMA appeared successful with a designated facility, national influence, and exhibits that traveled internationally, these programs ended about the time Rene D’Harnoncourt stepped down as Director at the end of the 1960s. Victor D’Amico (1904-1987) was forced to retire; most other staff were forced out, their spaces reassigned to other departments. Graves’s case study, based on archival research, is a clearly focused revisionist history, informed by labor history, theories of workplace class conflict, and sociologies of culture and art. She argues against previous interpretations that D’Amico’s education department was elitist, outdated, and too costly; these rationales hid the belief among MoMA administrators that education was “nonessential and disposable” (p. 16).

The co-authors of “A History of Community Art Education at Concordia University: Educating the Artist-Teacher Through Practice and Collaboration” have also written an institutional history. Kathleen Vaughan, Michel Lévesque, Linda Szabad-Smyth, Dustin Garnet, Sebastien Fitch, and Anita Sinner examine a half-century of undergraduate teaching for community arts programming at Concordia University in Montreal. Community-based art education encompasses formal and informal art education; the community is both resource and partner in creating art education experiences. Learners are approached through a principle of equality. The authors suggest their descriptive study might offer an example for other institutional histories of art education in higher education.

In “Historying the Past: New Histories in Art Education,” Dustin Garnet argues that historians of art education have adapted to changes in written histories, notably postmodern awareness that objectivity is a problematic concept. He writes: “As paradigms have shifted, so too have the way histories are written” (p. 38). Reviewing three decades of art educators’ writings on historical research, Garnet declares historical writing has become more inclusive and artful. Balancing metahistory with a case study, Garnet explains how his recent dissertation on the art department at Toronto’s Central Technical School exemplifies new history and historying.

Like Jean A. Graves in the second article, Chris Grodoski, Libba Willcox, and Samantha Goss explore structures; in their case, structures of networks identified during the first decade of Studies in Art Education. They investigate how structural relationships might have affected research in the field. Using network theory and data visualization techniques in their metahistory, “Visualizing Historic Networks in Studies in Art Education,” the authors analyze networks revealed by reference lists. They suggest analyses such as theirs might inform literature reviews and improve access to literature in the field.

Juuso Tervo critically examines art educators’ use of the concept paradigm in “Always the New: Paradigms and the Inherent Futurity of Art Education Historiography.” In his metahistory, Tervo claims Kuhn’s (1962/1970) argument for scientific change through paradigm shifts continues in histories of art education, although the concept has lost relevance to past and present art teaching practice—perhaps because art education is not a science. Tervo analyzes how several art educators used the concept in developmental approaches to Historiography-B (i.e., stories with sequential continuity). He argues that Kuhn’s sense of time might be replaced by Walter Benjamin’s (1955/2007) notion that history is not told like a string of rosary beads, but grasped as a whole, like a constellation.

Benefits of studying the past transcend nostalgia, tourist visits to the foreign country that is the past, to paraphrase American historian and geographer David Lowenthal (1985). An interpreted past enables us to make sense of the present, helps mold identity, and enriches understandings of the field.

Notes

¹ The last historically themed issue of Studies in Art Education was volume 26(2), Winter 1985, when Jean C. Rush was Senior Editor. Thirty years later, the National Art Education Association is celebrating its 70th anniversary (1947–2017). Two recent conferences signify reawakened interest in finding meaning in written narratives of art education’s past: (1) Brushes with History: Imagination and Innovation in Art Education History, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, November 19–22, 2015; and (2) The Penn State Seminar in Art Education @50: Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities, the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, April 1–3, 2016. Some papers given at the Brushes with History Conference will be published in a special issue of Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 5(2), guest edited by Paul Bolin and Ami Kantawala; others in their forthcoming book, Revitalizing History: Recognizing the Struggles, Lives, and Achievements of African American and Women Art Educators. Stankiewicz’s Developing Visual Arts Education in the United States: Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Normalization of Creativity was published by Palgrave Macmillan in June 2016, as part of their Arts in Higher Education series, edited by Nancy Kindelan.

² In the following five paragraphs all references are to Hamblen (1988) and Soucy (1985) unless otherwise indicated.