School Art in an Era of Accountability and Compliance: New Art Teachers and the Complex Relations of Public Schools

Abstract

Concern regarding the static nature of school art curricula has caused some higher educators to question what happens when graduates of art education programs transition from being preservice teachers associated with the university to in-service teachers working in schools. Why is it that graduates do not seem to be fulfilling their roles as the change-makers many hope they will be? In this article, I offer insights gleaned through work with new, in-service art teachers in a qualitative research study to suggest that school art practices as implemented by beginning art teachers are shaped in part by forces of accountability and compliance that are pervasive in current school contexts. My analysis attempts to shift the focus of concern from the individual actions of beginning art teachers to the regulatory nature of the audit culture in public schools and its productive effects with regard to school art.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study originally was approved by the Institutional Review Board of The Pennsylvania State University for my dissertation. I extend my thanks to my dissertation committee, particularly my advisor, Christine Thompson, for their invaluable advice. I also thank the participants for their commitment to the study and the reviewers whose feedback challenged me in critical ways.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities [2015 Summer Graduate Residency] at Penn State.

Notes

¹ Throughout this article, I have chosen to use the terms “new” or “beginning” art teacher rather than the term “novice,” in an attempt to avoid making a judgment about the skill or developmental level of my participants. Some might describe a novice as “young, inexperienced, and not yet able to master working techniques and approaches” (Buchtová et al., 2015, p. 712), or others might describe novices as belonging to a specific stage of teacher development in which they are focused mainly inward on developing personal images of themselves as teachers (Kagan, 1992). However, descriptions such as these can limit the ways new teachers are understood, supported, or valued; and stage-based accounts of teacher development have come under criticism (Levin, Hammer, & Coffey, 2009).

² The websites for both the state department of education and the charter school are not cited in order to avoid jeopardizing the masked identities of participants by disclosing their location.

³ “Audit culture” is a phrase used to describe cultural contexts in which technologies of audit and accountability prevail. As defined by anthropologists Shore and Wright (2000), “audit is essentially a relationship of power between scrutinizer and observed” (p. 59). Although previously associated with the financial sector, these technologies have transferred into public domains such as education. In these new contexts, audit technologies become “instruments for new forms of governance and power.… In short, they are agents for the creation of new kinds of subjectivity: self-managing individuals who render themselves auditable” (Shore & Wright, 2000, p. 57).

⁴ I refer here to Foucault’s (1977/1995) analysis of human subjectivity concerning Bentham’s panopticon in the book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault asserted that the major effect of the [prison as] panopticon was “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (p. 201).

⁵ All participant names used in this article are pseudonyms.

⁶ Website not listed in order to avoid disclosing location of participants.

⁷ In December 2015, half-way through this study, President Barack Obama signed a reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA gave states more responsibility for designing their accountability systems and opened up new possibilities for defining accountability beyond the eliminated Adequate Yearly Progress system (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016). However, changes in school-based accountability efforts reflecting ESSA were not yet in place at the time of this study.

⁸ Masuda (2010) contends that teachers be viewed as Professionals, a term she intentionally capitalizes to “indicate an opposing representation of a teacher as mere technician” (p. 468). Teachers as Professionals are knowledgeable active agents who seek opportunities to develop and refine their craft, who exercise professional judgment that draws on their knowledge of children and learning, and who are considered valuable resources by peers (Masuda, 2010, p. 468).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities [2015 Summer Graduate Residency].