More Stories and Tales

There are 8 million stories in the naked city

Some ice cold and told without pity

About the mean streets and the ghetto culture

The pimps the pushers the sharks and vultures…

—Blow (1984)

A long time ago, in a land far, far away, an earlier version of me wrote an editorial for another art education journal. In that editorial, I mused about the story of art education as complex and reflective of past and current lives, occasionally written by various authors with contradictory tales to tell (Carpenter, 2005). Yet the story of art education is not singular, but rather, it is a collection of stories of people and places, of policies and politics, of ideals and institutions, of cultures and constructs, and of art and education.

People tell stories every day and in a variety of ways. They tell stories on the pages of books, during conversations at bus stops, among friends in booths at diners, across dinner tables with family, through truncated and codified text messages on smartphones, and over the telephone. Some of the stories people tell appear initially in one format and then get retold in another, as is the case with some films adapted for the screen that first appeared as novels, plays, or comic books. Stories can captivate imaginations. They can be cautionary tales or otherwise allegorical renderings of morals or ethical dilemmas in narrative form. Certain stories are so rich with messages about the human condition they invite tellers to recount them over and over again, passing them along from generation to generation. Some storytellers share accounts that revise previous assumptions, while others may have words to say, yet are without a moment in which to speak or a receptive audience, a reminder that all stories have their time and place.

Some stories only support a single narrator or one point of view at a time. Others rely on multiple perspectives woven together to produce a complex and thought-provoking story. Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa’s classic film, comes to mind—itself based on short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa—in which contrasting accounts by four different characters recount the same event as revealed through their combined subjectivities. Similarly, Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men (1983) and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001) offer narratives in which characters challenge conceptions of time, history, causality, and societal assumptions. I first learned to appreciate the payoff of attending to intertextual storytelling strategies and the often unsung perspectives of otherwise minor characters while a high school student in Mr. Frank Tufano’s English class in suburban Maryland. Mr. Tufano provided an entry into William Shakespeare’s Hamlet for my classmates and me by showing us a film adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The trick was to entice us with Stoppard’s narrative, building up the roles of the two protagonists who ducked in and out of the original text.¹

Art education is a similarly multidimensional story filled with characters and narratives that resist the acceptance of a single story, monolithic narrative, or unique perspective agreed on by all readers. It is impossible to define art education in a single account, a single example, or a single story. It cannot be done. The more accounts there are and the more accounts that are told, the more expansive and complex the discipline becomes. Of course, some who encounter narratives of art education that do not jibe with their own may instinctively push back, seek resonance with other ways of seeing and being, or simply cower, unwilling or unable to accept changing times or allow for innovative ways to tell an ever-changing narrative—doing so would mean accepting the notion that art education, like art, is not static, and therefore neither should nor can its story or storytelling be frozen in time.

Art education research is a gathering of stories and storytellers, old and new. It is a gathering of stories yet to be told, from multiple perspectives and multiple narrative subjectivities. No single author or singular way of seeing, telling, or interpreting can do what multiple voices can. What takes place in art educational spaces and experiences is made more vivid when seen in comparison with and among accounts of different research projects. That is, the conversations between and among different stories reveal the challenge of making some sense out of the complexity of art education. For some scholars, their practice is centered on the gathering of these stories in practices that include reviews of past literature or interviews as means to capture conversations that make up the social spaces of learning.

When accounts by different narrators about different experiences are placed in conversation, they often reveal new understandings and new narratives. When these accounts overlap, they can reveal collective and common experiences. When they differ, new spaces of reflection can open about practices assumed to be set, stable, or otherwise above reproach. Art education—the practice, field, modes of research, perspectives—is a story comprised of a collection of stories. Art education is a collection of stories of art education, so to speak. Storylines about institutions—physical, systemic, cultural, discursive, social—are common to the collection of stories presented in this issue, driven in varying degrees by policies and ideologies, and the ways in which they are operationalized.

Stories about new teachers can be intriguing, particularly when the plots present characters in the process of learning to adjust, adapt, cope, and reinvent themselves as members of school culture. In the opening story, Christina Hanawalt draws attention to the stories of new teachers coming to terms with school culture defined by accountability and compliance. This story reveals experiences of novice teachers as populated by inherited discourses, cultural myths of what it means to teach, and ideologies of what it means to know and learn—all of which make teaching political. This collection reveals the individual and humanistic stories that go unnoticed, unattended, and often untold when the larger narratives of accountability and audits are privileged, and how current teacher assessment paradigms work to undermine contemporary conceptions of curriculum in many art education programs.

High school students are the protagonists in an investigative account of studio-focused learning told by Mary Erickson and Laura Ramson Hales about a year-long program at a contemporary art museum. Central to the interchange is the role inquiry plays, or might play, within the experiences of these learners around their own art practices in conversation with contemporary artists and their artworks. A story in support of the sway of scaffolded art inquiry, the authors underscore the power of asking questions in the service of learning, supported by a review of literature on scaffolded learning, inquiry, and the influence of the student–teacher relationship on learning. Among the implications of their project, Erickson and Ramson Hales set up directions for future stories to be researched and told through subsequent studies.

The personal and social features of narrative are indistinguishable and inseparable in the story told by Danielle Carter. Each child in this study is portrayed as an author of individual and negotiated collective knowledge. Drawing on hermeneutic theory, Carter’s story of preschool children echoes the importance of establishing personal relevance through reading and interpreting texts in order to rework their frameworks, thereby making them meaningful to their lives (Wiklund, Lindholm, & Lindström, 2002; Wilson, 2010). Set in an art museum in Stockholm, Sweden, Carter reveals how multiple narrators contribute to a single, yet complex story, each of whom are informed by their own perspective, time, bias, language, and mode of expression; revisions of ideas that yield to new insights—all of which contribute to an approach and message redolent of the multiple perspectives of the same story told by the old men in Ernest Gaines’s novel. That is, all individuals within the group of learners offer new insights where others might be lacking, and each one of them moves the collective understanding forward to construct an otherwise interconnected but not necessarily unified story.

Magdeline C. Mannathoko and Attwell Mamvuto are narrators of a tale about the art instructional approaches of teachers in classes of primary school learners in Botswana and Zimbabwe. In some ways, their account is linked to Hanawalt’s study, as it reveals the often hidden narratives of operationalized curriculum for veteran teachers in the face of school culture expectations. This story also presents opportunities and challenges facing policy expectations in contrast with the operationalization, oversight, and implementation of art education in these two countries. Mannathoko and Mamvuto uncover perceptions and perspectives of teachers faced with challenges of implementing integrated art curriculum in light of the limits of their own disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge to do so. Self described as a narrative inquiry, theirs is a study situated in a post-colonial context. It is a comparative tale of integrated art curricula and the navigation of policy issues, content, and pedagogical knowledge in two countries, with explicit implications for countries with similar historical, political, and educational contexts.

Situated in past and recent histories of research and practice, the three media reviews are predominantly descriptive and supportive, positioning the books in dialogue with each other or in conversation with discourses of past practices and the individuals around whose lives, ideologies, and stories are told. Kryssi Staikidis and John Howell White review books about historical research in art education. These two reviews share art education historian Mary Ann Stankiewicz as a common character. Stankiewicz penned the foreword to the book reviewed by Staikidis, which is edited by art education historians Paul Bolin and Ami Kantawala, and Stankiewicz also authored the book reviewed by White. As Staikidis notes, Bolin and Kantawala’s book emerged from scholarship presented at a 2015 conference on art education history. The contributions to this collection bring to light overlooked stories of the lives of women and African American art educators. Staikidis’s review reveals how the eleven chapters tell stories of art education history that need to be included more formally in art education courses and histories. According to White’s review, Stankiewicz’s book is a case study that clarifies the important role Massachusetts Normal Art School—MassArt—played in shaping policies in American art education.

In the third review, Ryan Shin discusses a self-edited anthology by Kevin Tavin, composed of the author’s own writing selected from a decade of research on visual culture. As an exercise in comparative literature, one might consider another review of this anthology written by jan jagodzinski (2017). Shin presents Tavin’s theoretical discussions of psycholanalysis as challenging, dense, and difficult to access, but Shin is able to draw out the importance of Tavin’s central goal to challenge practices in art education through confronting Tavin’s own beliefs and foundations in acts described as cannibalistic, iconoclastic, and nomadic to unlock new territories.

Interestingly, Shin’s review sits in reciprocal dialogue with the commentary by Karen Keifer-Boyd. Keifer-Boyd’s commentary tells a tale about visual culture, a trope in the contemporary field that once occupied a central and contested position among those, including Tavin, who were actively telling and retelling its story. Keifer-Boyd leverages the context and breadth of her own encounters with visual culture within the recent past against which she argues in favor of a reanimation of visual culture within art education as a reboot of the story through feminist, posthumanist theories of new materialism.

In the conclusion of her review, Staikidis (2018) says, “an editor’s work is to create a space for presence; to bring new content forward; to shape an original vision; to curate and cull views that align with missing and much-needed perspectives” (p. 163). As for me, I hope my efforts as editor of this issue do similar work. I do not claim to be the main narrator, storyteller, character, or griot. My hand and voice need not be noticed, except in the effort to promote the words, stories, accounts, narratives, and tales of others who have something to tell. Of course, while several accounts of art education are told in the following pages, many more are inevitably left out. To think this field is beholden by some set of explicit or implicit rules or guides against which all stories must be assessed would be shortsighted.

A new story every day

Told a thousand different ways

That’s how it is and that’s how it goes

The city with the 8 and six big O’s

—Blow (1984)

Notes

¹ Thank you, Mr. Tufano.