The U.S. K–12 Art Education Curricular Landscape: A Nationwide Survey

Abstract

In the midst of future-oriented dialogues within the field, we turned our attention broadly toward the multiplicity of educational approaches that might characterize U.S. K–12 art education today. Through large-scale descriptive survey research (N = 742), we explored K–12 art teachers’ emphasis on 10 common educational approaches: choice-based art education/teaching for artistic behavior (TAB); community-based education; discipline-based art education (DBAE); design education; ecological/environmental education; interdisciplinary education or arts integration; multicultural education; social justice; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)/science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM); and visual/material culture. The results confirm we are in a period of plurality, albeit more defined by visual/material culture and multicultural education. The range of ways in which these 10 educational approaches can exhibit theoretically and in practice raises a number of critical questions. We recommend any future sketches of the field explore these nuances—delving deeper into how each of these curricular movements is conceptualized and enacted in K–12 art education practice.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In discussing curricular movements in recent history, we would like to emphasize that we do not see these movements as monolithic, as precisely commencing or concluding, or as existing singularly. Additionally, we recognize these movements can vary widely in the way they are defined and interpreted by practitioners.

² Educational approaches are typically allied with curricular movements and educational philosophies and have implications for curriculum content and teaching methods.

³ We utilized the regions of the US outlined by NAEA, which may vary from popular conceptions. This disparity in classifications might be most distinct in the categories of Pacific and Western. The Western region, as defined by NAEA, represents the Midwestern US, spanning from Ohio to Nebraska, to include the southwestern states of Texas and New Mexico. The Pacific region not only includes states with a Pacific coastline, but also some states often associated with the Midwest and Southwest, such as Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and Arizona.

⁴ Some categories represented a pairing of overlapping educational approaches, such as choice-based education and TAB, ecological education and environmental education, interdisciplinary education and arts integration, STEM and STEAM, and visual culture and material culture. In combining these associated fields, we recognize practitioners may understand these approaches differently, attributing diverging purposes and methods to them. The distinctions between visual and material culture may be the most pronounced despite their recurrent coupling in the literature (i.e., Garber & Costantino, 2007; Hausman et al., 2010). While this strategy of joining approaches allowed us to shorten the questionnaire and might have helped teachers in understanding each approach (for instance, if they were familiar with STEM but not STEAM), it might have added some obscurity to the results.

⁵ For degree-of-emphasis items, ordinal scale options were provided to participants (i.e., five ordered options ranging from 1=not emphasized to 5=strongly emphasized). Ordinal scale options are typical for survey items, and we anticipated response data would require nonparametric analyses due to the ordinal nature of the data (as opposed to continuous, interval data).

⁶ By theorizing arts practice as research, arts-based research and practice-based research (Sullivan, 2005) have an important implication for K–12 art education: Student-artists might be regarded as researchers and supported in investigating lines of inquiry through their artistic process (Marshall & Donahue, 2014).