Conventions of Conventions: Social Capital and International Art Education Congresses, 1893-1928

• In Event: Capitalizing Art Education: Mapping International Histories

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper investigates how relationships among social networks, institutions, and cognitive frames have shaped visual arts education. Specifically, this paper examines a series of international art education congresses held from 1893-1928 in the United States and Europe as rule-governed sites where art educators constructed social capital. By participating in these conferences, visual art educators shaped and transmitted cognitive frames for their field, beliefs about art teaching and learning in a world of industrial capitalism.

Theoretical Framework:
Lackey (2003) argues for framing art education with a wide lens, as a network within which institutional roles and social patterns shape the professional community (Bourdieu, 1993; Wenger, 1998). Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) claim that professional capital, the confluence of human capital, social capital, and decisional capital, is necessary for genuine educational reform. Stankiewicz (2007; 2009) suggested various ways to frame international histories of art education, but mapped her narrative in relation to human, cultural, social, and economic capital. She posited national heroes who championed either a classic thesis or romantic antithesis for art education (Thistlewood, 1992). Bourdieu (1983) argues that histories focused on great men as central actors should be replaced by analyses of struggles at the boundaries of a field. Furthermore, forms of capital should not be reified, but treated as strategies employed in negotiations for power (Beckert, 2010; Bourdieu, 1993; Childress, 2011).

Modes of Inquiry:
This research, although informed by sociological theory, is historical and revisionist. As industrial capitalism spread through Britain, Europe, and North America, world’s fairs proliferated, providing opportunities to display national identities, e.g., the 1876 Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia; and—in the Midway at the 1893 Chicago Fair—to assert the dominance of Western industrial culture over traditional small-scale societies. Chicago hosted a series of congresses, including what may have been the first International Congress of Art Instruction. The next was held in conjunction with 1900 Exposition Universelle, Paris; later European congresses were organized with government support but independent of international fairs.

Data Sources:
As part of research on Massachusetts Normal Art School, and its role in shaping professional identities of visual art educators in the United States from its founding in 1873 through the interwar years, this study uses data from institutional and state archives, collections of personal papers, and other primary sources. Interpretations draw on educational history, art history, histories of world’s fair, and sociology of culture.
Results:
The results of this study will suggest a new approach to interpreting international histories of the field of art education, not as actions by heroic champions, or strings of key texts, but as mutually constituted social networks operating within institutional and cognitive frameworks.

Scholarly Significance:
Given the pervasiveness of gerunds in new standards for arts education and other educational reform documents, reconceptualizing histories of art education in relation to more fluid, less objectified scholarly models offers a new perspective on the field and its development.

Author

• Mary Ann Stankiewicz, The Pennsylvania State University