Rethinking Studio: Disrupting Instrumentalism in the Valuing of Art Education

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Innovative Approaches to Art and Design Education

Abstract

Why we teach the arts in public education has been argued on three lines: for art’s sake, for instrumental purposes, and for our sake. Using a modification of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study confirms that the Studio Thinking project is a paradigmatically distinct, instrumental approach to valuing the arts. At the macro-level, this study supports the conclusion that the Studio Habits of Mind promote disembodied, cognitive models of the self, Enlightenment hierarchies of knowledge, and Western notions of creativity and talent. Advancing the cause for arts education requires disrupting this instrumentalism; compelling us to embrace embodied ontologies in which the self-transcending experiences of the arts foster divergent ways of Being and Becoming that promote the fullness of our shared Humanity.

Author

• Timothy Babulski, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities