Contemporary Art and Mastery in Education

• In Event: Resisting the Drive Toward Pedagogical Mastery: Challenging Relations of Domination in the Curriculum of Teacher Education

Abstract

We are in a time where education should facilitate, encourage, and engage the development of a social imagination that recognizes and images the complexity of the world in the particular present. Maxine Greene writes that “Social imagination is the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficit society, in the streets where we live and our schools. Social imagination not only suggests but also requires that one take action to repair or renew” (2000, p. 5). How do our current approaches to teacher education, rooted in mastery prepare action to repair or renew?
 
The field of teacher education is overdue for a discussion about the purpose and social imagination is an exciting place to linger. In a few short years the institutions that many people took for granted are straining in some cases and outright failing in others, producing more people as economically, socially, and environmentally precarious (Fisher Watkins, 2020; Haraway, 2016). Given this shifting but urgent context, how might we reimagine teacher education to better engage with the present moment characterized by multiple and accelerating social, environmental, and institutional crises?
 
Teacher education concerned with preparing teachers for that K-12 system is too often about enclosure, binaries, and a disciplined and narrow conception of progression. The problem is that this way of educating young people does not at all prepare them to critically encounter and engage the slow and fast violence that characterizes our world (Colebrook, 2020). To reconsider the role of teacher education in facilitating social imagination in future teachers, we might ask about the limits of current approaches and begin to imagine what it might become. This paper is concerned with critically engaging the field of teacher education as it relates to our current moment and considering the potential of contemporary art in rethinking how we imagine what matters in teacher education.
 
The “use” of art is always debatable or even outright dismissed (hooks, 1995). This is because the conceptions of the art worth studying and learning in school is narrow. In many cases, to appeal to a skeptical public art educators and contemporary art fans are made defensive and paranoid. A focus on skill and/or mastery can help make art legible to K-12 stakeholders. This does not move us toward developing a politics rooted in a social imagination. Using Art Education standards alongside contemporary/conceptual art pieces this paper considers mastery and art.
 
Contemporary art and aesthetics are a space of potential escape from the terms of mastery so often taken-for-granted in K-12 schools and teacher education. This is one of many ways of engaging teachers in the complexity of the world which cannot be mastered. A shift away from mastery across subject areas, might be inspired and facilitated by meaningful encounters with contemporary art across fields of study.

Author

• Asilia K. Franklin-Phipps, SUNY - College at New Paltz
  Presenting Author