Teaching What We Value: Care As an Outcome of Aesthetic Education

• In Event: Learning to Live Well: Developing, Deconstructing, and Sustaining an Aesthetic Way of Life With/in Arts-Based Curricula

Abstract

1. Objectives

Nel Noddings (1995) claimed that the fundamental challenge to bringing care into schools is that there is no discipline that acknowledges care as part of its core content. In 2010 the state of Georgia adopted new Visual Arts Performance Standards that allows the interpretation of aesthetics as a philosophy of care and responsible choice. The standards permit five forms of care as educational objectives of art instruction: the care of materials, the care of self, the care of others, the care of the school, and the care of the community. Rather than teaching the content of art through a pedagogy of care, the new Standards allow for teaching care (as a curricular objective) through pedagogies informed by arts-based teacher research. Thus, the Georgia Visual Arts Performance Standards address Noddings’ concerns and establish care as the outcome of aesthetic education.

2. Perspectives

The paper is informed by philosophical research into the 18th century aesthetic theory and its genealogical development within early German Idealism as a philosophy of being in-relationship (Bowie, 2003; Rancière, 2010). This dialogue is brought into American aesthetic theory by John Dewey (1934/1989). Recent post-modern interpretations further open the door to visual art education, claiming that teaching students to care at multiple levels of reflexivity is fulfilling curriculum mandates to teach aesthetics.

3. Methods

Besides philosophical research, the paper cites specific example of classroom. Data comes from interviews with four visual art teacher-researchers who work in three different public school districts. Narrative storytelling (Barone, 2001) is the methodology for interpretation. The teacher researchers support their interview narratives with lesson plans and images of student work. Each teacher-researcher uses self-reflective methods from a/r/tography (Springgay et al., 2008) and educational criticism (Eisner, 1991) to illuminate her personal practice. All four art teachers explicitly shape their curriculum to teach to the new performance standards of multiple levels of care.

4. Data sources

The analysis of an aesthetics of care is a comparative philosophical task based on both original texts and contemporary historical analysis. Educational criticism that draws from teacher interviews, lesson plans, and visual records of student art work, allows for rendering portraits of classroom practice.

5. Results

These examples demonstrate how teachers can use conceptual framework to move the implicit visual art curriculum of engaging students to care to the explicit curriculum. In so doing, teachers can forthrightly place the educational objectives that they value most, as the principal educational objectives in instruction. This honest acknowledgment of what is of value has the ability to create ripple effects within the culture of schools.

6 Significance

Nel Noddings has said that the change we seek in schools will not happen until a discipline steps forward to claim care—a fullness of being-in-relation—as the essential content of the discipline. The new Georgia standards —from a policy perspective—allow teaching forms of care as the educational objective of visual arts instruction.

Author

• Richard E. Siegesmund, Northern Illinois University