What's Educational About Art Education? An Exploration of the Educational Significance of Education Through Art

• In Event: Art, Artists, and Pedagogy: Philosophy and the Arts in Education

Abstract

There are at least three ways in which the notion of art education can be understood.
One is as education in the arts, where art is the phenomenon students are educated about. The second is education for the arts, which concerns the education of artists. And the third is education through the arts, where art itself appears as an educational ‘form,’ that is a way in which education has been organised and enacted. In each of these three the question as to what is educational about art education is an important but often overlooked question. Sometimes the educational is just understood in terms of instruction, although within varieties of art education such instruction is often given an artistic ‘flavour.’ The latter does not mean, however, that the educational significance of this ‘flavour’ has itself been sufficiently theorised and understood. In this contribution I will therefore engage with this more fundamental question about the educational significance of art education, particularly focusing on the third modality, that of education through art, but drawing implications for education for the arts and education in the arts. My exploration is driven by an existential approach, starting from the assumption that a key task of all education is to help children and young people to exist in the world in a grown up way. I will explore how we can understand grown-up-ness outside of developmental vocabularies, but will also show the unique potential of art in relation to this challenge, moving the educational significance of art beyond questions of creativity and expression, but also resisting the instrumentalisation of art, such as in the idea that engagement with art would raise achievement in domains that ‘really’ matter.

Author

• Gert J. Biesta, Brunel University