some student-teachers' experiments in art education and humanistic understanding

RACHEL MASON Some Student- Teachers’ Experiments in Art Education and Humanistic Understanding

The relationship between humanistic education and art education has received considerable attention from American art educators over the last decade. Katchadourian (1980), who admits to avoiding the issue of curriculum practice, has identified six humanistic functions of art as being those of keeping alive and nourishing the inborn capacity to feel, imagine, dream and remain sensitive to beauty and order; preserving the capacity to form human relationships; helping to bring human beings together socially; providing a certain degree of continuity; bringing order into chaos; and giving existence a meaning, a purpose. Smith (1982) has analyzed an arts in general education ideology and described the humanities through the arts or humanistic education movement as having two distinct strands rooted in traditional conceptions of the humanities and humanistic psychology. Levi (1983) has noted that some of the most crucial questions in education today hinge on the partial overlap of the humanities, social sciences and fine arts, but has denied the practice of art any place in humanistic education, which aims at the goal of inculcating human values. Smith and Smith (1982) on the other hand, have insisted that humanistic education and visual arts education coincide in the study of the arts as cultural artifacts, the cultivation of an aesthetic attitude, the acquisition of aesthetic preferences and standards and in educational programmes that stress art as a paradigm for self-develop- ment. To the best of my knowledge, the notion of humanistic education has received scant attention from British art educators [ l ] , but over a period of nine months my students and I examined its implications for planning and implementing curricula in art and design.

Our curriculum experiments were conducted in an art teacher- training institution where the students were enrolled on a one year post-graduate course that qualified them to teach art and design in secondary schools. The majority of them had completed three or four years of specialist subject training in Fine Art, but others had specialised in Graphics, Fashion, Textiles, Art History and Industrial Design. As part of their professional studies in art education they organised informal workshops for children which took place on Saturday mornings. The workshops provided them with a different kind of educational experience from their practice-teaching in schools because the majority of their pupils were younger (aged 5-1 1 years); they attended the classes voluntarily and were highly motivated. The student-

30unta1 of Art t3 &sign Education

Vol4, No 1, 1985

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R A C H E L M A S O N Student-teachers’ Experiments in Art Education

teachers’ post-graduate year was divided into three terms and each student-teacher was responsible for one session of workshops lasting eight weeks during either the autumn, spring or summer terms. They worked singly, or in pairs, planning and teaching curricula to groups of approximately fourteen children of mixed abilities and ages.

At the beginning of each session, the student-teachers were required to design sequences of lessons which focussed on children’s practical activity with art media and materials. They were advised, however, that successful art teaching involves more than mere instruction in art skills and techniques or getting children to make art products, and that it promotes a more general form of learning that is ‘humanistic’. They were directed to read extracts from three textbooks by art educators (Adams and Ward, 1982; Feldman, 1970; McFee and Degge, 1977) who promote liberal or ‘humane’ conceptions of art curricula [2], but were encouraged also to pursue their own ideas concerning relationships between humanistic understanding and education in art. When their session was over, they compiled written reports in which they commented, among other things, on their success or failure at integrating learning in art with humanistic understanding or knowledge, and at formulating and implementing humanistic [ 31 (and liberal), as opposed to technical or vocational, art education objectives and aims.

Learning about people through art The student-teachers organising workshops during the autumn term were commencing their professional studies in art education, so they had no previous experience either of observing teaching or practising it in schools. As a result, they associated the teaching/learning situation very closely with what had occurred during their subject training in art and design. After reading Feldman’s source material about ‘Understanding people and places through art’ (1970, pp. 214-246), they agreed to interpret humanistic education as referring to ‘any kind of learning which is about people’.

Photographing faces

Two student-teachers who organised a photography workshop around the subtheme or concept ‘expression’, directed their pupils to take photographs of people. They developed some effective teaching strategies for motivating photographic production and for inducing facial expression in photographic subjects.

The lessons incorporated simulation exercises in which the children acted out the roles of photographer and model and they utilised studio ‘props’ to good effect while they were being photographed (e.g. the models built houses out of playing cards, chewed sticky toffees, threaded needles and listened to musical

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comedy on tape). They encouraged the children to photograph friends (Fig. 1 ) manipulating clay, sawing wood, painting and drawing in other workshops and sent them into the neighbour- hood to take ‘candid camera shots’ of people walking, shopping and running for buses.

The aesthetic, artistic and technical qualities of the children’s photographs were excellent, but the student-teachers assumed that increasing their aesthetic interest in facial expression was synonymous with teaching them something about people’s life- styles, emotions and characters. At the end of their session they reported that the children had learned to look for facial expression when photographing human subjects and that they had taught them some basic photography skills, but that they could not claim to have increased their general knowledge of understanding of human nature.

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F I G U R E 1. Photography workshop.

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R A C H E L M A S O N Student-teachers ’ Experiments in Art Education

Creating puppet characters

Two student-teachers decided that anything enabling children to gain insights into human beings as individuals with unique characters and feelings would meet with the group’s humanistic brief. Having identified puppets as ‘symbols and caricatures of people’, they elected to involve their pupils in what they described as ‘the representation of human characters in exagger- ated form’. Following this, they encouraged them to experiment with stage make-up and to utilise it to express particular characters and emotions. For the remainder of the session, the children were split into groups making shadow, rod and Bunraku puppets (Fig. 2); they invented individual puppet characters and wrote and produced their own puppet play.

In their report, one of the student-teachers was critical of the fact that they had emphasized practical activity in the arts at the expense of ‘cognitive aspects of humanistic learning’. She observed that the children had enjoyed making puppets and in- venting good and bad characters but that they had not really understood the motives behind their choice of characters or the moral elements of their play. She concluded that their chances of effecting humanistic learning would have improved if they had F I G U R E 2. Bunraku puppets.

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limited their options to making Bunraku puppets and studying the Japanese tradition and society in which they existed. The other student-teacher reported that humanistic understanding had been achieved and that it had occurred as a consequence of the children working together 141. She noted, for example, that they had been forced to co-operate both in planning and design- ing their art and drama activities and in producing their puppet play.

Men-and-machinery

Another student-teacher identified the theme of men-and- machinery as an appropriate focus around which to organise some humanistic lesson content. She voiced a concern for increasing her pupils’ knowledge and understanding of the interaction between people and their environments (Adams and Ward, 1983), but her teaching was aimed.almost exclusively at improving their ceramics skills and techniques. The photographic images of industrial buildings and men at work that she utilised to motivate their personal expression in art inspired one older boy to include the following passage of humanistic reflec- tion alongside a ceramic sculpture (Fig. 3) he exhibited in their final display:

Our project was to produce a piece of work on men and machinery. I decided to expand on this and concern myself with man in a city environment. I wanted to suggest the idea of the city as being more important than its inhabitants-the people who created it. The vast sprawling mass of ugly concrete architects’ failures had become a Frankenstein monster and turned against its creators-the people were drab shadows, not really important to the city any more. Look at the people at ground level; some are down-and-outs, rejects and cast-offs of the uncaring city, others are just servants to the system-like ants in a massive complex of tunnels, emotionless and not really human any longer. My city exists in the future, but that’s immaterial; it could just as easily be present-day London or New York, or any other large city. Have you see the London underground during the rush-hour? A more perfect example of what I’m trying to express would be hard to find. A huge conglomeration of separate human beings, all units in the quest for a seat of a journey to another boring day at the office. The only human element is the buskers!

Heroes and heroines By the spring term, the student-teachers had received formal instruction in art education and teaching methods and had observed and/or practised teaching in primary and secondary schools. While they interpreted humanistic education in various

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R A C H E L M A S O N Student-teachers ’ Experiments in Art Education

ways they agreed to utilise the over-arching concept [5] or theme of ‘heroes and heroines’ as a common focus for structuring or organising their curriculum units.

The legend of Robin Hood

Two student-teachers who interpreted humanistic education as necessitating that they chose subject matter that ‘maximized social content’ and that they designed curricula that ‘furthered children’s understanding of themselves, the society in which they lived and other societies’, identified the legend of Robin Hood as a sub-issue and engaged their pupils in the practical activity of mural painting (Fig. 4).

They had plenty of good ideas about the manner in which art education could contribute to children’s rational and imaginative understanding of the human situation. At the beginning of their session, they said they wanted their pupils to depict struggles between good and evil, to become aware of the fact that there are different kinds of heroes and heroines (historical, religious, political, literary and, most importantly in their view, ordinary working-class people), and to learn that legends and folk stories fulfil a social function. But like many student-teachers, they

F I G U R E 3. Ceramic sculpture by Simon Collins, 15 yrs.

F I G U R E 4. Mural Painting workshop.

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found it difficult to translate their curriculum ideals into practice.

The mural was completed on time, but their failure to antici- pate the practical problems associated with groupwork in art and integrating different forms of knowledge caused it to be judged unsatisfactory-technically and aesthetically. The student-teachers did, however, make valiant attempts to combine instruction in art with instruction more typical of the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, they noted that the legend, or story, of Robin Hood provided an excellent focus for a curriculum aimed at integrating learning in art with humanistic understanding. They reported that:

The pupils were asked to discuss different types of characters in the stories; they were asked to consider if Robin Hood really existed and, if so, who he was, and they had to research costumes and buildings typical of the historical period he was supposed to have lived in.

Favourite heroes and heroines

TWO student-teachers involved a group of girls in reconstructing costumes worn by their favourite heroes and heroines. They taught them how to make cardboard bases for costumes and how to decorate them with cut, folded and curled applied paper designs. The life-size costumes were enthusiastically paraded in a final display. In her report, one of these student-teachers described their workshop as having included a humanistic component which took the form of the girls telling stories and exchanging information about their characters. But, the other student-teacher admitted that she had found the humanistic requirement ‘an intrusion on her lessons’ since it had necessitated talking and writing which, in her view, had ‘nothing to do with education in art’. Since the pupils were allowed total freedom of choice, it was not surprising that the majority of them selected popular characters from the media and that the student-teachers reported that they had failed to teach them anything about the history of costume or the lives of their heroes and heroines.

The Indian culture The student-teachers planning and implementing workshops during the summer term had taught in two schools and were about to commence teaching in a third. They had encountered large numbers of ethnic minority pupils in some of these schools and had received course input designed to increase their awareness of the need to develop multi-cultural curriculum objectives and content. These student-teachers selected the single subject, or area of study ‘The Indian Culture’ as a common focus for humanistic learning.

They were divided however as to whether they interpreted

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this as meaning that they should aim: (a) at increasing the children’s general knowledge about the Indian continent and its culture, or (b) at increasing their understanding of the way in which visual forms in their immediate environment (e.g. shops, houses, churches, etc.) manifested both Indian and European cultural values, attitudes and beliefs (McFee, J. and Degge, R. 1979, pp. 272-319).

Learning about Indian Art

One student-teacher introduced her workshop by showing her pupils slides of Indian and European art and involving them in discussion about their similarities and differences. She reported that:

They noted that Indian paintings were about religion and the spiritual world; that they depicted gods, some in human form and some as fantastic beings; that they were painted in gold and silver and bright colours with symbolic significances and, that important figures were painted without regard to perspective.

She continued to develop these concepts for the remainder of the session and utilised Indian myths to motivate the children’s artistic production. (In lesson 2, for example, the children sat on the floor to discuss a picture of Shiva, the many-limbed Hindu god, after which they painted an enchanted scene (Fig. 5 ) . In lesson 3 they looked at slides and made designs for border patterns. In another lesson she read them an Indian fable about a lion and a hare and asked them to illustrate it,)

This student-teacher reported that she had utilised myths and legends to motivate painting because she understood that ‘they were a psychological necessity for children’s imaginations and essential to a proper understanding of mankind‘ (Lavender, 1976, p. 11). While she did a lot of research and utilised the theme to good effect she appeared confused about her educational intentions for the children’s art. For example, she rejected the notion of interdisciplinary curricula but utilised concepts located in another school discipline (namely religion) to explain Indian art. She focussed on Indian subject matter or topics while teaching the children European colour concepts. In her report, she noted that her pupils had enjoyed painting in bright colours and using gold and silver, and that they had learned something about the Indian culture, but that her curriculum experiment had only been partially successful and was probably a more valuable learning experience for herself.

Above F I G U R E 5. An enchanted scene: tempera paint on paper.

Below FIGURE 6. Drawing: pencil and feltip on paper.

Life in India

Two student-teachers introduced their pupils to techniques associated with mono-printing and collage while attempting simuita- neously to extend their knowledge of the Indian continent and

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Above F I G U R E 5. Painting workshop: Enchanted Scene.

Below F I G U R E 6. Drawing: Life in India.

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RACHEL M A S O N Student-teachers’ Experiments in Art Education

its art. Their curriculum incorporated geographical facts (e.g. they began the session by discussing a map of India and showed the children slidetapes designed to help them visualise Indian village life) , and included detailed information about Indian architecture and costume and its social and religious functions. They drew the children’s attention to narrative and decorative elements in Indian miniature painting, and directed them to incorporate Indian colour schemes into drawings (Fig. 6) and to collaborate on printing a visual narrative based on a wedding ceremony in an Indian village.

In her report, one of the student-teachers commented that their humanistic emphasis had necessitated their doing a lot of preparation but that it had certain advantages. She said:

. . . prior to the commencement of the workshop, I had little or no knowledge of the Indian culture or the printing process I was going to teach. This meant doing a lot of research and experimentation. Despite the obvious disadvantages, this had its benefits because the information I was passing on was fresh and of as much interest to me as to the children. I got quite a lot of feedback from parents informing me of what their children had learned about India.

The other student-teacher noted that their theme of the Indian Culture had motivated the children’s interest and consolidated their art learning. He reported that:

In our group an affinity developed with the theme. The children were never bored and took sufficient interest in it to bring in Indian objects, like ornamental craftwork, to discuss.

He commented also on the important role that visual aids in the form of pictures, slides, cultural artifacts, etc., had played in effecting their humanistic teaching.

Recognising cultural values in visual forms

One student-teacher utilised photographs of a local urban environment populated by Indian immigrants to motivate discussion about the way the visual appearance of its shops, houses, churches, etc., exemplified the different cultural attitudes and values of the people who had built them and who lived in them now. I remain perplexed about his educational intentions for his pupils’ practical activity in sculpture; but he presented them with visual exemplars of environments created by Keinholz and Segal, and claimed he wanted ‘to develop their understanding of the way artists and designers draw on aspects of the man-made environment for inspiration’, and ‘how they utilise 3-dimensional forms to express ideas’. The children’s wood, stone and perspex constructions were highly individualistic (Fig. 7) and the student-teacher commented on them as follows:

David utilised a traditional Western process to produce an Indian head. I don’t think he understood exactly what he

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7 8 F I G U R E 7. Woodcarving-sculpture workshop.

F I G U R E 8. Shop-front collage.

F I G U R E 9. Papermaking workshop.

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R A C H E L M A S O N Student-teachers’ Experiments in Art Education

was doing, but the fact that some sort of comparison had been made led me to believe that some of the learning I had identified as humanistic had been achieved. Julie and Anne-Marie made a wood construction. They added sequins, bits of old jewellery, silver foil decorations and coloured gems like those on Hindu religious objects. Glyn made a birdtable and superimposed a contrasting visual form on it-a brightly coloured Indian bird with contrasting plumage. He obviously grasped some of the principles involved.

Finally, two student-teachers utilised photographs of the same local environment as a means of motivating their pupils to produce a group collage. They claimed they intended to increase the children’s awareness of similarities and differences in British and Indian cultural values and attitudes by focussing their attention on the design and content of shop fronts in the area (Fig. 8). I suspect, however, that they said this just to please me. While the project had enormous potential for promoting cross- cultural or multi-cultural understanding, their teaching was resolutely skills-based and technical and the children’s finished collage showed absolutely no evidence of their having recognised any cultural values or attitudes in the environment they had re- created.

Summary and conclusion A conscious decision was made before writing this paper, not to theorize about what art teachers ought to do, but rather to describe what some of them have been doing for better or worse. I do not mean to imply by this that I consider theory irrelevant to teaching. On the contrary, in initiating this project, I was aware of Smith and Smith’s theoretical distinction (1982) between ‘humanistic and liberal arts education’ and ‘narrow specialised career preparation’. Theoretical discussion about art education and humanistic understanding located in professional journals such as Art Education and The Journal of Aesthetic Education has also influenced both the form and content of this curriculum experiment and my interpretation of its results. Moreover, in presenting the student-teachers with three concep- tual models, in the form of possible curricula, while encouraging them to pursue their own ideas, I was operating in accordance with Eisner’s view (1982, p. 5) that the function of theory and research in education is to ‘provide teachers with frames of reference or rules of thumb (not rules) that allow them to use their heads and view things from other perspectives’, not to supply prescriptive formulae for practice.

The student-teachers concerned could be described as recipi- ents of Smith’s narrow specialised career preparation, or of vocational and technical subject training. How did they respond to my suggestion that they integrate art education into a general

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educational ideology and that they organise practical or studio- based art activity around humanistic curricula themes?

A number of them rejected it completely, and insisted that art education and humanistic understanding occupied separate pedagogical domains. One student-teacher, trained as an art historian, described humanistic education as ‘an excuse for art’ and equated it with the geography lessons she hated at school. She found Feldman’s suggestion (1970) that ‘children can gain an understanding of humanity through art’ congenial, but interpreted it as ‘too general to be useful’ and inappropriate for studio-based art activity. Moreover, her Christian beliefs led her to doubt his wisdom in advising art teachers to ‘broaden children’s references to life’:

There comes a time surely when one must decide whether to broaden their references to life in a particular way might do more harm than good. I am not aware, for example, about the usefulness of teaching children about certain types of African tribal art, which is used to conjure up evil spirits which are very real.

Another student-teaching observed that a humanistic general education ideology necessitated her integrating art with other school subjects, and felt that it was wrong for art specialists to teach children something they knew nothing about. She said:

The difficulty we found in combining our paper-making workshop (Fig. 9) with humanistic understanding under the theme of India, stemmed in part from us choosing the practical activity before the theme. However, I’m not convinced that we would have been any more successful with any other theme we were unfamiliar with. I found that I did not know enough about the Indian culture to teach it to others. I have learned a lot during this workshop, but I still feel it is wrong to teach something one can only be knowledgeable about after years of study.

A number of the student-teachers experienced considerable difficulty developing and organising humanistic frameworks of ideas around which to structure their curriculum units. While some of them identified appropriate humanistic functions for their subject [6 ] . they tended to exploit humanistic themes formulated by colleagues simply to motivate personal expression in art or as a means of teaching them art skills and techniques. In my view the majority of these student-teachers trivialised or abused what theorists have identified as humanistic possibilities for art teaching.

The student-teachers who successfully integrated learning in art with humanistic understanding, identified learning about people as a humanistic educational objective and structured their curriculum units round themes like ‘heroes and heroines’, ‘expression’, ‘the Indian culture’, or ‘men-and-machinery’. In implementing their aims they adopted one or more of the following teaching practices or strategies.

(a) They encouraged their pupils to represent and communi-

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cate ‘character, expression and feeling’ and utilised creative activity in art as a means of increasing children’s understanding of human nature.

(b) They identified myths or legends as an appropriate focus for stimulating children’s artistic imaginations, together with teaching them about a particular race, culture or society’s sense of its own identity and its values and beliefs.

(c) They focussed their pupils’ attention on aspects of the urban environment and utilised practical activity in art as a means of increasing their awareness of the interaction between people and environments.

(d) They encouraged children to look at and respond to household objects, paintings, costumes, etc., and utilised cultural artifacts as a focus for teaching them specific art skills and techniques, and, at the same time, increasing their understanding and knowledge of people in other cultures.

While acknowledging that these student-teachers’ efforts were tentative and, in many cases, naive, I suggest that any one of their four pedagogical strategies offers a practical solution to the problem of extending the art specialists’ thinking beyond technical or vocational objectives towards generalist and liberal conceptions of art curricula and of fulfilling some, at least, of the six humanistic educational functions Katchadourian has identified for art.

Notes and references Notes

1 Some discussion of the relationship between art education and humanistic understanding can be located in educational literature relating to integrated or interdisciplinary curricula in the humanities in the 1960s and 1970s (Bolam, 1971; Stenhouse, 1968).

2 While the authors of these textbooks offer different descriptions of practice, they all advocate what Feldman (1982) calls liberal or humane conceptions of curricula, i.e. they propose that children study humanity through art and that teachers seek to liberate them from psychological, geneological, physical, sectarian and societal con- straints.

3 The distinction between generalist and vocational or technical art educational objectives is well documented in American literature. Smith and Smith (1982) distinguish humanistic or liberal arts education from narrow specialistic career preparation and claim that the objective of a liberal education is to produce the culturally literate generalist or the whole man. Feldman (1982) distinguishes between narrow, technical or psychological conceptions of art curricula and anthropological and aesthetic conceptions with more liberal or general educational aims.

4 The students’ differing views on humanistic understanding probably coincide with Smith’s two strands of humanistic education (1982).

5 Bolam (1971) has described a characteristic mode of structuring curriculum units thematically as organising them around an over- arching concept (e.g. expression) which is pertinent to several school disciplines.

6 E.g. helping to bring people together socially, keeping alive the inborn capacity to feel or imagine and giving existence a meaning (Katchadourian, 1983).

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References

ADAMS, E. & WARD, C. (1982) Art and the Built Environment, London, Longmans.

BOLAM, D. (1971) Integrating the curriculum: a case study in the humanities. Paedegogicae Europea, Brauenschweig, George Wester- mann.

EISNER, E. (1982) The relationship of theory and practice in art education. Art Education, 35, 1,4-5.

FELDMAN, E. (1970) Becoming Human Through Art. New Jersey, Prentice-Hall Inc. (1982) Varieties of art curricula, Journal of Art and Design Education,

KATCHADOURIAN, H. (1980) Humanistic functions of the arts today.

LAVENDER, R. (1976) Myths, Legends and Lore. Oxford, Blackwell. LEVI, A. (1983) The humanities: their essence, nature, future. Journal of

MCFEE, J. & DEGGE, R. (1977) Art, Culture and Environment. Califor-

SMITH, R. (1982) On the third realm, two decades of politics in art

SMITH, R. & SMITH, C. (1982) On the third realm-once more the case

STENHOUSE, L. (1968) The humanities curriculum project. Journal of

1, 1, 21-45.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 14, 2, 11-22.

Aesthetic Education, 17, 2, 5-17.

nia, Wadsworth.

education. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 16, 3, 5-1 5.

for liberal education. J O U W ~ of Aesthetic Education, 16, 2, 6-9.

Curriculum Studies, 1, 1, 26-33.

R A C H E L MASON Student-teachers’


This article is a revised edition of a paper presented at the VIIth European, Middle Eastern, and African Regional Congress of INSEA, 1983. The author thanks the student-teachers who participated in the experiment during 1982-3.

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some student-teachers' experiments in art education and humanistic understanding

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