Issues in Art and Design Teaching
Book by RoutledgeFalmer, 2003

Introduction
Art educationalists have argued for a critical curriculum in the school subject Art and Design for many years (Field 1970; Eisner 1972). Since then, and following endless discussion and debate, a 'critical' dimension has found its way into legislation. If Ofsted (the government inspectorate for schools) is to be believed, this dimension is practised satisfactorily in secondary schools in England (Jones 1998). But we wish to challenge this judgement. Is the inclusion of this 'critical' dimension tokenistic, merely lip service to diverging canons, the western and the multicultural, a parade of signs of the critical that is neither critical nor ethical in conception and practice? However, if it does exist, where can it be found? Is it a fixed phenomenon or should it be subject to ongoing revision? In our advice to postgraduate student teachers (Addison and Burgess 2000) we recommended that entrants to the profession needed to see themselves as agents of change, teachers who would question the orthodoxies that privilege the subject as uniquely creative, a distinct and autonomous realm divorced from other forms of social and cultural production. What student teachers find when they get into schools is a subject squeezed of resources: human, material, spatial and temporal. They meet resistance both from pupils, who prize the subject as an escape from the logocentric curriculum, and teachers, who use the prevailing orthodoxies to maintain high grades in external examinations. This is an inevitable strategy in the present audit climate where it is necessary to demonstrate each subject's contribution to the school's position in national league tables. Why question what is working? Well, we believe there are questions beyond implementing simple instrumental solutions; meeting expectations is not a recipe for survival. Judged as professionally competent only if they achieve the standards set and evaluated by others, teachers are denied any real agency. Contributors to this book identify not only how existing practice is reproduced and maintained but also how it can be transformed.

Transitions and shifts in teaching and learning
If teachers are to achieve agency then it is necessary that they recognise and engage with the paradigm shifts of the late twentieth century, transformations that are determining the changing place of education in a postcolonial, postindustrial, post-patriarchal, global context. From the USA, Freedman (Chapter 1) provides seven conditions necessary to reshape art education within the expanding field of visual culture, relocating student practice within contemporary realities. From the UK, Steers (Chapter 2) insists that such a reshaping is possible only if teachers abandon pragmatism and adopt a more theorised and energised position both in relation to subject knowledge and pedagogy. One difficulty is the lack of continuity between the different phases of art education, the disjunctions between primary and secondary, secondary and further/higher education. Prentice (Chapter 3) and Robins (Chapter 4) look at the implications of cross-phase transitions and discuss the need for 'dialogue' and 'mutuality'.

Curriculum issues
Eisner (Chapter 5) reasserts the need to underpin theory and practice with meaningful research in art education. For him this entails questioning the ready acceptance of quantitative data because it obscures what is vivid in art. The subtleties and nuances of practice in the subject can be recoded and evaluated only by employing qualitative methodologies and he provides insights into this process. Addison (Chapter 6) suggests that such methodologies are not without their tensions. However, by analysing a collaborative and interventionist, action research project involving art critics and historians in schools, he argues that the dialectical relationship between parallel discourses can in practice be productive. One way in which the curriculum can be reshaped is through the changes brought about by revision of the old and recognition of the new, a process that requires an acknowledgment of other voices and the growing importance of interdisciplinarity. Franks (Chapter 7) reconsiders the role of language in art and design by examining its function within a multimodal theory of meaning-making. He visits an art room as a sympathetic and 'intimate outsider' to record the everyday interactions that are often overlooked by those following other teaching agendas, including a critical one. Hickman (Chapter 8) recognises what might be described as the political imperatives of 'the Third Way' and explores some of the rationales behind the introduction of Citizenship in English schools. He argues that Art and Design has a significant role to play in developing this new 'literacy'. A similar imperative informs the UK government's move to digitalisation. Within the teaching of new technologies Davies and Worrall (Chapter 9) reconsider the emphasis on technical and transferable skills; they argue instead for the potentiality of the new technologies as a research tool and as a way to promote electronic collaboration, suggesting the possibility of more reciprocal modes of learning and teaching. Allen (Chapter 10) reminds the reader that art within modernity has always to recognise its place alongside other forms of visual culture. In an autobiographical account of his own practice as a teacher he recounts his shift from fine art modernism to a multisensory, multimedia, interdisciplinary pluralism and argues for the recognition of other perspectives through disciplinary exchange.

Periods of change always produce anxiety, and this is manifest in doubts and fears. Burgess (Chapter 11) highlights the continuing reluctance on the part of art teachers to acknowledge 'difficult' contemporary practice. Such practice is absent because schooling reinforces and reproduces dominant forms of cultural identity, ones that in a modern nation-state have been essentialised and fixed. In this context much contemporary practice appears difficult because it challenges these identities, and is therefore outlawed as monstrous. Addison (Chapter 12) suggests that absences are much wider and are predicated on modernist myths about what matters. He unearths a climate of iconoscepticism in which the value of the image is contested within a curriculum that privileges the word in the form of writing. He argues that the status of the logocentric curriculum can be questioned only if art teachers and their allies forgo the historical opposition between word and image and develop more discursive environments in which simple reproductive strategies are replaced by interpretative ones. Hulks (Chapter 13) recognises that assessment has been perceived negatively by art teachers, who, holding on to modernist myths, see it as an assault on aesthetic freedom and self-expression. He suggests ways by which art teachers might use assessment both to inform practice through teacher feedback and provide credibility and parity with other curriculum subjects.

The principle of collaboration has already been noted in other sections and it too has the quality of a mantra in government directives. All contributors to this section suggest that productive collaborations require participants to define their identities and clarify roles. Schofield's collaboration (Chapter 14) is at the level of institution and her example works because the partnership is based on intervention rather than consensus. Hall and Meecham (Chapter 15) warn against the rhetoric of collaboration revealing how 'creative partnerships' can easily be reduced to the celebratory and the acritical. Addison and Burgess (Chapter 16) examine ways in which student teachers can bridge the differences between institutional aims and philosophies and reinforce the need for critique both in the form of reflective dialogue and in student teachers' own practice as makers.