Educating Artists: Theory and Practice in College Studio Art

What I read

In this article, the author lists various approaches for teaching art students in higher education, and summarizes suggestions from art students on the types of educational approaches that they appreciate the most.

First, the author describes that she presented this work at a conference, and it was well received. This, along with conversations with colleagues, led the author to conclude that art educators don’t know about available resources. The goal of the text is to answer the question “What might a ‘readily accessible and relevant resource’ for college studio art educators look like?”

Next, the author provides a list of things that an effective studio instructor should do, and a list of things that students might do. The author includes citations after each list, which she describes at the end of the text as a set of resources intended for art educators to leverage as they continue to learn.

The majority of the text then focuses on five pedagogical requests or perspectives from students, based on a questionnaire provided to 90 students spread between SBA and MICA. These refer to how students want to be taught, not what they want to be taught.

The first ideal, “know us,” indicates that students want to form intimate relationships with their instructors and to be treated as peers. The author makes some broad statements about how women and minority students prefer to learn. The next ideal requests professors to help students make meaningful artwork. Research indicates that exploration, play, and existential questioning leads to stimulating effective learning, and that dialogue is a way to provoke this. The third request from students is that professors teach skills, but not as ends in themselves; instead, skills should help students find their voice and gain confidence. The fourth ideal is for professors to create a “safe” community for students, where they can have fun, feel encouraged, and take risks. Three approaches are mentioned for this, including using variety in structuring a class, emphasizing storytelling, and ensuring there is a safe community.

The last pedagogical request from students is described in more detail; this is the ideal of teaching students to “live creative lives.” This manifests as taking risks, building confidence, and persevering. Students described that they wished they had been more daring in freshman year, had worked harder and procrastinated less, and had taken control of their education more directly. The author notes that students ultimately “learn how to live a creative life through the act of making itself.”

What I learned and what I think

I’m curious about the placing of student requests, or needs, at the center of an argument for how to be a better teacher. I like very much that the researcher conducted research with students themselves, because I often feel that pedagogical research seems to ignore the student experience; Mewburn’s article keeps coming back to me as an example of how Schön’s always-cited-work takes only a faculty-centric view of how learning is happening. What students appreciate and want will probably impact their attitude and approach and if these needs aren’t met, they may run away from learning, literally or figuratively.

There’s an enormous difference in understanding how students want to learn, and how students should learn. I realize should is not a word that academics seem to like, as it correctly indicates a power system at play that’s entirely one-sided. But there are factually better and worse ways of teaching and learning (? are there? do I know that?) and “I felt good about it” doesn’t really cut it. Research into teaching almost always comes back to Dewey (this didn’t, which is surprising), and it seems like Dewey’s view of student freedom is misread or at least selectively forget his ideas of mis-educative experiences.

The technical skill portion is maybe the most interesting to me. According to the interpretation of the questionnaire results, students only want to learn skills if they see that they help them “develop voice, gain confidence, or feel empowered.” The author describes that “research across higher education and art education suggests that learning technical skills is, in fact, empowering for students, but that refining processes and techniques for their own sake, rather than for the purposes of making meaning, is ultimately unsatisfying for students. In educating artists, therefore, we must bear in mind that studio art education is neither teaching skills nor transmitting knowledge, but rather creating a space for our students to pursue inquiry, make meaning, and generate knowledge.”

What a bizarre statement to make. No argument from me that it may be unsatisfying, but tough shit. With all the confidence in the world and a wonderful outlook, without the actual technical abilities to make things, artists and designers can’t make art and can’t design. And the idea that studio art education is not for teaching skills? Skills don’t just materialize through trial and error. They are guided, shaped, aimed, critiqued, practiced… this isn’t just random. It’s informed repetition. And if this really is what art educators are being taught or encouraged to do, that’s a huge problem. I see it in short-form design education all the time. It’s almost acknowledged that in a year you can’t learn technical abilities, so instead, here’s a wonderful and supportive and trustworthy environment. Have fun and good luck.

If I take this at face value and believe that what students want is actually what they need, I do see a way to approach this that is probably not a good idea; teach the five items above as foundations studies, and then teach students how to make things after they get through that process. In this weird model, students would take foundations courses in self-esteem building, building motivation, learning to trust, being curious, being friends with your instructors, and so-on. Mid sophomore year, they would start to learn how to make things, and if typical foundations skills were considered important, they would kick off 2D, 3D, color, etc. I don’t know; maybe that’s a wonderful idea. It doesn’t seem that way, but it probably needs some room to marinate.

But I always find my way back to the responsibility art and design educators have for teaching a vocational set of employable skills—simply because of the cost of higher education. Educators didn’t make education ridiculously expensive, but they now find themselves at the center of that bloat, and if a program costs any meaningful amount of money, it’s criminal if students pop out the end of the machine feeling great and with no employable abilities (unless that’s what the student wants, and that’s fine, but pretty unlikely.) This one always ends at "but what if they don't want a job" and "what about lifelong learning,"... what elite crap.

I wonder if it would be useful to build a translation of “what students say they want” to “what educators should actually teach that has technically educative value,” and see if there’s a way to align the two explicitly. I know it’s possible, because I’ve seen great professors find ways to do both.

An aside; in the same way that the “let’s quantify creativity!” crew was looking for a way to broad-stroke creativity, I get the sense that there’s a want to color all art and design education the same way. But it seems reasonable that the most successful teaching approaches to teach someone to paint are different than to teach them to dance or to design cars or anything else. Not in terms of skills (of course those are different), but in actual pedagogical approach. Those would probably be much more useful, because in higher education, it’s unlikely that someone is going to be teaching all art, like one might in K-12.