Arts Education

Standardization and Countermovements

The critical acts of appreciating, perceiving, reflecting, imagining, judging, constructing, problem solving, evaluating, criticizing, and more are all integral to the arts. These are of no lesser value in the field of education. Over a decade ago, the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations produced voluntary standards for K–12 American schools that address these elements. Developing students' capacity for learning promotes benefits such as improved self-esteem and increased motivation, necessary for success within and beyond school. These standards are rooted in the premise that arts education and a student's achievement in other subjects and on standardized tests correspond directly.

In contrast to a national movement to standardize arts education in the schools, educators in the academy, searching for alternatives to empirical approaches within their own domain of the social sciences, created a “paradigm” known as arts-based inquiry. This movement originates in multiple, influential sources and concepts, including John Dewey's 1934 Art as Experience and the Deweyian notion that artists, unlike scientists, aim to express, not state, meaning. Arts-based approaches to research combine the arts and humanities, which challenge tradition as well as the status quo.

The pioneering work of educators Maxine Greene, Suzanne Langer, Elliot Eisner, Tom Barone, Robert Donmoyer, Norman Denzin, and others since the 1970s has led to groundbreaking efforts to infuse education and the arts with critique and analysis. Together with a rapidly developing cadre of faculty and students, these innovators essentially maintain that the arts inform educational research and yield intellectual gain. The predominant trend in arts-based educational research (ABER) features text or words and verbal communication. The new wave of ABER has propelled experimentation with video, multimedia documentary, photographic portfolios, three-dimensional collage, art studio collaborations, complex technological adaptations of story, voice, movement, and sound, and more.

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