National Art Education Association

Letters to the EditorAuthor(s): Peter London and Don L. BrighamSource: Art Education, Vol. 41, No. 2, Discipline-Based Art Education (Mar., 1988), pp. 5-6Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193105 .

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Dear Dr. Lewis,

What's all the fuss about the Getty and DBAE? What is there so enchanting about DBAE that it is attracting so many eager adherents who apparently can't wait to abandon their clearly ineffectual practices for something that really works? Have I missed some original contribution that DBAE makes to our field that heretofore has gone unsaid? Is art criticism a novel idea? Are aesthetics and art history newcomers to the theory and practice of art education? Have serious and informed looking at and talking about art been things that only I have been doing these last twenty-five years? Am I the only art teacher who writes up his lesson and unit plans and who talks with principals and school boards? For the life of me, I can't find anything more than this which is proposed by DBAE. Could this be all that they claim as lying "beyond creativity"?

I wonder, too, about this. If the legacy of another mission of art education, say that of Lowenfeld, or Chapman or D'Amico, came not only with bright ideas but with a hefty endowment, perhaps of a billion or two, would we now be dreaming kind thoughts of Lowenfeld, while visions of fluttering bucks danced merrily around our heads?

And another thing. Has anyone field tested DBAE against a control group and a contending theory of art education to see whether the thing

works better than anything else currently on the market? I haven't seen the results of such comparative field tests, have you?

Or have I just been missing a great deal?

Sincerely,

Peter London, Ed.D Department of Art Education Southeastern Massachusetts

University North Dartmouth, Massachusetts

Dear Editor Lewis:

Thank you for the issue of September 1987 focused upon Discipline-Based Art Education. It helpfully articulates some matters of concern that are widespread in our field. Lanier and Chalmers are particularly effective in highlighting the concern that multicultures are generally not included as subject matters for study in programs to date approved by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts. Further, Chalmers helps us see that, to date, Getty DBAE has constricted disciplined inquiry into art by excluding ethnological methodologies.

Though I appreciate Lanier's elucidation of the Aristotelian underpinings of DBAE as operationally defined by Broudy and Greer, I am dismayed that the

clarification appears to be primarily a device to move DBAE to a philosophical stance that serves Lanier's own pet prescriptions for aesthetic education: (a) investigation of aesthetic value "in all kinds of art, vernacular as well as fine," and (b) student inquiry primarily if not wholly in the media of verbal discourse ("inquiry into the nature of aesthetic response . . . issues for dialogue... Looking, Talking, Reading . .. making art is an almost unnecessary activity" pp. 50-52). John Dewey, exemplar of pragmatic experimentalism and contextualism alluded to by Lanier as a basis for re- orienting Broudy and Greer's version of DBAE, would surely turn in his grave to be thought the apologist for an aesthetic education that would have children use verbal discourse, rather than artmaking, as primary modality for knowing, and would cause them to apply that mode of discourse to the junk media of pop culture ("television commercials, billboards . . . record album/tape covers, cartoons and comics" p. 52; Lanier is promoting mere "visual literacy," not "Aesthetic Response") rather than to objects having potential for aesthetic experience.

Elliot Eisner, it seems to me, is our field's best guide to appropriate media for aesthetic knowing in visual art. Consistently in publications of recent years, Eisner, well versed in Dewey, Langer and Arnheim (note his many references to these authors, p. 45 of the September issue) has

Art Education/March 1988 5

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emphasized that the visual arts are nonverbal modalities of meaning: "The arts are testimony that humans have a need to convey and to represent what cannot be expressed in other forms of representation. If, for example, words could say what the visual arts can convey, the visual arts would hardly be necessary." (p. 9) If this is so, and I believe it is, how then are Lanier and many of the operational leaders of The Getty's Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts justified in emphasizing verbal discourse about art (and about Aesthetic Response, according to Lanier) rather than qualitative interaction with objects and environments of aesthetic potential (including, let us agree with Lanier,

"the widest possible range") directly in the tangible, pliable, and visible media of knowing in the discipline we term "visual art?"

In a truly discipline-based art education, students of every level from kindergarten through high school and college would continually make art. The "art" would be both cognitive (i.e., in and of the mind as explained by Eisner under "The Bio- logical Basis of Learning" pp. 7-8, "Art and Mind, Talent and Intelligence" pp. 11-12, and as I've explained under "Dewey's Theory of the Qualitative Mind") andphysical (i.e., in 2D and 3D formed media). Verbal discourse can heighten, expand, and reinforce cognitions thus obtained but it can never substitute for the aesthetic knowledge and understanding (and appreciation) that are the natural outcomes of person-world interaction in visual art media.

In their eagerness to obtain academic good standing for the visual arts, DBAE leaders, including, unfortunately, Eisner who certainly knows better, have generally gone overboard in proposing curricular contents and pedagogical strategies that imitate "other academic subjects" (Greer, Studies, 25, 1984, p. 212) rather than emphasize the

merits that distinguish the visual arts from other school subjects and methodologies. As a veteran arts administrator in a public school system where, happily, visual arts in the general curriculum is taken seriously as well as joyously, I guarantee that the DBAE quest for equity will be frustrated until Eisner's insight, "If . . . words could say what . .. arts can convey, the ... arts would hardly be necessary," is taken to heart and applied in DBAE practice. Given such a transformation, DBAE can achieve more than equity, it can become the core of basic education. For, as America's great educator, John Dewey, well stated in his seminal essay, "Qualitative Thought" (1931), the "logic of artistic construction and esthetic appreciation is peculiarly significant because they exemplify in accentuated and purified form" (p. 103) the mode of thought and ideation, guided throughout by "underlying pervasive quality" (p. 112), that is "the point of departure, and the regulative principle of all thinking." (p. 116) Visual art in its

purest mode, which is constructive in pliable and perceivable media, is, if we agree with Dewey, Arnheim, Langer, Eisner and other first-rate thinkers, a prime means of human intellection that ought to be at the core of all educational theory and practice.

Cordially,

Don L. Brigham, Ed.D. Supervisor of Visual Arts Attleboro Public Schools Attleboro, Massachusetts

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