Discipline-Based Art Education || The Getty Center for Education in the Arts and Discipline-Based Art Education

National Art Education Association

The Getty Center for Education in the Arts and Discipline-Based Art EducationAuthor(s): Leilani Lattin DukeSource: Art Education, Vol. 41, No. 2, Discipline-Based Art Education (Mar., 1988), pp. 7-12Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193106 .

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I . A~~~~~~

The Getty Center

for Education i n the Arts and

Discipline-Based Art Education Leilani Lattin Duke

t has now been five years since the J. Paul Getty Trust established its operating programs, including the Getty Center for Education in the Arts. The years since 1982 have been eventful, and a

fifth anniversary seems a good occasion to review what has happened and where we seem to be headed.

The origins of the J. Paul Getty Trust are worth recalling. It was set up by its founder as a private operating foundation. Unlike a grant-making foundation, which funds the programs of others, the primary purpose of the Getty is to create and operate its own programs. This distinction is an important one, because it helps to explain the courses of action taken by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts.

The Center is also unique not only in being an operating entity itself, but because it was conceived in the beginning as a program locus rather than a physical entity. Thus, it has a modest permanent staff of four professionals and draws widely on the expertise of scholars and practitioners in the field of art education and related disciplines in the arts to carry out its activities.

One assumption - one article of faith - forms the figurative cornerstone of the Center's foundation: because the arts are a repository of the highest achievements of culture, study of the arts is a principal means of understanding human experience and transmitting cultural values. No human being is truly educated without a comprehensive education in the arts.

The Center's stated mission is to improve the quality and status of arts education in America's schools. To bring about any significant change in the way the public perceives art and in the way teachers teach it, we needed a

more comprehensive understanding of how the arts are taught and why.

For more than a year we studied art education in the schools, consulting with dozens of art teachers, supervisors, principals, school board members, academics, and others. The Center found that the status of art education had declined alarmingly. Most students spend 12 years in school during which they receive some 12,000 hours of instruction in all subjects. Less than one percent of this time is spent in studying any of the art forms, and 80 percent of all students who graduate from public high schools have little, if any, instruction in the arts at all. Furthermore, although they are expected to teach art in the elementary classroom, teachers in almost half the states still do not have to take a course in art for their certification.

Moreover, arts instruction in many places has been limited to teaching technical skills for making art - not to teaching students about the historical and critical aspects of art as well. While studio-oriented art may have been a satisfying experience for a few innately gifted students, it meant that children were not receiving sufficient instruction in the cultural and historical contributions of art or in how to analyze, interpret, and value works of art. The activities in which students were engaged during their art lessons were often without substantive content. Thus, it left too many young people with the impression that art was only a production activity that had little to do with their lives - that encounters with art were elitist activities which could be appreciated only by the exceptionally talented or by those with wealth and leisure.

Art Education/March 1988 7



It followed that if the status of arts education were to be elevated in the perception of the public and in the schools, a more substantive and comprehensive approach to arts education would have to be adopted. Harold Williams, president and chief executive officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust, summed up the problem: " . . . the arts have been assigned a marginal position in today's curriculum, and art education is valued almost exclusively as a means for enhancing self-expression and creativity, rather than as an organized body of knowledge requiring the same kind of substance and intellectual rigor we expect in the sciences and the humanities."

At the outset, the Center adopted discipline-based art education (DBAE) as a viable approach to ensure a serious place in the public schools for art besides reading, writing, and arithmetic. Organized around concepts which had been circulating in the field of art education for at least twenty years, DBAE draws its content from the four interrelated disciplines: art production, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. This represents a different paradigm from that of creative self-expression which had dominated art education throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It emphasized product over process, romanticized child art, and characterized art primarily from the inside out, a process of personal self-discovery.

The DBAE approach by contrast, values the art product, uses adult models of artistic accomplishment, and treats art as a process moving from the outside in, a process of discovery about responding, understanding, and making which is "taught" and not merely "caught." DBAE may be compared with the traditional approach to instruction in the arts in its conception of the learner as a student of art whose understanding needs to be developed in several comprehensive areas. Traditional instruction, on the other hand, sees the student simply as an innately creative being who needs only models and encouragement. Center Adopts DBAE The Center's decision to adopt DBAE was based on extensive consultations with professionals and academics in the field, but it also required a leap of faith. The idea of DBAE was first developed during the 1960s by a group of leading art educators, including Manuel Barkan of Ohio State University and Elliot Eisner of Stanford University. But theory had not yet been completely developed or integrated with actual practice in the classroom.

This gap between theory and practice means that the Center, in committing its efforts to DBAE, is devoting its resources to a broad range of activities. That is, we are doing more than just building support for DBAE among educational professionals and the public; the Center is nurturing its evolution in all areas - the strengthening of theoretical underpinnings, the work of developing sound curricula, the training of teachers, and the demonstration of DBAE in classroom practice.

In a sense, the Center moved into a mildly haunted house when it adopted DBAE. Ghosts still linger in the form of misconceptions stemming from some earlier misjudgments made when the discipline-based reform movement was in its early phases. For example, early proponents once thought of bringing about change

8 Art Education/March 1988



through the introduction of "teacher-proof" curricula. This has left the impression in some minds that DBAE means imposing an inflexible, formula-like curriculum on classroom teachers. To some, this also implies that regular teachers can be used interchangeably to replace trained art teachers in the art program. There are further misgivings that a rigid set of instructional rules, carried out by an obedient but inadequately trained teacher, would squelch the development of a child's originality and creativity. There was also the fear that DBAE would eliminate art production, when, in fact, DBAE not only specifically includes this basic discipline but is designed to enhance the child's making of art by introducing new levels of skills and art appreciation.

The Center has taken the position from the beginning that there is not one prescriptive way for implementing DBAE, but that many forms of the approach will develop. There are good and practical reasons for this. For example, experience shows that a DBAE program stands the best chance of success if it is the result of a cooperative effort between school administrators, art educators, teachers, and parents, and thus it must be flexible enough to be adapted to diverse conditions on the level of individual school districts. Elliot Eisner, in his essay The Role of Discipline-Based Art Education in America's Schools, writes: "Discipline-based art education provides no set formula for success, no Betty Crocker recipe for practice. It is a set of resources developed from a set of convictions, theories and facts about how children learn, what is important to teach, and how content can be organized."

At the same time, we believe that DBAE cannot move to a more central place in a balanced school curriculum, without substantial content of its own. Moreover, that content must be based on and integrate sound theory, knowledge, and practice from the four basic disciplines in art. And this content needs to be written so that it can be taught by properly trained teachers in a sequential course of instruction. In short, DBAE programs need to have curricula of their own, with appropriate instructional materials, time for instruction, and administrative support.

But curriculum development is only one part of the Center's mission. In the beginning, the Center convened panels of distinguished art and general education experts to help identify areas where it could reasonably expect to make an impact on the quality of art education in the nation's schools. Today, the Center's programs and activities are organized in the five areas defined by those panels - public advocacy, professional training, evolution of DBAE model programs, the creation of theory and theoretical materials, and curriculum development. Public Advocacy The Center's advocacy activities are focused on improving the quality and status of art education by acting as a catalyst in building a network of DBAE advocates through meetings, conferences, publications,

-and media coverage. The Center's advocacy programs do not overlook children as one of the most important constituencies. Because television is one of the major sources of information for this group, the Center is

supporting research in the use of television to introduce greater numbers of children to the substance and excitement of art.

In 1982, when the Center was founded, relatively little research existed about programs that reflected a discipline-based orientation. What could the experiences of school districts teach us about the issues, factors, and problems that influence the development of such programs? With the help of the Rand Corporation, a national research organization that has analyzed educational change extensively in the United States, the Center identified and studied art programs in seven school districts across the country. These districts were chosen because they were integrating content from the four art disciplines.

The study revealed that while the seven district programs had enough features in common to identify them all as promising art education programs, it was clear that they all varied to suit individual district environments, and that no one program will work in every setting.

The study also taught us that three things had to happen before a change could occur through the establishment of a DBAE program. First, in order for art education to have the broad support it needs to play a basic role in the schools, a change in perspective about the value of art is required. Second, politically skilled advocates are needed to gain community support, and these advocates need, in return, a commitment from school administrators, as well as from teachers and parents. Also the quality of the program depends on the expert input from the district-level art specialist. Third, art education will have to measure up against other academic subjects; that is, school district policies will need to call for a comprehensive, sequential curriculum, in-service teacher training, and classroom review by district adminstrators.

The study report was published in 1985 under the title: Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. Since publication, the Center has disseminated more than 65,000 copies of the report, and more requests for it continue to come in weekly.

The Center followed up the study by sponsoring the "Beyond Creating Roundtable Series" in late 1985 and early 1986, a series of regional discussions held in Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, and Chicago. The purpose was to gather feedback from art and education specialists who were asked to read and react to Beyond Creating's recommendations. The Center then published a Proceedings Report on the series. Participants were strong in their support of the idea of DBAE, but also emphasized the constraints on improving the status and quality of art education and the problems facing advocates of establishing DBAE programs in the schools.

In January 1987 the Center hosted a National Invitational Conference on "Discipline-Based Art Education: What Forms Will It Take?" Twenty-nine prestigious national educational and arts education organizations cooperated in the conference, including the National Art Education Association. The conference provided a forum for four eminent keynote speakers William Bennett, United States Secretary of Education;

Art Education/March 1988 9



Ernest Boyer, President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Frank Hodsoll, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts; and Elliot Eisner, Professor of Education and Art at Stanford University - who were unanimous in expressing a commitment to bettering the place of the arts in general education in the nation's schools.

Recognizing that television is one of the most important influences on the minds of children, the Center has also joined with the National Endowment for the Arts to support the research and development of a potential TV series to introduce children to the arts. Three pilot programs are now in production, one on music, one on dance and one on the visual arts. The goal of the sponsors is to use these programs for testing how television might be used to introduce children to the arts in a compelling and substantive way. Professional Development If DBAE is to become a reality in the classroom, then professional development and training of teachers is essential. Through its second major program area the Center is addressing the needs of both inservice staff development and preservice development for new teachers. The research and development for inservice staff training is carried out under a pilot initiative in Los Angeles County called the Getty Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts. This initiative is now five years old and presently involves 21 school districts in Los Angeles.

Teachers, school administrators, and school board members attend an intensive 3-week summer staff development program. Art teachers and general classroom teachers then return to their schools where they implement a curriculum to teach a discipline-based art education program using a written, sequential curriculum of their choice. So far, the program seems to be proving itself as an effective model for initiating and sustaining a DBAE program for grades K-6.

Regional Institutes will open their doors in summer 1988 to develop inservice programs at other sites around the country. Like the Center's program in Los Angeles, some of these will focus on the elementary classroom teacher, while others will be directed at elementary and/or secondary art specialists. These Regional Institutes will be designed and operated by consortia consisting of school districts, teacher training institutions, and museums and other community cultural organizations. These consortia will use the Los Angeles inservice model as a point of departure for their own designs.

The Center's research on university and college art education courses and requirements reveal that art teachers are now required to take more than 60-75 percent of their course work in studio production and the remainder in the other three disciplines. Because of this imbalance, art specialists are generally not well prepared to teach content from art history, art criticism, and aesthetics.

In late summer 1987, as part of its preservice training research and development, the Center hosted an eight- day seminar for faculty teams from 15 universities from across the country to explore how their teacher training programs might include the tenets of discipline-based art

education. The teams included two art education academics and two academics from studio art, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics.

The Center now is supporting projects suggested by some of the university faculty teams to review and revise the content of some of their courses and their degree requirements for both art and general education teachers. The results of these preservice projects will be published and distributed through reports, seminars, and conferences for teacher-educators throughout the country. Development of DBAE Theory At the same time that the Center is nurturing the application of DBAE in the classroom through its research and development projects, it is also encouraging and supporting the development of the theoretical underpinnings of DBAE, the third of the Center's program areas. It is true that the concepts and general outlines of DBAE have been around for many years, but the scholarly work of articulating theory has not proceeded in any systematic or thorough manner.

The summer 1987 issue of The Journal of Aesthetic Education contains ten papers commissioned by the Center and written by respected art educators and representatives of the art disciplines examining the antecedents of DBAE, addressing the contributions that the various foundational disciplines make to the education of young people and describing the characteristics of DBAE.

Reflecting our recognition that developing the theoretical underpinnings of DBAE is essential, the Center sponsored its first seminar devoted to theoretical issues confronting art education. In May 1987, 42 academic art educators met in Cincinn ati for discussion and debate. This seminar demonstrated how much more systematic discussion about DBAE theory needs to occur if we are to build this conceptual house on a strong foundation. The discussions were spirited, intense, and produced many excellent recommendations, including some regarding practical applications of DBAE. Even more important, the results of these discussions will provide a rich vein of provocative themes and research questions for graduate dissertations for years to come. Proceedings were published in January of this year.

Another project devoted to developing DBAE theory is the Center's series of occasional papers, the first of which was published in 1987. It was written by Harry S. Broudy, Professor of Philosophy of Education, Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana, on The Role of Imagery in Learning. Model Programs Classroom practice is another matter, and under the auspices of model programs, the fourth of the Center's program areas, we have funded nine school districts to enable them to plan and four to implement DBAE, which can serve to demonstrate how instruction can be applied in the classroom and how it will affect students' understanding of art. Model programs are vital to forming links between theory and practice for a wide variety of settings. Some of these district programs funded by the Center already have art specialists in place, while others rely on generalist teachers to develop




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programs. Many have already held staff development institutes, and several are working closely with university faculties in their communities. Curriculum Development Curriculum development, the fifth program area, is one of the Center's most important objectives. Clearly, DBAE is not likely to be adopted on a wide scale without curricula that integrate the content from the four art disciplines. It is futile to leave teachers to struggle with areas they find too abstract or abstruse for educational application. They need curricula and instructional materials to back up philosophy.

In 1987, the Center convened a panel of experts including curriculum specialists, art educators with curriculum development experience and a representative from a major textbook publisher. We asked them to help us clarify the issues and processes involved in curriculum development and identify ways we might stimulate the design of DBAE curricula. The likeliest option for the Center, we found, would be to support art teachers working in collaboration with art education curriculum specialists. This approach would enable the development of model units which could be disseminated in a workbook format - "works in progress" - illustrating DBAE lessons.

In the summer of 1988, the Center will establish its first Curriculum Development Institute. Through such Institutes, we hope to build a critical mass of art supervisors with expertise in DBAE and curriculum; produce model DBAE units which can be used to encourage the adoption of DBAE and local curriculum development efforts; create prototype materials to encourage commercial publishers to enter the visual art education market; and develop materials for dissemination and discussion in the field and at upcoming conferences.

Obviously, a lot has occurred in the short life of the Center. The network of DBAE advocates has grown enormously since 1982. Not all have agreed with our

directions or policies - DBAE is often a controversial subject, but we have tried to welcome diverse opinions and examine new evidence with a rational and impartial mind. Without new and sometimes conflicting ideas, we can never achieve our objective of improving the status and quality of art education in the schools.

Today, we believe it is demonstrably evident that the discipline-based approach is becoming accepted nationwide as the new standard for art education. Support has come from prestigious national organizations including The College Board, Council of Chief State School Officers, National Endowment for the Arts, National Art Education Association, National School Boards Association, and U.S. Department of Education. State departments of education, art education scholars and practitioners, teachers, school administrators, school boards, and parents have become enthusiastic partisans of DBAE. Significantly, the goals of the Center for DBAE are virtually identical to the aims stated by the National Art Education Association for achieving "Quality Art Education."

There is still much to be done in all areas. The theoretical constructs and implementation practices continue to evolve but are not yet well enough developed to encourage broad-scale adoption of DBAE. The real work in curriculum development is just beginning.

What is certain is that the Getty Center for Education in the Arts continues to commit itself to elevating the status and quality of art education in our communities and schools, and to building the broadest possible base of support in order for these changes to be deep and enduring. As we continue to support and nurture the evolution of DBAE, we look forward to working together with those who share these goals. O

Leilani Lattin Duke is Director, The Getty Centerfor Education in the Arts, LosAngeles, California.




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Discipline-Based Art Education || The Getty Center for Education in the Arts and Discipline-Based Art Education