Drawing, painting, sculpting with clay, these are the skills we typically think of as the foundations of art education. Art skills are essential, but art class can teach much more than just how to draw well. Art education can play a pivotal role in the development of creative and critical thinking skills and dispositions. These skills are best developed in a classroom environment based in Critical Pedagogy practices as defined by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel in their book “An Urgency of Teachers”, and the environment of art class is uniquely well suited to integrating those practices. The problem-solving and critically-observant nature of art creates a strong foundation to build critical education on while also being free of many of the barriers that teachers of other subjects may face.
When students are so often expected to accept, memorize, and regurgitate information, it’s essential teachers take every opportunity to allow them to think independently by questioning and exploring. It’s then important for art teachers to take full advantage of the opportunity art education gives them to expand their students’ ability and willingness to think critically and creatively. To do this well we have to understand the benefits we see from art education, and why they occur, so we can then look at how we can build our own teaching practices to best serve the students, whether they will be artists or not.
Critical pedagogy as discussed by Morris and Stommel is based on Paulo Freire’s work in his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Broken down simply it has two parts, teaching students how to think instead of what to think, and fully respecting students as intelligent individuals who should have agency in their learning. This means making a lot of space in the classroom for students to talk and ask questions and for the teacher to be willing to be challenged by the students. The power structure between students and teachers needs to be broken down so that students are helping lead the learning with their inquiry. To do this teachers need to be willing to listen to the students’ ideas, and needs, and admit when they are wrong or don’t know. In her online seminar Culturally Responsive Teaching in the Art Room, educator and artist Flavia Zuñiga-West, shares the importance of having students “co-create” the rules and guidelines of the classroom. This allows them to express their
needs, feel heard and cared about, and actually be invested in the rules resulting in students holding themselves and each other accountable. In this structure, Zuñiga-West explains the “Teacher is not a dictator, but a collaborator”. This practice certainly applies to a critically pedagogical classroom, but it’s also important to apply co-creation to the learning practice. By inviting students to participate in what they’re learning instead of just passing down instruction they can explore ideas and be invested in what they are learning and creating instead of just memorizing and trying to fulfill assignments for a grade.
Of course allowing students to explore their interests and take an active role in their learning probably sounds great to most people, but I expect many teachers would read this and laugh at how unrealistic the idea is. A class full of students with different interests, mandatory curriculum, and tests their kids have to pass, all take the freedom of inquiry and exploration away from the teachers as much as from the students. This is why it’s so important for art teachers to recognize the opportunity they have! Art is all about exploring and expressing interests and ideas. Since talking and working can happen simultaneously it has the most freedom for discussion, and there’s no standardized test to make students cram for. Art is a critical pedagogy dream.
If art is already so great at developing critical thinking and the underlying skills to support it (and I’m going to tell you why it is in my next post), what’s the point of Critical Art Education? Certainly art education can already be shown to have a lot of benefits, but we should see these as the foundation of what truly great art education can look like, not the finished work. If it’s already good, a little extra intentionality can make it incredibly powerful. Without looking at how creative and critical thinking can be intentionally fostered through art-making, all the extra benefits of art are side-effects instead of intended results. This means their effect is going to vary more based on students’ investment in art, and the work won’t be done to help students who may struggle with art skills still benefit. And just because making art is great doesn’t mean everything about how it’s taught is great. If we look at the what, why, and how, of the benefits of art education and applying critical pedagogy, we can focus on what’s working, get rid of what isn’t, and maybe even develop whole new ways of teaching art and creating critical thinkers.