As in all teaching, we want to avoid what Paulo Friere called “banking” techniques of education in his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Banking is simply giving information to students and expecting them to consume and mimic it. This isn’t really learning, and it’s certainly not respecting the students as learners. This type of teaching isn’t as obvious in art as it is in other classes since the actual practice of techniques is inherent to art class, but negative and banking aspects of teaching can still exist in the art room.
What do we most commonly think of when we think of kids art projects? Especially regarding elementary ages? This answer will vary from person to person but I’m willing to guess that most of you have seen similar to what I’ve seen along the walls of the nursery school I worked in, or the kids I nanny bring home from school. While each project is made by a different child, they are all essentially the same. Rows of seasonal tree projects look great down a hallway with cotton ball snow and construction paper cherry blossoms, but are students truly experiencing and learning what it means to create art when they’re given a project with such predetermined end results?
This was explored by art educators Jessica Hamlin and Joe Fusaro in their article “Contemporary Strategies for Creative and Critical Teaching in the 21st Century” where they explored different wants to enhance the creative and critical skills students were developing through art. One of their explorations centers around the realization that having predetermined end results that students were supposed to recreate they were losing the decision-making part of making art.
Hamlin and Fusaro discuss how for artists, art is often messy and experimental, and even for artists who focus on the end result, the process is deeply important. They compare studios to laboratories for “experimentation… and the occasional disaster”. By giving students a clear and required end result, and a step by step process to get there, we’re turning our
classrooms away from their true potential to be a studio or “laboratory” and keeping students trapped in just a classroom where they simply follow instructions and repeat what they’re told to do. Even though a creation might come out of the end, it’s still a banking process that creates it.
In my last post, we saw some of the skills that art education has the potential to develop, with and without attention to Critical Pedagogy. Problem-solving is one of the biggest factors in developing those skills which is why art is so great since art-making is the process of problem-solving. When we expect students to check off instructions 1-10 and make the same piece of art as every other student, we’ve solved all the problems for them. They don’t need to think or experiment, just mindlessly follow instructions. We think teaching art is inherently progressive and creative, but when we fall into the trap of these checkbox projects it’s no better than classes where students are expected to memorize and repeat information without applying any actual thought. Our students also lose the communication skills and critical viewing skills of critique and understanding and discussing each other’s art. There’s no need to think about others perspectives in their art if students are all making the same thing.
I hope this resonates with you, but I also expect you have a lot of questions. Sure, we would all love to have a class full of independent and creative artists making their own deep meaningful work, I doubt any art teacher wouldn’t, but who has the time? It’s much easier to plan one lesson for every student then individualize, especially when you already have too many students in each class, and probably too many classes. Maybe you’re already supplementing your own supplies out of pocket, how can you afford all this “experimentation”? Or maybe you just have too many students who insist they aren’t “good at art” and it’s like pulling teeth to get them to make ANYTHING much less making them take an active role in the creative process. I wish I had perfect solutions to all these challenges, I don’t, but I do have some. The next post will address how critical art education can practically be brought into the classroom. Teaching isn’t easy, and good teaching is even harder, but the more art educators actively integrate Critical Pedagogy into their teaching practice the more solutions we’re going to be able to develop and the more powerful art education will become.