imagine
A POSTMODERN ART EDUCATION FOR GRADES K-2 Leslie Gates : EDCI 602 : Fall 2008
The need for “imagine”
Many of this semester’s authors have argued for a paradigm shift in art education. None of them offered concrete examples of what this new way of teaching and learning would look like for our youngest students. • Anderson states that despite the fact that the current practice of art criticism involves deconstruction and recontextualization, “children do not have that cultural base. The reason they are in school is to acquire it. Before they can deconstruct and recontextualize cultural information, they need to construct it, contextualize it, and integrate its meanings” (Anderson, 1993, p. 201). • “Evidence of a postmodern approach is more prevalent in the scholarly literature than in actual practice in the classroom, since formalist theories and practices that characterized the modernist period are still the most popular approach to teaching art.” (Wolcott, 1996, p. 73).
• After describing a course called The Visual Society, Hicks makes the following statement in a footnote, "It was very successful. Content and methodologies are effective at all levels down to third grade" (Hicks, 2001, p. 10)
For my final project, I investigated the literature to make sense of the proposed paradigm shift (specifically related to postmodernism) with the hopes of uncovering implications for elementary art educators. In the rest of this document, I attempt to communicate my findings in a way that is useful for the elementary art educator.
Contents The need for “imagine” What is postmodern? Implications for the classroom Examples for K-2
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