Art in Education Identity and Practice [Hardcover]

Distinctive and unique in its approach, this book opens up art education to the broader field of social enquiry into practice, subjectivity and identity. It draws upon important developments in contemporary philosophy and the social sciences and applies this to the professional field of art in education. It opens new perspectives for teachers, teacher educators and student teachers.

MEMORY SEED My introduction to teaching art began in September 1971 when I took up a post as art teacher in a secondary school in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Apart from my desire to survive and establish myself amongst students and staff I remember holding firm ideas about what I should be teaching. In relation to drawing and painting I had clear expectations concerning practice and representation. Students art work which did not correspond to these I rather naively) considered as weak and in need of correction. I assumed wrongly that when students were making paintings and drawings from observation of objects, people or landscape, they should be aiming to develop specific representational skills associated with the idea of rendering a reasonable likeness. I was reasonably familiar with the development of Western art and different forms of visual representation and expression and I knew, for example, that the projection system perspective is only one and not the correct rep- sentational system for mapping objects and their spatial relations as viewed from a particular point into corresponding relations in a painting or drawing. Nevertheless I still employed this mode of projection as an expectation or a criterion of judgement when teaching my students.Acknowledgements. About the Author. Introduction. Memory Seed. Theories of Learning. Learning Theory in Art Education. Representation and Signification. Identity and Difference. The Idea of Experience. Outline of the Book. Part One: Interpretation and Practice. 1. Semiotics and Hermeneutics. Introduction. Semioticl£M