AED 811: Future Vision for Art Education

In the twentieth century, literacy and social skills were necessary to fully access and move upwards within the world, specifically within your own education and career. In the twenty-first century culture, a new literacy in technology pulls people through their past values and into a new set of structures for interaction and education. As new generations are born into this and raised with a device [gripped tightly] in their hands and the screen’s blue luminescence forever falling across their faces, it becomes an innate adaption to human existence, interaction, and ways of learning while older [archaic when possessed alone] skills have been absorbed into a fresh technological scope. Here, technology takes over simplistic roles and responsibilities that mankind used to manage, and we hold a higher responsibility of managing the technology we've created.

In the year 2014, I began teaching in the public schools of Pittsburgh, PA. I would use an Elmo to demonstrate, a chalkboard to write on, a wall to project images upon and my smart phone to track time. Technology was pretty similar when I was getting my high school education with the exception of usage of the old-old school projectors with transparencies. It is now 2035, and I am now [45] about the age my parents were when they first used a computer. I have been teaching the arts for twenty years now, and slowly, traditional education was taken out of a physical classroom and no longer exists, unless you pay for a traditional private option. Students no longer sit in a pre-arranged environment and are not bound to the factory-esque bell schedules or traditional rules for a lecture-style class. Our computers and devices now connect us to the entire public education system without having to leave our homes; students are able to optimize their educational experience by sitting comfortably where they please and engaging when is optimal. Every child in the nation is entitled to a premium educational laptop and access to worldwide wifi to connect to the U.S. [E]school system; economic disparity no longer plays a role in your access to an equal education or technology.

In my online classroom, I deliver information to my students through video podcasts that are based in a “sketchcast” style. I used to teach the same lesson over and over again with different sets of children; I now get to convey my lesson through an artfully produced video with my voice, drawings, and written notes that students can pause, rewind, and replay. Students produce works of art using apps like iBrush technology to create drawings and paintings on their device that take up only the space of “the cloud.” Media-based art units have students repurpose and edit existing pictures and videos from our visual culture using photo and video editing applications like Photoshop and iMovie. It is the ultimate objective of art education to teach students extensive ways to have autonomy and sovereignty over the technology that is now the centerpiece of our existence. Our society has done incredible things to conserve our finite resources by changing the way we produce educational artifacts.

In the age of the technological freedom, the world and subworlds of difference and culture at our fingertips allows for significantly extensive ways of acknowledging and affirming issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and status among my exploring student artists. Existing on the internet as a transient and changeable avatar is far different than physically occupying a space in a uniform with no self-expression or acceptance of individuality. Traditional schooling always perpetuated and silenced differences among students. Art education and history was almost always restricted to "school-appropriate subject matter" that blocked a lot of perspectives from being seen, internalized, and understood by students. Luckily, access to the web allows for students to study beyond the textbooks or materials that were provided; as the teacher, I have autonomy in sharing diverse perspectives and resources within the curricular framework that students may also autonomously contribute to via the online conversation. A major part of the art curriculum that has finally been appropriately adapted is talking about real societal issues and current events including politics, religion, and environmental concerns within the classroom. How do we ever change our world for the better if we only look at the past and fail to interpret and take action in the present?

The contemporary student gets to participate in class through interactive webquests and games online that develop their artistic concepts, projects, collaboration, and critiquing of their emerging works with peers socially with the online platform; socializing, designing, and playing is fostered through the use of the Secondlife platform within my art classroom. Tasks are set up to meet, develop and advance students of all abilities using a spiral framework; "The spiral curriculum is the curricular model best suited to gamification as pedagogy because it allows students to learn and practice basic skills in order to master advanced tasks (Han, 2015)." I am fortunate to oversee these interactions and provide students with direction when they find themselves at a standstill. With the fun and interactive styles of teaching and learning we have adapted with the changing technological age, students get to interact engagingly and have self-driven autonomy within their education in a way children haven't in past generations. Each unit is designed to "challenge students to think" beyond their preexisting conceptions of the world and art (Dodge, 2001). These adaptations to learning have positively affected attendance, rates of graduation, and overall academic performance.

Art exhibitions are no longer a tedious process that occupy physical space or time; students use social media platforms like online blogs, Instagram, and Pinterest to share their artwork with their classmates and the [entire] world. Critiques are engaging and less intimidating with the use of Find Cards to help students closely observe and examine what they are viewing (Keifer-Boyd, 2014). It's critical to note that we are breaking from past paradigms for critique that were teacher-driven and instead embrace artist centered practices explained by William Catling in Judy Chicago's lecture series at the Pennsylvania State University (2014). In the past, critiques were critical in the sense that artists were put down and there wasn't enough attention on intention and growth. Creation is meant to be inspiring, not belittling. Technology has taken artistic viewing and sharing from a small private opportunity to a public affair where makers become consumers of art and the viewers themselves create and share their inspirations and reactions.

The students I teach don’t just “naturally” use an iPad or other comparable technologies to entertain or socialize; these devices and the lives they lead are entirely intertwined. Stylistically and culturally through technology, young individuals have a platform to develop their entire life’s identity and purpose through education. Their conscious beings are dictated by how they react and express political and social values within the new mediums of social media. These techies [those born with technological savvy] track every second of their physical location and all of their interactions with the world including the food they consume and the things they smile and frown at. Techies track each footstep they take, test their pulses, check their stress levels, and give input and ratings on the internet of every experience they have and place they go. Humans in the age of contemporary technology no longer worry about who has their data and what it's being used for; this is a given part of our consumer and political culture. This is the age where we literally become one with our technology while still having to maintain control of what we have created. Learning in an online classroom is just one piece of the technologically-woven puzzle of human existence in the age of technology [Year 2035].

References

Chicago, J. (2014). Transforming Curriculum. Retrieved April 23, 2018, from http://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/dialogue/transforming-curriculum/

Five Rules for Writing a Great WebQuest by Bernie Dodge published in Learning and Leading with Technology (May 2001) is very helpful in understanding the conceptual basis of WebQuests.

Han, H.-C. (2015). Gamified pedagogy: From gaming theory to creating a self-motivated learning environment in studio art. Studies in Art Education, 56(3), 257-267.

Keifer-Boyd, K., & Kraft, M. L. (2014). IDEA<—>Empowerment through difference <—>Find Card strategies. In S. Malley (Ed.), 2013 VSA Intersections: Arts and Special Education Exemplary Programs and Approaches (pp. 147-158). Washington, DC: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.