The Visual and Material Culture of Art Educators

I spent some productive time last week in the PSU Library Special Collections taking a second look at Brent Wilson's collection of children's drawings following last Wednesday's lively class discussion in A ED 212 of Blandy and Bolin’s (2012) article Looking At, Engaging More: Approaches for Investigating Material Culture and juxtaposing Weber & Mitchell's (2008) Imagining, keyboarding, and posting identities: Young people and new media technologies discussed in A ED 211 last Thursday. These articles and our discussions prompted me to recollect my own notions of the visual and material culture of art educators and teacher identity. Specifically, I was thinking about the notions I had as a pre-service art educator about what my classroom should look like, what kinds of artworks I would teach my students to make, and how those two expectations ended up being in tension with the reality of my teaching experiences. Further complicating this tension (I will call this the visual culture of art educators) is the fact that I have very few examples of student artwork created in my classrooms to verify my discussion of this tension between expectation and outcome (I will call this the material culture of art educators). This lack of material artifacts from my public school teaching is the result of several decisions and life events that I will discuss later. First of all though, I would like to share some images that prompted my recollection and contemplation. 

This is the call number for the PSU library
collection box containing Brent Wilson's
collected child artworks that I explored. 

 
I began browsing the PSU Art Education collections with the intent of collecting a series of images to share with my classmates in the PSU graduate course A ED 541: Theories of Child Art and Children's Culture. I recalled seeing some images drawn by a child named Andrew Stumbo in the late 1970's through early 1980's in Wilson & Wilson's (2010) textbook Teaching Children to Draw (2nd ed.) and I wanted to take a closer look at those images. Full disclosure, I was fascinated by the images because I am a music lover, I married into a musical family, and our family visual art making is influenced by music. I have also, over the years, received many artworks as gifts from students who were also influenced by music and created artworks inspired by musicians or music videos. With all that in mind, I set out to find more of Andy's KISS drawings and to think about how visual art inspired by music is and has been important to my experiences with teaching, my experiences in creating visual art, and my experiences in reflecting on the visual and material culture of art educators. Without further ado, here is a selection of the artworks, all drawn by Andrew Stumbo, I found in the collection:

This drawing by Andrew Stumbo is one of the few signed and dated works in the collection.

Following the exploration of Andy's drawings I was taken back to my pre-service art education training. I attended a small private college in central Texas and our Art Education program at the time of my pre-service training used Viktor Lowenfeld's Creative and Mental Growth (8th ed.). Both the textbook and my professors downplayed the importance of visual culture in child art making. As I began my student teaching I realized that it was difficult, if not impossible, to make students remove visual culture references from their classroom artworks. This troubled me as I thought it indicated I was not shaping up to be a good art teacher. Even more worrisome, students would make me artworks as gifts chock full of visual culture references including musicians, bands, cartoons, video games, and other non-Lowenfeldian approved images. I wondered what to do with these images given my pre-conceived notion of the ideal art classroom. That classroom looked something like this:

An art classroom devoid of popular visual culture.
Source: http://www.sbdawards.com/gallery/imgDisplay.php?img=../submit/projImages/interior_art_classroom.jpg

In reality, over time I grew to cherish these images students shared with me. After I was hired to teach art at a middle school I happily hung art gifts from students up in my less-than-perfectly-organized classroom. (I have no photographs of my pop culture decorated art classroom, but a quick Google search will reveal that most productive and happy K-12 art classrooms DO NOT look like the one above when in use.) These images changed my notion of what a classroom should look like and what kinds of artworks I encouraged my students to make and analyze. I gave up on the idea that popular visual culture was a negative influence on my students, not because I was familiar at that time with Wilson & Wilson's thesis on popular visual culture and copying, but because I recognized that my students were far more likely to enjoy learning about art, talking about art, and making art if they felt that the art they were learning about was relevant to their lived experiences. Essentially the kinds of artworks my students created for their own enjoyment changed the way I understood art education, my role as a teacher, and the influence of life experience on the creative process. My own sketchbooks through the years also reflect these popular visual culture influences:

A drawing I made in 2011 inspired by SNL's
Lonely Island music video "Like A Boss"

Unfortunately, my narrative reflection on the PSU collection and my public school art teaching experiences has a sad ending. Through the course of several moves across the U.S. I shed many items in my possession that I considered (at the time) non-essential. Our family moved from Texas to Florida in 2008, back to Texas in 2009, then to Pennsylvania in 2011. Somewhere along the way I discarded a large box with artworks given to me by former students. I have a scant number of works of art given to me by students that were stored in a portfolio case I kept. None of the works I kept directly reflect the tremendous influence musicians and music videos had on my students. I found myself wondering why I hadn't kept these fantastic works of art. Why did I keep images of Kirby and Sonic and throw away images of Blink 182 and Britney Spears? 

An artwork given to me by a former student
declaring that "Kirby is Art"

This question returns to my notion of the material culture of art education. This process of exploring the PSU archive has helped me realize (too late) that the important material culture of art education is not only USB drives filled with old lesson plans or photographs of students receiving awards at local art competitions. Continued learning is facilitated by those artworks your students give you. Keeping an archive of student artworks created for assignments, for fun, and for you as gifts give you a broader picture of what art education is REALLY about. Art education is convoluted - it's a combination of "official" and emergent curriculum, threaded together by the lived (or imagined) experiences of students, teachers, pop culture icons, and myriad other living and invented entities. Keeping ALL these artworks also holds the potential for other art educators to learn from you and your students. I didn't save much space in the moving truck by throwing away some of these drawings. Please keep this in mind if you are no longer teaching and you're thinking about what you should do with your student work, currently teaching art or will be teaching soon. Don't throw things out that you can't replace. On that note, I am grateful to Brent Wilson for collecting, keeping, and donating Andy's (and many others') artworks. Without these artworks my entire recollection of these teaching moments and the importance of visual and material culture of art education would not have occurred. Thanks, Brent!

References:

Blandy, D., & Bolin, P. E. (2012). Looking at, engaging more: Approaches for investigating material culture. Art Education, 65(4), 40-46. 

Weber, S., & Mitchell, C. (2008). Imagining, keyboarding, and posting identities: Young people and new media technologies. In D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, identity, and digital media (pp. 25-48). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Wilson, M., & Wilson, B. (2010). Teaching Children to Draw (2nd ed.) Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, Incorporated.