Art and Art History

A holistic education linked to creativity, innovation, critical thinking and local/ global citizenship is increasingly marginalized in the United States as schools continue to struggle with the impact of high-stakes testing regimes. In particular, urban youths’ access to an education that furthers their ability to choose lives they have reason to value, are circumscribed. Current discussions around the skills and capabilities necessary for youth to graduate and be equipped for meaningful lives beyond high school are aligned with research on the benefits of arts education. This mixed-methods exploratory study uses aspects of Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach to frame and examine a range of capabili- ties fostered through student engagement with arts education opportunities, what we refer to as arts pathways, inside of five small arts-focused high schools in New York City, US.

Social justice, in its broadest sense, is about equal rights and opportunities for all. But understandings of rights and opportunities vary widely, depending upon how we are situated socially, politically, economically, and culturally. In education, social justice is not simply the absence of injustice but also the need to recognize and enact teaching and learning that promotes a deeper understanding of ourselves and our students in relation to the broader social and cultural landscape. This article argues that, given the growing diversity of our society, it is imperative for current and future teachers to find ways of embodying, implementing, and assessing social justice practices in art classrooms. The author's developed, taught, and evaluated a social justice based art education course with a service learning component for undergraduate art education students. Through their experience they discovered that the capabilities students brought to the classroom directly influenced the ways in which they engaged with and put into practice the social justice course material.

Across the nation, urban school districts struggle to raise often abysmally low high school graduation rates. New York City, with a four-year graduation rate of 57 percent, is no exception. Yet, some high schools in New York, as elsewhere, succeed beyond expectations in bringing students with low academic skills and high needs to graduation in four years, followed by enrollment in college.
This report describes a follow-up qualitative study, conducted in 2006 by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, of a small group of New York City high schools that, according to 2001 data, were “beating the odds” in preparing low-performing ninth- grade students for timely high school grad- uation and college going. The thirteen schools included two long-established technical-vocational schools, nine small high schools created between 1993 and 1998, and two high schools created in the reconstitution of large, failing high schools.

This article explores Nussbaum's notion of the importance of the arts and humanities as they relate to global citizenship and education. Nussbaum proposes three capacities or capabilities that are, above all, 'essential to the cultivation of humanity in today's interlocking world' - critical thinking, world citizenship and imaginative understanding. The author of this article looks on the one had at an obsessive concentration on reading and numeracy programmes, and on the other at an Los Angeles arts education programme '10,000 Kites' which successfully combined a capability focus and social inter-action across cultural faultlines.

Increasingly, education policy makers understand the importance of students and families having access to a range of high quality educational opportunities inside and outside of school, 365 days a year. This paper explores the concept of multiple pathways in arts education to further conceptualize and build upon such opportunities, inside and outside the regular school day. Using a mixed-methods approach, we examine the arts pathways schools provide for their students, the relationships that exist between pathways and academic benefits, and the work of cultural and art partners in supporting pathways. Implications for future research and arts education policy are addressed.

The College Pathway series grew out of the findings in Beating the Odds, a study of thirteen high-performing NYC high schools by Carol Ascher and Cindy Maguire for AISR. Each of the schools admitted ninth-graders with high poverty rates and far-below-average reading and math scores but produced four-year graduation rates and college acceptance above the district average, and well above other high schools serving similar students. To help schools benefit from what these schools have learned, AISR has developed a set of tools that schools can use to assess their status in the key component areas and to strengthen their practices to put all their students on a path-way to college. The full set of tools are available at: www.annenberginstitute.org/Products/BTO.php

Since 2009, my work has focused on global collaborations with populations in conflict-affected environments.  Through respect, open dialogue, and long-term cooperation, projects are co-created and produced with local partners including children and youth. A core extension is sharing these experiences with a broader global audience, including those close to home. In 2013, colleagues and I developed and taught a class titled Art and Human Rights: Western Sahara.  The course provides an example of how to enact pedagogy that is “critical, democratic, moral and ethical—as much as it is about ‘key skills’ or ‘deep’ individual learning” (Walker, 2004, p. 131).  These ideals stem from the perspective shared by Walker (2004) and others that we need to  find ways of talking about and actualizing such education pedagogy.

ArtsAction Group is a non-profit focused on global partnerships with populations in
conflict-affected environments. As international community-based collective, we are committed to facilitating visual and performing arts initiatives with children and youth across these settings. Our work is grounded in an ethic of care and respect, where open dialogue, and long-term cooperation are essential to the partnerships. All projects are co-created with local stakeholders on the ground and both process and final product are foregrounded and shared with a broader global audience. In this chapter we provide an overview of the organization, discussion of the theoretical approaches that guide our work as well as some examples illustrating our work in action on the ground, specifically Sri Lanka, Kosovo, and Algeria/Western Sahara.

Cultivating systemic thinking and critical exploration in post-secondary art education programs concerned with peace and social justice is expressed through a multitude of practices. This chapter provides an analysis of and argument for peace and social justice art education pedagogy grounded in aspects of Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach and Kester’s notion of dialogical aesthetics. Illustrations of best practices are provided. Art education communities understand the range of interpersonal, sociopolitical, and economic issues generated by the impact of contemporary imagery and the values inherent in such representations. We also understand that such imagery profoundly influences “student identity, notions of citizenship, [and] beliefs about democracy” (Freedman 2003, p 94). Post-secondary art education concerned with building a culture of peace consciously focuses on these issues through curriculum and pedagogy, promoting a deeper understanding of one’s self as well as one’s self in relation to the social and cultural landscape we live in.

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