Real Lives Now: Narratives of Art Educators and 21st-Century Learning

REAL LIVES NOW:

Narratives of Art Educators and 21st-Century Learning

By Jeffrey L. Broome and Renee Sandell

About NAEA

The National Art Education Association is the world’s largest professional visual arts education association and a leader in educational research, policy, and practice for art education. NAEA’s mission is to advance visual arts education to fulfill human potential and promote global understanding.

Membership includes elementary and secondary art teachers, middle school and high school students in the National Art Honor Society programs, artists, administrators, museum educators, arts council staff, university professors, and students from the United States and 25 other countries. It also includes publishers, manufacturers, and suppliers of art materials; parents; students; retired art educators; and others concerned about quality art education in our schools.

National Art Education Association

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (includes photography, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the author and publisher.

To order a copy of this book or obtain additional information, contact National Art Education Association: www.arteducators.org or 800-299-8321.

ISBN: 978-1-890160-76-0

Dedication

In memory of Nancy Crawford and Jean Price.

For Monica, Mackenzie, and Carson. JLB

In memory of Steven H. Sandell. RYS

For Simone, Jacob, Shane, Justin, and Drew. RYS

Table of Contents

Dedication iv

Acknowledgments vi

Foreword Tom Anderson viii

Section One: Introduction

Chapter 1 | Telling Impactful Stories in a 21st-Century Context 2

Chapter 2 | Revisiting the Original Real Lives Participants: Where Are They Now? 10

Section Two: First-Person Narrative Inquiry and Case Studies

Chapter 3 | Xiomara Romine: Teaching Design by Design—Digital Media at a Title I

Middle School 20

Chapter 4 | Debi Barrett-Hayes: Studio Habits and Advanced Placement at a

University Laboratory School 30

Chapter 5 | Maria Cuzzocrea Burke: Art Integration and Multidisciplinary Connections

in a Net-Zero-Energy Elementary School 40

Chapter 6 | Cheryl Mravec: Superheroes, Sidekicks, and Supervision in Suburbia 46

Chapter 7 | Deborah L. Gaston: Inspiring Visitor Interactions Within the Feminist Lens

of Gallery Interpretive Programs 54

Chapter 8 | Nancy Crawford: Preparing Students for Art School and Their

Future Careers 62

Chapter 9 | Lucia Herrera: Teaching Art in a Migrant Farmworkers’ Community 72

Chapter 10 | Elizabeth Stuart Whitehead: Supporting Instruction and Mentoring

Art Teachers in a Large Metropolitan School District 80

Section Three: Closing Thoughts

Chapter 11 | Reflections on Art Education and Change 92

Appendix A: Semistructured Interview Guide 99

Appendix B: Study Guide—Prompts for Concluding Reflections 101

About the Authors 103

References 104

Acknowledgments

Although there are many people we must acknowledge for their assistance and encouragement in completing this book, we absolutely must begin by thanking all of the art educators who participated in this project and shared their unique professional stories: Elizabeth Willett, Donald Sheppard, Maria Sarduy, John Ingebritson, Jean Price, Xiomara Romine, Debi Barrett-Hayes, Maria Cuzzocrea Burke, Cheryl Mravec, Deborah Gaston, Nancy Crawford, Lucia Hererra, Melvin Twine, Resha Jarvis-Garay, Christina Kunze, Dalitso Chinkhota, and Elizabeth Stuart Whitehead. Each of these participants spent their valuable time answering our numerous questions, and we could not be more grateful to those who graciously welcomed us into their work environments to observe them while they were teaching. Quite simply, this book would not have been possible without their cooperation, flexibility, and hard work.

Similarly, it is inconceivable this book could have come to fruition without its inspirational predecessor, Tom Anderson’s Real Lives: Art Teachers and the Cultures of School (2000a). We are forever indebted to Tom, on multiple levels that are too numerous to count. Aside from writing the exemplary book that motivated this one, he was instrumental in this project from beginning to end; he gave us permission to write a sequel, participated in the early stages of its development, granted use of adapted versions of his interview questions, reviewed the finished work, and provided the foreword. We sincerely thank Tom for his inspiration, guidance, and steadfast mentorship, and we are forever grateful to extend his scholarly legacy.

In helping us locate and contact the participants, we are also indebted to many professionals: NaJuana Lee Johnson (Fulton County Schools, Georgia), Amy Freedman Peck (North Ridgeville City Schools, Ohio/Legacy Traditional School, Arizona), Rita Irwin (University of British Columbia), Susan Graulty (Pajaro County Unified School District, California), and Lisa Stuart Whitehead (Prince George’s County Public Schools, Maryland). Without these contacts, this book would have looked vastly different. Amy Freedman Peck and her extended family (Patrick, Mike, Serina, and both sets of children) receive additional gratitude for providing hospitality and lodging during field visits to Ohio.

The publication of this book would not have been possible without the early support of Deborah Reeve, former Executive Director of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), and the sustained support of the current director, Mario R. Rossero. We would like to thank Krista Brooke and the entire NAEA publications staff—particularly Jamie Klinger-Krebs, Lynn Ezell, Janice Hughes, Katherine Holland, Sharon Sanchez, and Elizabeth Snow—for their patience and guidance, and also the Professional Materials Committee for favorably reviewing our initial book proposal. We appreciate the work of Lorraine Sobson for her efforts in copyediting and providing useful suggestions that led to a restructuring of format for Chapter 7.

For their assistance reviewing specific chapters and providing us with valuable feedback, we thank Jackie Henson-Dacey (State College of Florida/Sarasota County Schools), Alexandra Allen (SUNY Buffalo State College), Anthony Woodruff (McCracken County Schools, Kentucky), Kit Grauer (Associate Professor Emerita, University of British Columbia), Enid Zimmerman (Professor Emerita, Indiana University), Konrad Breuers, and Kayla Preston (Langley School District, British Columbia). Additional and special thanks are due to Konrad Breuers and Darci Trimmer for their contributions to specific chapters involving sensitive subject matter. Barbara Davis of Florida State University School receives our thanks for providing two photographs for Chapter 4. We also appreciated the feedback provided by Juliann Dorff and Linda Hoeptner Poling (Kent State University), following a panel presentation at the 2019 NAEA Convention; their insight and wisdom were instrumental in making final revisions to this book.

Tom Anderson and Monica Broome both read this book in its entirety, and they proved to be our most thorough reviewers. Tom offered crucial feedback during a particularly difficult stage of revision, and Monica receives additional thanks for providing the Spanish translations featured in Chapter 9.

Renee is grateful for the rewarding longevity of collaborative scholarship, published and unpublished, focused on connecting meaningful pedagogy with critical ideas in art education over the years. She wishes to thank the late Georgia Collins, and Carole Henry, Jacqueline Kibbey, Mary Ann Stankiewicz, and Enid Zimmerman. Working with Jeff Broome’s extraordinary scholarship and leadership on this project has been profoundly rewarding in terms of creative process and product.

Jeff would like to acknowledge the backing that he received from Florida State University throughout this book project. The Committee on Faculty Research Support awarded Jeff with a grant that funded travel for observational fieldwork, and the chairs of the Department of Art Education (David Gussak, Antonio Cuyler, and Sara Scott Shields) consistently provided research assistants—including Alexandra Allen, Kimberly Panchigar, and Hayley Munn—who were instrumental in transcribing qualitative interviews. Jeff also wishes to recognize his colleagues in art education (Sara Scott Shields, Rachel Fendler, and Amber Ward), who were supportive of his efforts when this project became particularly time intensive. Their own research efforts and instructional excellence continues to serve as an inspiration to him, their students, and the larger field of art education. Most important, Jeff cannot thank Renee enough for her collaborative spirit, keen insight, patience, and unparalleled dedication to art education and this project. It has been an honor to work together.

We conclude our acknowledgments, then, by noting that our collaborative effort made this work stronger; the opportunity to work together was inspirational. Most important, we thank our loved ones. Renee extends her love and gratitude to her late husband, Steve Sandell; her sons and their wives; and her grandchildren, Simone, Jacob, Shane, Justin, and Drew, for their creative inspiration and unconditional love. Jeff expresses his love, admiration, and thanks to Monica, Mackenzie, and Carson for their supportive and understanding nature throughout the duration of this project.

FOREWORD

Tom Anderson

Art teachers are frequently viewed as a little unreadable, a little incomprehensible, and perhaps even a little weird by the rest of the staff at school. You might hear their colleagues say something like, Oh that’s the art teacher. You just can’t predict what they’re going to do. But they’re a good sort, and we do appreciate the murals (posters, digital ads) they contribute to Explorer Elementary/Midway Middle School/Horsepower High School. This perspective is a stereotype, for sure, but the grain of truth in it—which irritates us until we smooth it over as a pearly stereotype—still holds true. Art teachers are, indeed, a different breed.

So, what sort of person is an art teacher? What do they believe in and value in teaching art; and do they walk the talk? What precisely do they teach, and how and why? What’s their day like at school and in extended academic settings in the school and community? In this book, Jeffrey Broome and Renee Sandell address these questions, in an effort to understand the real lives of art educators, including K–12 art teachers, an art museum educator, and an art supervisor: the participants in this study.

This is not a big-data, quantitative, confirmatory study. Instead, the authors primarily used field-based methods to answer the driving question—what the day-to-day lives of these participants are like—by casting each one as an individual facing a particular set of problems and opportunities within a particular locale, community, and educational setting. The authors’ primary research strategy was to observe and record participants naturally doing what they do in their usual environment. In most cases, the authors engaged participants on their home field.

In the purely field-based chapters, the authors used their natural intuitive instincts to ferret out baseline data that could be gathered only through personal engagement with each participant, to see what kind of story emerged from the lived experience. This is an exploratory, firsthand, intimate report drawn primarily from direct observation and conversation, supplemented by supporting documents as evidence and confirmation. The point is to tell participants’ stories, with the researcher acting as a sort of medium in bringing the stories to life. The stories in this book are emergent, formed and structured to best convey narratives that presented themselves to the researchers and participants working together to make a coherent account of the participants’ real lives, commensurate with the evidence presented. The authors and participants together discovered conceptual qualitative threads that emerged from the facts and feelings of the experience: threads that run through the stories constructed to represent each participant’s work. These threads serve as the basis of storylines that emerge, holding the accounts together conceptually and aesthetically, rising from real-life experience.

As a secondary, supporting strategy, the authors have used a sort of casework approach in which some of the participants responded to sets of survey questions. Survey responses make up the bulk of the report in one chapter and, to a lesser extent, in two other chapters. This strategy is more distant than the fieldwork that centers this book, but it begins to bridge the gap between narrative fieldwork and confirmatory research. In Chapter 11, Broome and Sandell summarize, interpret, make appropriate overarching observations, and discuss what they have found commensurate with the emergent nature of this study, staying with the participants’ experiences as evidence.

The Research and Reporting Strategy

Real Lives Now is modeled on my book, Real Lives: Art Teachers and the Cultures of School (2000). The participants are art educators; they aren’t science teachers, reading teachers, or gym teachers. They are all drawn to teaching art. So, it struck me that it may be fruitful to wonder about these stories in that context. Specifically, what is unique or different about art from the other subjects and disciplines in school, as demonstrated by these art educators? When I ask myself this question, a number of interesting observations arise for me.

The frontline K–12 art teachers in Real Lives Now have in various ways addressed most of the qualities that make art, art. Those qualities include emotions and subjective drives, focused on some figurative or abstract content, addressed through working in some medium or media to create an expressive object or action—resulting in ineffable quality of action, experience, and product we call art. The participants in this study, whether explicitly or implicitly, in their discussion and in their actions seem to understand this as a kind of artistic thinking and doing, and they just take it as natural. (Probably it is natural for many art teachers, and it would be interesting to question this in further primary and confirmatory study.) Further, the participants in this study mostly seem to have a rather well-developed sense of feelingful intuition, and walk that path that leads to what feels right in their relationships with art, students, and their profession of teaching art. This feelingful intuition also directs the stories that convey the real lives of these art educators. The authors’ focus on individual art educators’ embeddedness in the culture of art might also prove to be profitable for future research, as would the study of whether artistic thinking is inherent, learned, or both. Can artistic thinking be taught?

A central factor and premise of Real Lives Now is that the authors engage the artistic process (rather than a scientific approach) to construct the stories and the meanings they convey. That is, Broome and Sandell use the same constitutional artistic components of subject matter and style to achieve a vehicle that expresses the multiple points of view of the participants, guided by their own overriding purpose of exploring the real lives of today’s art teachers. Each participant has a specific point of view as a result of their life experiences, community, geography, personality, and so on. In this book we find an almost perfect artistic fit of subject (real lives of art teachers) and style (artful storytelling), the result of which is not only qualitative research, but can be seen as art itself, both in the process and in the product. The artistic mode of feeling, thinking, and doing in constructing this book is informed artistic expression that derives meaning from the participants’ stories, rather than seeking scientific truth. Although the deep end of the pool we’re swimming in here is expressive meaning, not proof, that doesn’t mean the results and conclusions are untrue. Rather, both the process and product exist in a different milieu than scientific verification, having different premises and thus different questions and processes than the scientific method. The questions Broome and Sandell ask are best addressed by the kinds of understandings attained through artistic thinking and processes. Trying to prove the insights gleaned from the stories in this book would simply be a confusion of categories, like asking if Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is true. It’s not true or false; it’s art. It relies on coherence, unity, and fitness of form to what is being expressed for its success. Seekers of the truth seek the truth using scientific methods, whereas seekers of (expressive) meaning usually try to derive as many meanings from an experience as their abilities allow.

There is no one truth to be found in Real Lives Now. There is no attempt to conjure up a false neutrality on the researchers’ part. Rather, both the participants and the researchers cooperatively engaged in constructing the stories presented here, readily acknowledging the values, preferences, working styles, prejudices, strengths, and weaknesses invoked as these became relevant to the story being constructed. The story that emerged is based on the facts, values, and meanings that were discovered, and relied on the agreement of all parties to achieve its final form. The test of the veracity of the stories is the internal and external coherence of form—the story—and the rightness of form to meaning, which rely on the story makers’ intuition, knowledge of the field, and ability to translate sometimes seemingly unrelated information into a cohesive narrative.

The question to ask about stories and narrative reports is not Is it true? but rather, does it ring true?—like a bell in a church tower, like Picasso’s Guernica, like Beethoven’s Fifth. Are the stories consistent within themselves? An overarching meaningful story must hold together, via reasonable connections, insights, and perceived outcomes. Do the stories seem reasonable in the world as we know it, and feasible in their given contexts? The end goal of constructing these stories was to unearth and interpret the particularities of art teachers’ thoughts and professional activities, to find out what their lives are like at school, in the museum, and in the communities they serve. The results of this research are presented artfully and expressively and have an ultimate coherence of form and content. Jeffrey Broome and Renee Sandell achieve a credible level of believability and artful expression in the form of stories that convey what it’s like to be an art teacher, now.

The Artist’s Way

The stories in Real Lives Now also suggest to me that art teachers understand this mode of artful expression very well. Art is aspirational in nature. It can lead us not only to what is but to what ought to be. Art teachers know this, perhaps better than they did 20 years ago. In fact, these participants live it. They teach to the qualitative nature of human beings as expressed through art. That’s different than in math or social studies, subjects that focus on disciplinary knowledge rather than emotion or expression. Art is uniquely about expressing, and art teachers instinctively follow from that operating principle; thus it becomes clear why the art teacher frequently is the odd duck at school. You can’t ever tell what they’re going to do, because creativity travels where it will. If you take the emergent creative path, you don’t know where you’ll end up, but if you take the process and the questions raised by the process seriously, you know you’ll find something of value in the end, sometimes even something straight from the heart. The art teachers in this book get that, even if some of their students and colleagues don’t.

Following from their own tendency to exist within the artistic/aesthetic paradigm, it seems a number of the teachers in Real Lives Now see it as their primary role to guide students toward and through this feelingful way of thinking, toward the ultimate goal of seeing their students become successful adults in the world. However, it seems like this path to success doesn’t come naturally to many students. Many of the participants say that they think students frequently have to be coaxed, cajoled, fostered, given time to brood, and/or even be allowed to express themselves over and over, maybe with different media and spaces, until the artistic form matches the development of students’ intended expression. The majority of the teachers report that many students come into their art classes without a clue as to the emergent, artistic ways of thinking feelingfully. They don’t always understand how to approach coursework and projects that don’t necessarily have a single right answer. In this context, the stories in this study make me wonder whether this emergent, feelingful way of thinking and acting is inherent in most people and just needs development, or is it more fostered within and by certain cultural contexts? Common sense would suggest that both nature and nurture contribute, but it would be interesting to explore how and how much each contributes, in what contexts, and with what various characteristics people (students) bring to the table. Is emergent creative thought and action a product of nature or nurture? If it’s mostly nurture that develops expressive or creative thinking, it would be valuable to know how art educators should proceed to prepare their students for life through access to the artist’s way.

Some Things Change, and Some Things Don’t

Also, it came to me when reading Broome and Sandell’s book that some things change, and some things don’t. For example, the art teachers I interviewed in 1999 cared deeply about their students and their relationships with their students. They frequently called them my kids. Love may not be too strong a word to describe how they felt about their kids. The teachers in my study found immense satisfaction in helping their students negotiate success in the art room and in life using the understandings and strategies of teaching and learning in and through art. The majority of the teachers in my study admitted to being shy introverts (reinforcing the stereotype), but when it came to fostering student success, they became people people, reaching out to students, parents, other teachers, and the community to foster student success. Their work as art teachers was important as service to the upcoming generations, instrumental in both individual students’ lives and for the community and for society as a whole. Many of them went above and beyond in their assigned teaching and service in school to engage the larger community, including in some cases even national and international service. They believed in what they were doing and acted on those beliefs. By adhering to their founding ideals and principles, they found success—sometimes great success—as art teachers.

None of this has changed, at least for the participants in this study. The teachers in Real Lives Now live and teach from the same conceptual, emotional, and intellectual place as the participants in my earlier study. They have beliefs and understandings