Visualizing the History of Art Education: Mapping Assignment

Started in a course entitled “Issues and Research in Art Education,” George Mason University graduate students explore the history, research and issues pertaining to the field of art education, using FTC to guide their creative processes to gain knowledge and understanding while reading Roots of Art Education Practice (Stankiewicz, 2001), A Whole New Mind (Pink, 2005) and other sources including Visualizing History2ViewsSandell.ppt   Students engage in 14 weeks of marking and mapping their research to help them visualize in personal ways their professional roots and discover their place in the field of art education. 

Intended to provide needed scaffolding for the semester-long assignment on a single sheet of 11x15 Canson watercolor paper, black Sharpie pen, set of 6 Derwent Inktense pencils, and a waterbrush, and the FTC Palette helps document the evolution of the creative process stages leading to a final product examples as shown by different instructors below.  All students engaged in encoding visual evidence through a range of selected formal qualities, using the elements of art and principles of design related to the theme and contexts at play. Each exploration reflected a range of media choice and use to transform a flat drawing into 3D map via an accordion fold (book) that could stand as a screen.  Students engaged in “gradual” 15 weeks of marking, mapping, drawing, painting, composing, writing, bookmaking, reflecting, visualizing, and connecting. 

Evolving explorations, documentation, and reflections were further supported by periodic large and small group formative critiques.  In exploring thematic qualities of our evolving field, students found interesting ways to represent relationships with art and other subjects as they recorded the big ideas within the field throughout time, noting trends and patterns in art education history and contemporary issues.  

Finally, students’ History of Art Education Maps revealed their own shaping and discernment of art education’s significance and relevance that preceded them, rooted in a wide range of underlying contextual qualities.  Engaged in the creative process, these graduate students felt privileged to decode the historical roots and contemporary issues shaping our professional field while also encoding personal understandings and connections. Visual problem solving and discoveries led to a sense of artistic ownership and pride in their artwork documenting professional identity at this point in their careers.  For the instructors and other students, these new visions of the field are unique interpretations that reflect concrete and abstract relationships and literally expand ways of viewing our field, through the eyes of our neophyte professionals.