I love reading Eisner! He's so comon-sensical, eloquent and profound, all at the same time! Freedman, on the other hand is not quite as accessible.  I keep wanting her to put her thinking in layman's terms. I'm sure her ideas are well-informed and brilliant; just more difficult to tease apart and digest.

In his discussion of "The Role of the Arts in Transforming Consciousness" (Chapter 1), Eisner describes our environment as a qualitative which we experience through our senses.  As language, culture, values, and beliefs combine with the sensory experiences of everyday ,we "create ourselves". (How empowering is that?!) Within this mileu, it is the arts that expand our imaginations, helping us to consider "the possible." Imagination  then leads to the inscription of creative ideas which are expressed outwardly as consciously chosen creative representations. As all of this transpires, cognitive growth takes place. Sensory experience, imagination, creative inscription and respresentation; all of this is the stuff that art education is made of!

Of all the lessons and cognitive dispositions Eisner asserts that the arts teach best, my favorite is the "slowing down of perception."  Maxine Greene refers to it as "deep noticing;" In the fast-paced, sensory-satiated, plugged-in-yet-tunned-out nature of 21st century life, I believe it is one of the most important. Our students look, but they don't see.  They hear, but they don't listen. How much of life is passing them by???? I know that is why VTS is so exciting for me.  When viewers look, listen to the observations of others, and then, look again, their comprehesion of the visual text and their recognition/appreciation of nuances and details expand exponentially! The more often they do it, the better they do it and the more likely they are to do it again independently and without prompting! A disposition is born!s

Clearly, Eisner's concept of imagination parallels the Imagination-Creativity-Innovation (ICI) model presented by Liu and Noppe-Brandon in "Imagination First."  The authors of both texts clearly agree that  significant human accomplishments must first be imagined.  Without imagiation, innovations that change the quality of human life and experience cannot occur.  The innovative results of creative thinking go on to shape the culture that have engendered them. The only real difference between the authors' conceptions of this process is that Eisner closes Liu and Noppe-Brandon's ICI continuum  into a cyclical model. Artistic  products are not end products, but rather inspirations for the ICI process to begin again.

In "Visions and Versions of Art Education" (Chapter 2), Eisner explains that art programs enacted in most contemporary art classrooms are pragmatic hybridizations, not pure forms of historic or more recently proposed art education models. Two art education forms that Eisner addresses as signficant are Discipline-Based Art Education and Visual Culture Art Education.  DBAE, which has impacted art curriculum since the 1990s, championed a comprehensive instructional approach which integrated 4 disciplines of art history, art criticism, and aesthetics as well as art production. DBAE proponents believed (and still do!) that this approach would  dissolve misconceptions that arts education lacked substance and rigor. Though less dominant, it continues to impact art curriculum design and instructional practice. (I know that DBAE continues to impact my practice and I don't think that is a bad thing. It certainly lays the ground work for integration and Big Ideas.)

VCAE teaches students not only to recognize the social and cultural values of their producers, but also to decode the messages and agendas beneath the surface of popular culture and the fine arts. Eisner adds that it helps students to become more "sensitive, politically informed interpreters" of the images that bombard them on a daily basis.

Though Eisner was cautious not to overtly endorse a particular version of art education, he voiced the need for "practical and principled" art instruction that would grant "pride of place" for the discipline. Such quality art education would help each student recognize and appreciate her/his uniqueness, becoming more sensitive to and capable of constructing meaning from the visual culture of her/his everyday life.

Freedman adds signficant understanding to visual culture and the importance of teaching it to 21st century students. She asserts that visual culture impacts identity and self-concept as well as the creation and viewing of art and is used to maipulate both thinking and behavior. Clearly, in a democracy, this idea is sobering!

I found Freedman's discussion of visual culture as a form of communication fascinating but also challenging to comprehend fully. Case in point: She explains that because it responds more and more to social conditions, visual culture is also becoming a mediator in social interactions. She presents 3 forms that such mediated interactions take: face-to-face interactions, mediated interactions, and mediated quasi interactions.  I found myself stopping and attempting to contextualize these activities for myself  by coming up with examples so that I could fully appreciate her thinking.  I decided that face to face interactions mediated by visual culture would include a person's dress, hair style, the presence or absence of piercings or tatoos; all of the physical trappings and embellishments that communicate things to us about that person and cause us to make judgements about that person's identity, status, character, intentions, values, and the like.  I took the mediated interactions as those NOT of the face-to-face variety: posters, advertisements, logos and trademarks, etc. which I found difficult, then (if I was correct) to distinguish it from mediated quasi interactions which consist of one-way communication that does not require a response.  Perhaps I'll need to go back and review this in the future; after it has had a time to simmer, so to speak. Anyone have any ideas that could enlighten me on this?



RElfecions on the reading