Finding Fascination
My 11-year-old daughter came home from school last fall with nothing good to say about her new art teacher. This woman, she said, was so weird. They weren't doing any drawing or painting; for the first couple of weeks, all they did in art was reorganize the classroom. They spent whole classes mapping the location of the art supplies. As if that wasn't bad enough, the teacher showed up one day with a bunch of coffee cans, filled with unidentified materials and objects, into which her students had to put their hands. Then they had to discuss what they felt, not just physically, but emotionally. It wasn't enough to say that sand made you think of a beach. The teacher—Renee Jackson, an art-education specialist who studied at York University and NSCAD University—wanted them to come up with new, original things to say about how the sand made them feel.
After what seemed like eternity, the class was turned loose on the materials. Even then, the students didn't produce anything resembling what my daughter had come to think of as art, i.e., something that can be stuck on the fridge and admired by passing relatives. They redesigned the classroom, and talked about how their new sketchbooks were going to be visual journals, and dreamt up imaginary creatures with complicated lives. What had any of this to do with art class?
A year later, my kid is still grumbling. But I, along with many parents whose daughters attend the Linden School, the progressive girls' school in midtown Toronto that is home to Jackson's innovative program, am delighted. Some are pleased simply because they realize that, whatever the children might say, there is something remarkable unfolding in this classroom. My satisfaction came from recognizing what it is: a real art education, comprehensive enough to include students from grades 1 to 12.
Art educators are, by their own admission, a dwindling breed. The field flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, as public school boards poured resources into visual and performing arts. Those funds—some managed productively, others not so wisely—were the first thing affected when education bureaucrats faced budgetary pressures in the 1990s. And while every community has heard the hue and cry that goes up when cutbacks threaten music programs, I have yet to see anybody take to the sidewalks or launch a media blitz to save a stand-alone visual-arts program.
What's left are: 1) specialized programs for demonstrably gifted students, which tend to exist only in cities large enough to have a critical mass of such students, and 2) the ubiquitous integrated-arts programs, which tend to treat visual art as something best used to augment the performing arts. Even more discouraging is that many schools do not distinguish between visual art and computer graphics, with which today's children—a targeted commercial market for pre-packaged imagery delivered by every kind of mass media—are being bombarded at a relentless pace. What's lost, the art educators lament, is visual literacy, and with it the sense of personal creativity and critical perspective that comes when people grow up learning how to make and appreciate art.
How does one deliver a meaningful art education, given all the cultural and financial constraints? Is it possible to counteract the forces of contemporary culture? This is what Jackson, 30, sees as her singular goal. "We are not all meant to be artists, but we can all live artfully," she says. "Mass culture is so numbing; it anaesthetizes." Children younger than 10, already in possession of every kind of electronic gadget in existence, are already becoming little more than lifelong consumers, eternally in search of new toys to alleviate their boredom with real life. Jackson combats this by synthesizing what she learned from the groundbreaking York professor Byron E. Wall, NSCAD's Richard Mueller and the writings of John Dewey, Frederick Franck, John Berger and the OCAD professor Kym Pruesse, editor of a book about art intervention called The Accidental Audience, to challenge her students to start looking at the world.
Jackson says that, for what she wants to do, there are no contemporary educational models. So she had to create her own. "My teaching work is entirely constructed from the amazing education I had at NSCAD," she explains, in a program that itself recently became the victim of cutbacks. After graduating, she travelled widely, studying the fruits of other art-education programs, but found little to inspire her, outside of what she says was amazing student work on display at a contemporary gallery near Florence. Then, what with jobs for art teachers going the way of the giant panda, Jackson paid the bills by teaching French and drama and helping to found a Toronto-based artists' collective called m-pty media until the position opened up at Linden.
Thrilled by her extraordinary luck in finding an employer willing to let her put her ideas into practice (as long as she also incorporates the Ontario curriculum and the school's emphasis on girl-centred education), Jackson chose touch and sight as the senses her students would explore in the first year of her program, which she broke down into the following units: Claiming Space, Perceiving the Outside World, Developing the Inner World and Affecting the World at Large.
Over the year, as the threads of this first phase of Jackson's program came together, it was dubbed "Finding Fascination." "It's so much more than learning to draw. Art teaches you to pay attention, to think for yourself, to develop a sense of self that seems to be getting lost." Jackson's course culminated this past May with "Antidote," an inventive student art show that included not just paintings and sculpture but puppetry, collaborative installations, performance and intricate graphic novels—including one on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi.
In the school year ahead, Jackson hopes to push her students further. While they are certainly engaged, many—my daughter included—remain skeptical of her approach, something she welcomes, because it means they are thinking critically. She wants to introduce the theme of interconnection, which she can use to incorporate her students' love of technology and popular culture, and do what she can to expand the program's impact outside the school. In October, Jackson will speak at an art-education conference in Edmonton, and she is writing a book she hopes will be of use to art educators interested in taking a similar approach.
"You hear people talking about kids these days, and how they are so messed up, but they don't really look at why, and what can be done about it. People need to know that art education can be a practical solution."
Fall 2005
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