VA 505

When thinking about Arts Education (visual, music, dance and drama) I am asking myself where are we. This is the only thing I seem to be asking. Perhaps I am dumbfounded at having been institutionalized and complicit in helping those constructs continue. It has taken stepping back from it all and pulling at the string attached to the ball of yarn to realize the mess that can't be untangled. Or can it? I really don't know. Having read all the rhetoric from the art educator's perspective... crying to be heard and understood. Going as far to provide scientific evidence that the Arts improve test scores. Using the only valid currency (science) to validate the only "true" markers of education, the test score. I have looked at the need for certain elements to be reintroduced into education to help round out the student and to "flex" all their learning muscles so speak. And I have looked through Roy Ascott's Telematic Embrace and my own assumption...

I have made a few- necessary- connections in the past few weeks in order to locate my teaching philosophy and position as a Higher Education student. The following 3 points have become very important and influential in my developing point of view on Art Education. TED Talk: Teaching art or to think like an artist? Cindy Meyers Foley. I mentioned this in the second blog post. It is something I keep coming back to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcFRfJb2ONk&index=2&list=PLxsSUtZk_hjGXnkrwlvjFoN5yWL7Ds9g5&t=0s Groundcourse developed by Roy Ascott "within which everything can find its place and every individual his way" Lego Master Builder concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um-PlX6oPBQ I took my own teaching and workshops apart to see what I was doing wrong and what I  could do to improve the student's experience. The main shift in my strategy was to actually begin to teach students as though they were artists and not as students. I realized t...

Erin, Ontario, Continuation School, has been demolished in the past 2 years. The Powell Memorandum leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. To see how one memo has effected all tiers of societies for generations and generations to come was outside my grasp. This week, I put Lewis Powell's paranoid (but unfortunately effective) memo down and I looked into the structure of United Kingdom's Grammar School system. Currently there are less than 300 Grammar Schools left in the U.K. and Northern Ireland and at times the future of these schools face extinction depending on which political part has majority seats. The Grammar school system has been around since the 16th century in the U.K. But it was during the 19th and 20th century when the Grammar School became a beacon believed to lead working class children into a better way life than their parents had been afforded by their parents. It had become attainable and encouraged by the primary school system for children who showed academic...