Teaching in Arts Education

Wright, P. R. (2009) Teaching in Arts Education. In: Saha, L.J. and Dworkin, A.G., (eds.) International Handbook of Research on Teachers and Teaching. Springer, New York, pp. 1049-1060.

Abstract

Arts Education has the potential to play an increasingly important role in the education of young people around the world. This role includes contributing to the development of young people's critical and creative facility and thereby developing in them cultural, personal and social agency. These abilities can be seen to become increasingly important in times of neo-liberalism, rising fundamentalism, global economic development, critical education, and disposability (Giroux, 2006). Consequently, Arts Education and how it is taught has consequences.

What is important to understand, however, is that the role that Arts Education — like all education — plays is contextually defined thereby serving a variety of purposes across schools, communities, states or provinces, and countries. This means that provision varies markedly, that teaching is not solely confined to schools, and the way young people engage with the arts, and for what purposes is changing. For example, while all education is contextually defined, Arts Education particularly is increasingly limited less by geography or specific location and more by access to technology, the influences of economically developed societies, youth culture, and an understanding that school is only one ‘mode of delivery’ for education.