PRACTISING THEORY? VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION AND POSTMODERN PEDAGOGY
Theory and practice have never made comfortable bedfellows. In educational discourse ‘theory' is often confused with ‘method' or, more problematically, is seen as the refuge of an academic elite who are hopelessly out of touch with the practical concerns of the studio or classroom. While theoretical discourse may be all right for those working in the areas of sociology, or political science or even other areas of the humanities and liberal arts, there is a sense that critical theory has little to do with educating the visual artist. In particular the concerns of critical theory with interrogating and formulating the idea of the postmodern are especially fractious. What has critical theory to do with studio practice? Is postmodernity teachable? In this short article I would like to make connections between two concerns which are often treated as disparate and unrelated: pedagogy and postmodernity. The major obstacle in trying to unpack these concepts is that they are, in themselves, contested categories and that there is no consensus of what exactly pedagogy means or what postmodernity is.
Teaching and Learning
What is pedagogy? A dictionary definition suggests that it is the science of teaching but educational theorists, understandably enough, offer definitions which are not quite so reductive. For a start ‘pedagogy' is understood not so much as the art or science of teaching but also of learning. Furthermore, the question of ‘how' something is taught is not merely a qualitative concern but one which asks what commitment to inquiry, be it social, political, intellectual, or artistic, do students take with them when they graduate from colleges and universities every year?
Henri Giroux argues that over the past fifteen years questions centred around the pedagogic practices of teaching and learning have become a site of enormous contestation within educational theory [1]. Giroux considers that any examination of what the word ‘pedagogy' means does not simply reduce it to something that a tutor ‘does' in classrooms or studios or what a student learns. Instead he sees pedagogy as an activity which is clearly linked to cultural practices outside the learning environment. Pedagogic practice (or teaching and learning) offers particular, and vested, views of the world. What constitutes pedagogy, he says, "is posited as central to any political practice that takes up questions of how individuals learn, how knowledge is produced, and how subject positions are constructed" [2]. Therefore pedagogy is not simply the relationship between teaching or learning but a much more contested activity: whether consciously or not the student and the tutor are involved in a political as well as a cultural relationship which produces a particular political and cultural response to knowledge.
If pedagogy can therefore be understood as the production of knowledge, and of particular kinds of knowledge, then the importance of pedagogy is to raise questions not simply about how subjects learn but also to examine the positions of cultural authority from which tutors are speaking. Things are complicated by the fact that some educational theorists argue that using the word ‘pedagogy' in its singular form is misleading since it suggests that the political and cultural relationship between tutor and student is mutually understood. Jennifer Gore suggests that it is impossible to speak of ‘pedagogy' since to do so is to suggest "a unity and coherence…for a domain in which there is so much variation and contestation, not only about meaning but about function and goals" [3]. Gore contends that the use instead of the word ‘pedagogies' highlights that the practices and approaches of pedagogy are multiple and various. In addition, David Lusted argues for a concept of pedagogy which "draws attention to the process through which knowledge is produced" to the extent that "how one teaches…becomes inseparable from what is being taught and, crucially, how one learns" [4].
Giroux argues that learning is a way of becoming politicised and therefore educators have a responsibility to be aware of their own political and social approaches to teaching. Too often, he maintains, establishment practice throws alternative pedagogies to the margins by leaving out those histories and cultures that are rejected in order for an uncontested teaching practice to emerge. This results in a teaching and learning culture in which complex and difficult histories and ideologies are presented as seamless, contingent and continuous. Pedagogy's social function is, in Giroux's terms, not merely to transmit legitimised and prescribed knowledge but to interrogate the very ideologies of how ideas come to be mainstream. If "education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations [then] education becomes a central terrain where power and politics operate" [5]. All pedagogies must at some level, whether conscious or not, exclude, reject, or marginalise other discourses: this is the nature of discourse. Therefore all discourses on teaching and learning have a temporality according to their critical, cultural, historical and ideological agenda.
Postmodernism and Pedagogy
This may be all very well in the realm of theory but what does it have to do with teaching and/or postmodernism? First of all, Giroux's notion of pedagogies intersects very well with the pluralist and multi-cultural concerns of postmodernism and of contemporary critical inquiry. The term ‘postmodernism' is notoriously slippery and as a term over the past twenty years it has gained the status of a buzzword. It is used variously to suggest a state of mind, a condition of thinking, an ironic representation, or re-presentation, a stylistic innovation, a state of contemporaneity, a condition of self-reflexivity, a signifier for ‘cleverness' or, alternatively for elitist pretentiousness [6]. Postmodernism, in its most limiting sense of being post- or after modernism, challenges the universalist values of modernism and of the artist as a quixotic and temperamental creator. It introduces a socio-political and cultural dimension to the production of art by drawing attention to the way in which the canon of art history is often simultaneously a history of social and economic advantage. Feminist art historians, in particular, have drawn attention to the way in which discourses of modernism have privileged class, race and gender. Postmodern inquiry offers critiques of realism, universalism and individualism and offers localised narratives or petites histoires instead of the grand structuring metanarratives of ‘truth', ‘art' and ‘history'.
As a condition of thought postmodernism indicates a break or departure from strongly held (and culturally instilled) beliefs about the nature of society. Regardless of its particular focus (whether it be socio-economic, cultural or artistic) postmodernism suggests that old styles of analysis are no longer useful, and that new approaches and new vocabularies need to be created in order to understand a present which is continually being constructed, updated and modernised. More importantly postmodernism suggests that concrete subjects like developments in new technologies, mass media and consumer culture have an impact on our understanding of the more abstract questions of meaning, identity and reality.
While modernism believed in the possibility of art as universal communication, postmodernism suggests that art is contextually or culturally specific. The nature of postmodernism is critique: whether critiques of the grounds of difference, the critique of the myth of originality, or the critique of historical narratives [7]. The concept of a postmodern pedagogy (or even pedagogies) is, according to Melody Milbrandt, one which celebrates the interconnectedness of knowledge, learning experiences, inter-national communities, and life experience, and which presents "models of the artist-collaborator rather than the artist as solitary maverick or hero" [8].
For the most part contemporary art practice has pulled away from the aesthetics of significant form and expression that dominated modernism and therefore the student must have access to a critical vocabulary which is enabling, both in critique and in practice. This idea of praxis—the complementing of theory with practice—is one which enriches both intellectual and artistic production. To adopt a postmodern pedagogy does not mean a wholesale rejection of a traditional, modernist curricula but rather the incorporation of a critical language (both intellectual and visual) which challenges and interrogates the universalism of the modernist canon. Roger Clark suggests that some of the ways in which the notion of praxis can be implemented is through experimentation with alternative media and new technologies; the expansion of established artistic canons; the exploration of non-Western concepts of space and design; and increased exposure to non-mainstream art and artists (whether contemporary or historical) [9].
Education is ultimately a cultural and political activity and art practice is, by definition, a cultural activity. What the notion of praxis offers is a recognition of how all cultural activity is informed by its social and political circumstances. To divorce intellectual critical inquiry from the studio is to impoverish art practice. Detractors have suggested that the implementation of a postmodern curricula would lead to the promotion of particular social and political agendas in art practice but this position ignores the fact that all art practice is politically informed. We live in culture and have cultural and political identities and we cannot, either as practitioners or educators, ignore that fact. The point to be made however is that education and art practice must be recognised as being continually in process and that the concept of praxis is one in which teaching and learning continues and must continue to be unfolded, challenged, contested and interrogated.
[1] Henri Giroux, The Turn Toward Theory, in Disturbing Pleasures, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 110
[2] Henry Giroux, Crossing the Boundaries of Educational Discourse: Modernism, Postmodernism and Feminism, in Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 81
[3] Jennifer Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. xi
[4] David Lusted, Why Pedagogy?, Screen, No. 27, September-October, 1986, pp. 2-3
[5] Henry Giroux, Rethinking the Nature of Educational Reform, in Education Under Siege, ed. Stanley Aronwitz and Henry Giroux, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 12
[6] See Glen Ward, Postmodernism, Hodder & Stoughton, 1998
[7] P. Wood, F. Frascina, J. Harris, and C. Harrison, Modernism in Dispute, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993
[8] Melody Milbrandt, Postmodernism in Art Education: Content for Life, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 51, No. 6, November, 1998, p. 52
[9] Roger Clark, Constructing the Postmodernist Classroom, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 51, No. 6, November, 1998, p. 9
Dr. Elaine Sisson is a lecturer and writer in the humanities and the visual arts.
