Fall 2021
AED 101s – Introduction to Art Education

This course is still in-progress and we are early in the semester at the time of writing, but I can discuss my duties and techniques thus far. This is an introductory course, mostly serving first-semester students who are planning on majoring in art education, and which meets twice a week. I have structured the course to open with explorations of prominent paradigms developed over the 20th and 21st centuries in art education, with art and discussion activities designed to frame students’ situating of their own artist/teacher identities within these frameworks in anticipation of their writing their first teaching philosophy statements.

After the foundational theoretical exploration of the first four weeks, the course shifts focus. We then meet on Tuesdays to discuss and artfully engage with significant contemporary issues in art education (such as assessment, consideration of setting, and issues of race, gender, sexuality, and Indigeneity). Our Thursday time is used to give students an opportunity to do fieldwork in public school art rooms where they can observe how the issues we discuss play out in real-life contexts.

Each 101s session includes both critical discussion and creative production time, with students responding materially and artistically to issues discussed, or collaboratively developing lesson plans engaging with the day’s core concepts. On days when students lead the class (to develop their own embodied teaching practice), they are likewise expected to deploy both discussion and creative production in their lessons.

The AED 101s students recently completed an art project challenging them to visually represent themselves – without relying on naturalistic portraiture – in relation to the art education paradigms thus far discussed. This open-ended prompt generated a variety of responses wherein the (mostly first-semester) students thoughtfully navigated and articulated their own artist and teacher identities through a number of theoretical lenses. The wide range of sophisticated responses (some pictured below) this project afforded the students has me genuinely excited for the students’ upcoming development of their first written artist-teacher statements as part of their mid-term assignment. I’m interested to see how the non-textual exploration of artist and teacher identity may scaffold inventive approaches to a traditional textual statement that will eventually become a part of their art teaching portfolio.

AED 101s Syllabus, Fall 2021
2021fa-AED101s-meeken.pdf