Fall 2019
AED 211 – Interpreting Art Experience: Social and Behavioral Perspectives
AED 212 – Interpreting Art Experience: Educational Implications

I developed these two courses in relation to one another, with AED 211 being an examination of concepts and experiences with seeing and making art for an interdisciplinary group of 15 students, and AED 212 being a discussion of issues relevant to art pedagogy for the five art education students from the AED 211 course.

The classes’ eponymous emphasis on art experiences prompted me to use a blend of seminar discussion on theoretical readings on the value, impact, and experience of art alongside direct in-class engagement with arts activities, yielding experiences which could then be reflected upon in the context of each week’s readings. The interdisciplinary nature of AED 211 meant that most students were not self-identified artists, which challenged me to develop art activities that could yield meaningful discussion and reflection without alienating students who did not have traditional studio skills. By drawing on the conceptual art ‘games’ of groups like Fluxus and the Surrealists, and by drawing upon the work of artist and teacher Lynda Barry, whose work often addresses the tensions around shedding an artistic identity in adulthood, we were able to engage in a variety of arts experiences that served as the object for subsequent reflection and discussion.

For AED 212, I felt the need to complement the more theoretical focus of AED 211 with the practical pedagogical needs expressed by the pre-service art educators enrolled in the class. Each week’s AED 211 reading was extended with a shorter piece of writing or video explicitly tying that week’s big questions about art and culture to specific pedagogical issues and concerns. As with 211, seminar discussion was blended with creative activity, but in 212 the students created lesson ideas in response to prompts linked to that week’s larger concepts. In actively responding to the prompts, students not only had an opportunity to actively explore that week’s issues, but to build up a bank of lesson ideas from which they could draw in their future teaching.

AED 211 Syllabus, Fall 2021
AED 211-syllabus-meeken