The cookies are in the oven. It's a portable toaster oven that only gets half the way to

the 375 degrees required in the original toll house recipe. The cookies must be watched closely;

they could burn quickly if not properly supervised. Even though the oven isn't perfect, the

cookies are in the oven.

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Students are like cookies sometimes. The teacher adds the ingredients, puts them in the

classroom oven, and watches them cook. Art teachers create specialty cookies. Students come

out in different flavors and styles. We have to watch and make sure they don't burn. One of the

general issues with art education is that chefs outside the kitchen keep suggesting we change

the ingredients or make a different kind of cookie, or maybe we don't make cookies at all.

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Cindy Meyers Foley is the Executive Assistant Director and Director of Learning and

Experience at the Columbus Museum of Art. In a recent Ted talk, Cindy Foley talked about the

impact of standards and testing culture on art education. Foley believes we should be

developing learners that think like Artists. Learners who are creative, curious seek questions,

develop ideas, and play. Creative learning is a goal of all education, not just the arts. Cindy

continues by focusing on three critical habits artists need to employ: (Foley, 2014)

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1. Comfort with Ambiguity

2. Idea Generation

3. Transdisciplinary Research.

 

Cindy has a marvelous idea, but she doesn't teach 600 students, 40 minutes at a time.

She is running an upscale bakery, and most art teachers are battling it out in a MacDonald's.

 

Different cookies.

 

The nature of art education is constant change. From its beginnings as vocational

training to the influences of the child study movement. The Child study movement of the 1920s

and 30's believed that children, in addition to using their histories as a primary source of art,

were also capable of employing their creative potential in areas that ventured into new

configurations of learning. (Hurwitz, 1990) Art education focused on:

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• Creative power

• Perception

• Visual literacy

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Everyone agrees that the studio is the logical place to achieve art educational goals.

Teachers caught up in the fervent of the time regarded themselves as sensory rather than

academic. (Hurwitz, 1990) Through the '70s and '80s, teachers continued to serve priorities

determined by others rather than themselves. The list was impressive:

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• The return to basics

• Search for quality

• Development of critical thinking

• Taxonomical theory

• Psychology of creativity, mastery teaching

• Writing and reading across the curriculum

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These are some of the concerns that bedeviled art teachers. The priorities may shift or

expand, but the time constraints of the 50 (now 40) minute class remained the same. These

concerns and new priorities led to inflexibility and lack of agreement on curriculum and content

and the rise of solutions, including integrating or merging the arts into other subjects. (Hurwitz,

1990)

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In 1979 The Newly formed Getty Center for education in the arts continued the

conversation started at a 1965 Pennsylvania State University conference for establishing a base

knowledge for art education in such a way to include criticism, aesthetics, and history, in

addition to studio activity. The impact of the Getty Center DBAE proposals established a level of

controversy hereto unequaled in art education. An ancient controversy lay at the heart of theGood tasting cookies: Art education’s everchanging tastes 4

issue- the relative value of learning achieved through direct experience against learning through

the intellect. (Hurwitz, 1990)

 

We are born sensuous; we become intellectual, implying that our hold on the sensate

self has in some way inhibited our powers to reason. John Ruskin, in attempting to resolve this

ancient dichotomy, wrote, "Art is where the hand, the head, and the heart may go together"

(Hurwitz, 1990).

 

By 2001, 20 % of schools in the US were following DBAE, with 90% moving to a DBAE

type program.Questions by new critics – how does one best compare and describe? Why bother with

critical activity than the issues which surround objects really matter. Rejecting the distinction

between criticism and aesthetics, calling instead for more anthropology and social theory

drawing from an eclectic mix of neo-Marxism, French philosophers, postmodern critics who

wrote as aestheticians and philosophers who used artworks as commodities rather than

aesthetic events and therefore not interested in the qualitative differences between popular

and fine (high) art (Mulcahy, 1989).

 

Today's Postmodern thought embraces the heterogeneous, the local, and the specific.

Arts as investigation - understanding the art of others and seeing their artmaking, not as

exercise, but as research that produces new visual and conceptual insights. Olivia Gude (Gude,

2004) believes students in a quality art education program gain the capacity to reflect on

cultural issues related to self and society. Students become more attuned to nuance and

complexity by studying and making art.Good tasting cookies: 

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Gude rejects traditional art design and principles for newer categories of study and

focus.

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1. Appropriation

2. Juxtaposition

3. Recontextualization

4. Layering

5. Interaction of Text and image

6. Hybridity

7. Gazing

8. Representin'

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Today the trend of evolution in art education continues.

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Studio Habits

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Researchers with Harvard's Project Zero identified The Studio Habits of Mind. Through

research, Lois Hetland and her team classified and named eight Studio Habits. (Hare , 2015)

1. Understanding art worlds

2. Observation and exploration

3. Vision and design,

4. Persistence

5. Craft production

6. Expression,

7. Development

8. Reflection

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Eight Studio Habits are a lens through which we can look at studio structure, habits, and

frames of mind. These structures focus on learning (demonstration, lecture, students working,

critique, and exhibition), classroom management (class structure, studio transition, etc.) (Hare ,

2015)

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Teaching For Artistic Behavior (TAB)

Teaching For Artistic Behavior or TAB incorporates all the Standards and foundations of art

while encouraging students to find their own "voice" in their art from an early age.

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1. What do artists do?

2. The child is the artist.

3. The art room is the child's studio.

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TAB is a method of art education wherein the projects and media are choice-based,

student-driven, and conducted in a studio-center environment. Students are encouraged to

explore and playfully connect to their inner creative drives.

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So many ways to make cookies. Which recipe is the best? So many directions. So many

abstract meanings.

​

Enter The new National core art standards creating entirely new concepts of abstract

confusion. These ideas are helpful. Still, the constant rebranding of definitions can confuse all

the chefs just trying to make cookies.

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I would posit that though there are many recipes for chocolate chip cookies, The original

toll house recipe remains one of the best. Older ideas may drop out of fashion, but that does

not negate their usefulness, function, or necessity. Never ignore a good idea. Good cookies are

good cookies!

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If art is destined to become more academic than we should pull our academic requirements

from academic subjects rather than form new ones. One thing that everyone can agree on is

that art is a language, albeit a visual one. language can be broken down into three main

functions:

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1. Informative (This include invention)

2. Persuasive

3. Entertainment

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The three primary functions provide the focus of the art. The intention of the artist or

big idea drives the meaning. The art can be judged on the quality of its execution or success of

its intention. DBAE and the National core standards both align in framework and provide the

groundwork for assessment that satisfies the oversight constituency that provides funding for

the art program.

 

Olivia Gude's principles could act as strategy or style, while the original art

design principles act as the compositional grammar of the finished work. TAB-based classrooms

reaffirm that we respect our students as artists and that their ideas are important.

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In closing, There are many ways to make cookies. Not all cookies are the same. Some

cookies taste better than others, depending on who is doing the tasting. If no one likes the taste

of the cookies, maybe you should try a different recipe, but you don't throw out old ones just

because a new one comes along.

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Go make some cookies!

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References

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Foley, C. (2014) Teaching art or teaching to think like an artist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcFRfJb2ONk

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Gude, O. (2004). Postmodern Principles: In Search of a 21st Century Art Education.

Art Education, 57(1), 6–14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3194078

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Hare , T. (2015) compelling reasons for using the studio habits of mind in your art room

https://theartofeducation.edu/2015/09/30/2-compelling-reasons-for-using-the-

studio-habits-of-mind-in-your-art-room/

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Hurwitz, A. (1990). Chronicle: A Report to NAEA President Amelia Sanchez June 10,

2022. Art Education, 43(1), 12–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/3193193

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Mulcahy, K. V. (1989). Civilization through Arts Education. Journal of Aesthetic

Education, 23(2), 92–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3332945