Elementary Majors' Resistance to Art Method Courses:  Exploring Issues of Gender, Class, and Civility

Lara Lackey; Marjorie Cohee Manifold; Enid Zimmerman

Lara Lackey Indiana University
Marjorie Cohee Manifold Indiana University
Enid Zimmerman Indiana University

Abstract

We teach art education methods courses to elementary generalist teachers at a large Midwestern state university, where we find some students express entrenched preconceptions about the role of art in elementary curricula and demonstrate resistance to the content and instruction. Collaboratively, we sought to find why these students evidence such resistance. Concerned that this resistance might be in part due to socialization processes that devalue both art and women, we investigated our conjectures by developing survey questions about student expectations, their value of art as a school subject, whether they anticipated integrating art with other subjects in their future classrooms, what ideal content and instructors of an art methods courses should be, and how they experienced other students as supporting or hindering their learning. We performed content analysis of previous course evaluations and survey responses of 145 students and then interpreted findings and drew implications for those teaching similar courses.

Author Biographies

Lara Lackey, Indiana University

Lara Lackey is an associate professor in the School of Educationâ€”Art Education Program at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. She teaches courses for art education majors and elementary majors at the undergraduate and graduate level. She also teaches doctoral seminars related to gender and education as well as qualitative research methods. Her research interests include the examination of learning and education within non-formal and informal contexts; feminist and class-based analyses of education, and issues related to the arts and interdisciplinarity. Her publications can be found in Studies in Art Education, as chapters in books, and in other sources. She can be contacted at llackey@indiana. edu.

Marjorie Cohee Manifold, Indiana University

Marjorie Cohee Manifold is an assistant professor of art education at Indiana University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate students in the Art Education Program of the School of Educationâ€™s Curriculum and Instruction Department. In her research she explores the relationship between aesthetic experience and learning. She is particularly interested in how sorrow, which might otherwise hinder learning, may be transformed into aesthetic experience through art and, thus, initiate deeply meaningful learning. Also, she studies how youth learn about art and art making in informally situated environments such as through engagement in online (global) fandom communities based on interests in pop-culture phenomena. Her publications have appeared as book chapters and in Art Education, Visual Arts Research, The Journal of Social Theory on Art Education, The Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, and the International Journal of Art Education. She has given presentations at national and international levels and is active in several professional art educational organizations, including NAEA (National Art Education Assoication) and USSEA (the United States Society for Education Through the Arts) and is President-Elect of USSEA. She can be reached at mmanifol@indiana.edu.

Enid Zimmerman, Indiana University

Enid Zimmerman is professor emerita of art education and Coordinator of Gifted and Talented Education in the School of Education at Indiana University. She has authored or co-authored over 130 articles, 20 book chapters, and 25 books and monographs, the most recent being Teaching Talented Art Students: Principles and Practices (2004, with Gilbert Clark) and Women Art Educators V (2003, with Kit Grauer and Rita Irwin). She was editor of Teaching and Teacher Education for the Handbook for Research and Policy in Art Education (2004) and authored a chapter about art talent development with David Pariser. She recently served as consultant to the Hong Kong Department of Education and taught for a semester in Taiwan. She has co-edited Women Art Educators Volumes 1-5 and was senior editor of the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Some of the awards she has received are the NAEA Barkan Research Award, the Studies in Art Education Invited Paper Award, the NAEA Womenâ€™s Caucus Rouse and McFee Awards, the International Ziegfeld Award, and the National Association for Gifted Childrenâ€™s Paper of the Year Award. She also was named NAEA National Art Educator of the Year. She can be reached at zimmerm@indiana.edu.