Teaching Contemporary Art, Artists, Issues and Ideas in Public High Schools
Open AccessAbstract The research conducted was done for the purpose of finding out the state of contemporary art education in American public high schools. Fairfax County Public Schools, in Fairfax County, Virginia, was chosen as a sample school system to study. I wanted to find out how much, if at all, contemporary art was being looked at in the typical American high school. In addition to this I also wanted to find out why certain teachers embraced contemporary art and the study of it, while other teachers avoided contemporary art. To go about the research I sent out surveys to nearly 200 high school art teachers in Fairfax County. With a 10% response rate I felt that I needed another string of data collection and went on to conduct interviews with willing teachers and observe different art classrooms in the school system. I found that, according to the teachers who responded to the survey, and those who were interviewed and observed, a good portion of Fairfax County art teachers do indeed expose their students to contemporary art study. However, the depth and breadth of this seems to vary widely from teacher to teacher. In Fairfax County, Virginia, it is my observation through the research that visual art teachers in the public high schools, are indeed exposing students to contemporary art study. My research has obviously only scratched the surface and more study needs to be done. I also believe that Fairfax County Public Schools is a progressive school system and the school system actively pushes arts education and its importance to a well-rounded student, and this may not be in the case in other sections of the US. Fairfax County also has a Fine Arts Coordinator, Roger Tomhave, who believes strongly in the importance of 21st century job skills, which are learned through the arts, and pushes the study of contemporary art, and pushes his art faculty to keep current on contemporary art themselves.
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Perry_corcoran_0501M_10060.pdf | 2018-01-17 | Open Access |
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