Felix Rodriguez
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Lindsay L. Esola
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Yang Deng
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Citation: Rodriguez, F., Esola, L., Deng, Y., & Stankiewicz, M.A. (2019). Interpreting a seminar for research and curriculum development in art education: Context and significance. Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing. DOI: 10.26209/arted50-01
Abstract: This historical examination of the 1965 Penn State Seminar for Research and Curriculum Development in Art Education aims to situate conversations that took place half a century ago within a larger fabric of social, political and cultural events. In this essay, the authors’ goal is to facilitate more critical and transparent interpretations of the significance of the 1965 Seminar for art education today. We address two historical issues that provide a foundational understanding of the Seminar. First, we examine the context of the Seminar. Second, we analyze the significance of the Penn State Seminar based on perceptions of art educators during the following decades regarding its success and outcomes. The sponsors and planners of the Seminar wanted to redefine the foundation of art education in the United States. This top-down strategy entailed developing a series of best practices for art education that could then be passed down to schoolteachers. An unusual level of federal support for research in the arts, the discourse of educational reform in response to the advances of the Soviet space program, and the research culture started by European immigrants not only created the conditions that allowed the Seminar to happen, but also shaped conversations during the Seminar. The Penn State Seminar can be seen as a landmark in the historical development of art education because it provided a conceptual foundation for further innovation in the field, including the aesthetic education and the discipline-based art education movements. The Seminar pushed forward the idea of creating a comprehensive, coherent approach to teaching art.
Keywords: 1965 Penn State Seminar, Red Book, Curriculum Development, Art Education Research, History of Art Education.
Reflecting on the conversations that took place at the 1965 Penn State Seminar for Research and Curriculum Development in Art Education (Mattil, 1966) provides an opportunity for well-established and emerging scholars to envision new possibilities for art education and to propose new questions and concerns. Our historical examination of this event is pertinent because positioning conversations that took place half a century ago within their larger social and historical context allows us to be more critical and transparent regarding possible meanings of the 1965 Seminar.
In this paper, we address two historical issues that provide a foundational understanding of the Seminar. First, we examine the context of the Seminar. We begin with questions such as: What was the Penn State Seminar? Why did it happen? What were its objectives? Second, we analyze the significance of the Penn State Seminar based on perceptions art educators had in the following decades regarding its success and major outcomes. Other questions that guided our inquiry are: Did the Penn State Seminar change art education? How? Did the Seminar achieve its intended goals? Why/How is the Seminar meaningful to us today?
The Penn State Seminar was a ten-day event funded by the Arts and Humanities Program of the United States Office of Education. It was held from August 30th to September 9th at the Nittany Lion Inn, University Park. The Seminar gathered leading voices in art education and related disciplines to create a new philosophical foundation for art education (Marché, 2002). It focused on five major areas of concern: the philosophical [why], the sociological [to whom], content [what], educational-psychological [teaching-learning], and curriculum (Ecker, 1997; Efland, 1984; Mattil, 1966). The Seminar had the following format: Outside experts were asked to write formal papers following guidelines from the planning committee. Then an art education scholar would present a paper that responded to the outside expert’s presentation. Small group discussions followed each expert’s paper, with individual summary statements given during the final sessions (Zahner, 1997). The outcomes of the Seminar spread among other higher education institutions through published proceedings, known as the Red Book.
The planning committee, comprised of Manuel Barkan, Kenneth R. Beittel, David W. Ecker, Elliot W. Eisner, Jerome J. Hausman, and Edward L. Mattil, selected twenty-eight well-known art educators and ten outside experts. Sixteen of the participants—the ten outside experts and six art educators—were invited to present formal papers. The participants were nationally recognized scholars who were asked to address the implications of their respective fields for foundational areas of art education (McFee, 1984). Francis Villemain (philosopher) was paired with David Ecker (art educator) and focused on philosophic inquiry in art education. Joshua Taylor (art historian), Harold Rosenberg (art critic), Allan Kaprow (artist), and Jerome Hausman (art educator) focused on art history, criticism and production. Melvin Tumin (sociologist) and June King McFee (art educator) focused on social change and social differences in relation to teaching and learning art. Dale Harris (psychologist) and Kenneth Beittel (art educator) focused on learning in art (behaviors in art). Elliot Eisner (art educator), Manuel Barkan (art educator), and Asahel Woodruff (educator) focused on examining curriculum or curriculum development. Nathaniel Champlin (philosopher) and Robert Lathrop (psychologist) focused on philosophical inquiry. Arthur Foshay (educator) focused on educational innovation and art education.
Federal agencies sponsoring the Seminar believed that this cluster of professionals, both art educators and outside experts, had enough leverage to produce deep changes in art education at a national level (Hoffa, 1997). The goal of the Department of Education was to convene the best minds in a room to define a single constellation of issues (Zahner, 1997), and agree on the most effective method to reform art education. The Penn State Seminar was intended to lead to consensus among art educators and outside experts.
Three main events created the conditions for the series of Seminars in education and the arts that took place in the mid-sixties, including the Penn State Seminar: reforms in science education motivated by Russia’s space program; allocation of federal funding for research in the arts; and the development of a research tradition led by European immigrants after World War II (Hoffa, 1977).
The Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957 provoked important reforms in science education in the United States. The 1958 National Defense Education Act emphasized the need for improvement in teaching mathematics and science (Efland, 1988). August Heckscher’s (1963) report, The Arts and the National Government, denounced the lack of investment in the arts compared to science and engineering education, leading to financial support for research and development in the arts, including the Penn State Seminar (Hoffa, 1977). The United States government was aware that investment in education and the arts was fundamental to produce ingenuity needed to outsmart the Soviets.
Federal support for research in the arts at the time flowed through two entities: the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and the Arts and Humanities Program of the U.S. Office of Education. The President’s Science Advisory Committee, which played an important role in reforming science education, assumed the task of reforming arts education through its newly created panel for Educational Research and Development (ERD). ERD had more leverage on art conferences that took place prior to the Penn State Seminar. ERD emphasized that reforms in the arts should be modeled after other disciplines, using the expertise of professionals in relevant academic disciplines (Hoffa, 1977).
By the time of the Penn State Seminar, the Arts and Humanities Program of the U.S. Office of Education had more leverage in directing research programs in the arts; nonetheless, the influence of the President’s Science Advisory Panel is evident in the Penn State Seminar’s articulation of art education as a discipline. The Arts and Humanities Program of the U.S. Office of Education, through the advocacy and active work of Kathryn Bloom, funded 17 arts education conferences between October 1964 and November 1966. The Penn State Seminar was not an isolated initiative; it was part of a national program intended to fundamentally change education in the United States.
The emergence of a serious agenda for research and curriculum development in the arts was supported by a research culture initiated by European immigrants who arrived in the U.S. a few decades prior to the 1960s. According to Hoffa (1977), art educators did not have a solid research tradition until after World War II. Hoffa argues that those present at the Seminar were part of a promising second generation of researchers largely trained by Viktor Lowenfeld and other immigrants. This research culture gained traction as more art educators trained in the discipline of rigorous research joined art education programs in major universities.
The federal agencies and art educators attempting to reform art education in the sixties held several assumptions about the field. They believed art education had not been critical enough of its own practice, directly criticizing the apparent loose approach of the free-expression movement. In addition, they believed that American education should become more competitive by bringing the sophistication of academic disciplines to students (Efland, 1987), modeling art education after more rigorous school subjects, and deriving content from the work of artists, art critics, and art historians. Lastly, they wanted reforms in art education to be based on scientific research. Thus, art educators needed to develop a programmatic, national research agenda based on a single constellation of problems (Zahner, 1997).
The sponsors and planners of the Seminar wanted to redefine the foundation of art education in the United States. This top-down strategy entailed developing a series of best practices for art education that could then be passed down to schoolteachers. An unusual level of federal support for research in the arts, the discourse of educational reform in response to the advances of the Soviet space program, and the research culture started by European immigrants not only created the conditions that allowed the Seminar to happen, but also shaped the conversations that took place at the Seminar.
Several ideas pertaining to curriculum were discussed at the Seminar, including the following: aesthetics should be a core component of art education; art content should be the focus of study; art content should be modeled after the work of artists, art critics, and art historians; art should be studied within its sociocultural context; the art learner should be considered within the context of his own culture and past experiences; art should be taught by people with training in the arts and pedagogy; curriculum should be developed based on the behavior and knowledge of art professionals; and the interdisciplinary nature of art should be considered in research studies and curriculum activities (Hamblen, 1997).[1]
In the relatively broad spectrum of curriculum concepts discussed during the Seminar, the most pervasive idea was conceptualizing art education as a discipline (Efland, 1984). Debates on whether art education should be framed as a discipline in own right, as opposed to incorporating pieces of knowledge from different fields, had been published prior to the Penn State Seminar (Barkan, 1962; Eisner, 1965). For Efland, the resonance of Jerome Bruner’s theories in the work of Barkan at the Seminar was fundamental to convene art educators around the idea that art education has its own structure. Barkan cited Bruner’s claim that curriculum should be developed within a discipline, and proposed that art was a discipline equal to math and science, and should be taught in a similar manner (Efland, 1984).
Moreover, articulating art education as a discipline was a matter of status, as Efland explains: “In this new environment the arts either had to become disciplines themselves or lose their legitimacy” (Efland, 1988 p. 265). Although the concept of art education as a discipline and aesthetic education did not originate at the Penn State Seminar, the Seminar provided a comprehensive venue to discuss these ideas; thus, curriculum movements grounded in those tenets have claimed the Penn State Seminar as a stepping stone (Greer, 1984).
Determining the significance of the Penn State Seminar is not easy because of the different ways in which a historical event could be considered relevant. Tracing the significance of the Seminar, at least in a quantitative sense, would require identifying a series of measurable indicators demonstrating that the Seminar had a practical impact in the field, as well as ruling out other possible causes for those changes. That kind of research goes beyond the scope of this paper. We tackle the idea of significance by analyzing how the art education community, including planners and presenters at the Seminar, thought about the significance of the Seminar in the following years.
Although only five of 21 research proposals that emerged from the Seminar were funded (Murphy & Jones, 1978), some believe the Seminar was successful in stimulating research and more rigorous scholarship in art education (Hoffa, 1997; Stewart, 1986; Madeja, 1968). Dorn describes increased publications and expanding circulation of art education research journals in the years following the Seminar as an outcome of the research culture the Seminar stimulated. He mentions that in the years following the Seminar Studies in Art Education increased from 230 copies twice a year to 2,500.
Nonetheless, with the exception of Hoffa (1970), Dorn (1972), and a few others, art educators seemed almost to ignore the Penn State Seminar until 1984 when the Senior Editor of Studies in Art Education identified the Seminar as “an event that in retrospect seems to have produced noticeable change” for curriculum in the field (Rush, 1984, p. 203). Authors invited to write for that theme issue included: Arthur Efland, whose lead article was subtitled “An Evaluation in Retrospect” (1984); W. Dwaine Greer, Evan J. Kern, Gilbert A. Clark, Vincent Lanier, Ralph A. Smith, David Ecker, Ralph Hoepfner, Elliot W. Eisner, and June King McFee.
From our perspective, these names stand out from other distinguished art educators whose articles were included in that issue because all were working with the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, established in 1983 as one of several operating programs by the J. Paul Getty Trust. According to Rush (1984), Efland and Kern had been commissioned by the Getty to write papers on historical antecedents for discipline-based art education. Greer was identified as Director of the Getty-sponsored Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts in Los Angeles; Hoepfner was a consultant on evaluation for the Getty. Ecker, Eisner, Lanier, McFee, and Smith had all participated in the 1965 Seminar; the Getty had contracted for services from most of these authors.
After being practically forgotten for nearly two decades, the 1965 Penn State Seminar was revived and cast as the major antecedent to Discipline-based Art Education (DBAE), the approach to art teaching and learning the Center wanted to advance as the way to improve the quality and status of American art education. Greer, whose doctorate from Stanford had been completed with Eisner, had written several papers theorizing DBAE (Greer, 1984). Clark and Studies Senior Editor Jean Rush had been consultants for the Los Angeles Institute during its first summer. Efland (1985, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1996) continued to write about the 1965 Seminar as he prepared his 1990 history of art education. Most of his analysis of the Seminar emphasizes the contributions of Manuel Barkan, who had brought Efland onto the Ohio State faculty before his untimely death in 1970.
James Noble Stewart (1986), a doctoral student at Florida State University, conducted oral history interviews with Seminar planners, participants, and observers. Among other questions, Stewart asked each of his informants what they considered the major outcomes of the 1965 Seminar. During the 1980s and 1990s, Penn State hosted a series of three international conferences on the history of art education. The 1965 Seminar was featured at the third of these, planned by Albert Anderson and Paul Bolin (1997). At that History of Art Education Conference, a panel of Seminar planners — Ed Mattil, Harlan Hoffa, Jerome Hausman, and David Ecker — reflected on the context and consequences of the 1965 Penn State Seminar. Ken Beittel gave a separate paper on the Red Book. Ten presenters in eight other presentations analyzed the Seminar in relation to ideologies, policy, and historical significance, or used the Seminar as a jumping-off point for discussions of their own interests.
Stewart’s dissertation (1986), writings from the 1997 history conference, and other scattered writings suggest a range of opinions on the outcomes and success of the Seminar in the following three decades. On one hand, some believed that the Seminar had little direct effect on K-12 art education in the years following the Seminar (Dorn, 1972; Stewart, 1986; Efland, 1984). One possible explanation for this is the fact that government funding was explicitly directed toward research projects and not to schoolteachers’ resources. On the other hand, the Seminar was considered an antecedent to projects such as DBAE that profoundly affected art teaching (Stewart, 1986). Others, like Mattil, interviewed at the 1997 History of Art Education Conference, said that he believed the Seminar was significant, but had no proof.
In terms of curriculum concepts discussed at the Seminar, Efland (1984) and Dorn (1972) believed the Seminar did not represent a significant development of new ideas because concepts such as art education as a discipline and aesthetic education had started to gain currency prior to the Seminar. Other art educators thought that the strong network of people across multiple disciplines fostered by the 1965 Seminar changed the field of art education (Dorn 1972; Efland, 1980; Stewart, 1986). The strongest argument for the significance of the Seminar was that it brought together art educators already recognized as leaders in the field around a set of core problems. As Laura Chapman explained to Stewart: “It was just a wonderful opportunity for a lot of intense thinking by a group of people interested in doing just that” (Stewart, 1986, p. 201).
The Penn State Seminar can be seen as a landmark in the historical development of art education because it provided a conceptual foundation for further innovation in the field, including the aesthetic education and the discipline-based art education movements. The Seminar advanced the idea of creating a comprehensive, coherent approach to teaching art. The significance of the Penn State Seminar could be compared to a teaching act with both a stated and hidden curriculum. The Seminar’s significance should not be evaluated on the intended goals of the planning committee. The goal of developing a single constellation of issues and a centralized national research project that would produce best practices to be passed down to schoolteachers was not accomplished. However, the Seminar gave rise to unintended outcomes, such as professional networking and interdisciplinary conversations, which stimulated more rigorous research and scholarship.
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[1] The use of a male pronoun to refer to the learner is typical of this period, before second wave feminism helped increase awareness of sexist language in art education.