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Navigating the research/practice divide
- Source: Visual Inquiry, Volume 3, Issue 3, Sep 2014, p. 249 - 261
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- 01 Sep 2014
Abstract
This article provides an introduction to the development of the 2012 NAEA Research Commission and its mandate to bridge the divide between art education research and practice. Art education and its most significant generator of professional identity, the National Art Education Association (NAEA), contain an extensive range of practices played out in a wide range of sites. Art educators include PK-12 classroom teachers, community organizers, museum educators and curators, pre-service instructors, researchers, research professors, instructional materials manufacturers and arts administrators. In 2012 the Board of the NAEA reestablished an NAEA Research Commission with the expressed goal of attending to relationships between research and practice in art education. The initiative, emerging out of this member-driven association populated primarily by PK-12 practitioners, required a shift in orientation to adequately address the needs of that audience. This article provides insight into the documents, policies and discussions that have lead to the crafting of the Commissions’ existing form and to the changing orientations towards leadership that occurred as a result of the mandate of the commission. The article will propose that an attention to aesthetic leadership provided a useful sensibility for navigating complex conditions with multiple variables. Aesthetic leadership draws upon disciplinary and personal habits that inform awareness and action. Aesthetic leadership also emerges out of improvisational responses to unanticipated phenomena. Leadership can be a latent capacity underdetermined or overdetermined by groups, fields or individuals. Invested participants subsequently come to speak differently about their interrelationships as a consequence of emerging conditions. This way of speaking about leadership is conducted in relation to a field’s ability to reconstruct a research/practice model that is shaped by both present conditions and theories.