Visual Inquiry - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2014

Knowledge of the field and visions for the future are vital for transformational leadership in art education, according to current scholars. With the development of common schools and hierarchical bureaucracies in Massachusetts, in a context of belief in artistic genius, early historians of art education told stories of heroes and experts. During the 1870s, Walter Smith (1836–1886) lectured students at Massachusetts Normal Art School that great men demonstrated commitment to work, indomitable courage and persistence in their heroic leadership. In the mid-1890s, Massachusetts’ agent for industrial drawing Henry Turner Bailey (1865–1931) categorized art supervisors as geometric solids: sphere, cube and cylinder. About a decade later, Bailey called for a servant model of leadership, with traits that can be interpreted as stereotypically feminine. Networked leadership emerged in the early twentieth century as administrative progressives worked together to construct a business of art education with engaged stakeholders, distributed leadership and a rationale emphasizing functions of visual arts in everyday life. Royal Bailey Farnum (1884–1967) served as central node for most of the overlapping leadership networks. As Executive Vice President of Rhode Island School of Design during the 1930s and 1940s, he introduced strategic planning that prepared the School for post-war success. Leadership in American art education has changed in response to cultural contexts, social factors, institutional demands, and male and female performances of power. How will art educators play the leadership game in the years to come?

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.

In this article, I describe how Frances Thurber (1946–2012) and I began in the early 1990s to conduct research concerning empowerment and leadership themes in art teacher education. Over the next decade, we were involved in researching leadership issues in art teacher education and conducted a series of studies that focused on both theory and practice related to developing voice, collaboration, and social action as components of feminist leadership in art education. Our goal was to educate in-service art teachers to become empowered and take leadership roles in programmes in Nebraska and Indiana. By 2002, we had constructed several pedagogical models as a result of our studies of various components of leadership and empowerment. I describe how I then used these models from 2003 to 2012 to study three different populations of undergraduate and graduate students in the United States. Finally, I make a case for extending the leadership models to include creativity as a new component for considering leadership and art education. Rethinking my past decade of work about building leadership models for art education, from a more extended lens than the one through which the two leadership models were originally constructed, provides an avenue for new collaboration, community building, and consideration of the role of creativity in empowerment and leadership in art education and considers a variety of populations and organizations that can be enriched by using these extended leadership models in the future.

The roles of professional artists and educators are established and defined by mentors in the field. In addition, they have a large impact on students, and can have a powerful influence on future artists. Our position as mentors becomes one of furthering the knowledge base of the field and passing it down to the next generation. However, we know mentorship to be essential but it is also often misunderstood. Educating, motivating or helping others to become more effective are characteristics that can be developed in university art and art education programmes through the process of mentoring, whether in the classroom, studio, online, or institutions like museums or galleries. Despite the process of mentorship trending outside the traditional classroom, this was not always the case in the history of art education and much can be done through collaboration and effective communication to develop the mentoring process. This article explores the changing landscape of mentoring in the university and considers the deskilled context that favours developing competencies through the concepts of accidental mentoring and mentoring through collaboration.

This article will mostly engage with arts leadership through a discussion that focuses on the arts, leadership and education, and how their convergence might have a direct impact on autonomy. Taking a meta-theoretical approach, the main argument is that arts leadership is an asymptotic state of affairs. Rather than pose art and leadership as antithetical events that necessitate forms of syntheses through identifiable contexts, the context for arts leadership represents a contiguous space where art and leadership continuously seek a mutual way of preserving their integrity in an asymptotic relationship. If this relationship turns into a synthesis, both art’s autonomy and the ability to lead creatively are neutralized. The aim is to question the various implications that bring together the autonomous spheres of the arts, education and leadership, while inviting the reader to draw his or her own conclusions critically and autonomously. To clarify this approach, this article straddles across several horizons, including: arts practice as a sphere of autonomous dispositions and the political implications that follow; education as a horizon that educes – leads out – through the pedagogical exits that are offered by the arts; and art’s anti-systemic pedagogy, where art’s autonomy becomes a possibility of unlearning systems.

This article considers how arts-based and other practices inform creative leadership capacities. This consideration is grounded primarily in a reflection on previous work of artists and their colleagues on the production, advocacy and education of colloidal silver-enhanced ceramic water filters as a response to the global water crisis. Central to this reflection is consideration of how this work informs creative leadership capacities through theoretical lenses of collaborative leadership, socially engaged practice and art practice as giving. Ultimately, the intention is to suggest that creative leadership as praxis takes form through cultural production beyond object-making, favouring the facilitation of meaningful relationships among people, ideas and contexts, as they arise from collaboration and social engagement.

How do the characteristics and behaviours of creative people mesh with their roles as faculty members? How do the opportunities and demands of today’s college environments play into the work lives of arts faculty? And what are the implications of these questions for thinking about how best to lead artists and arts scholars in colleges and universities? This article explores these questions through an examination of servant leadership, an approach that focuses on service as an underlying principle of leadership. Intertwined with a discussion of creative people and optimal characteristics of those who lead them, I describe current conditions of colleges and universities and what being a college leader may be like. I then present characteristics of servant leaders and attempt to draw some parallels between servant leadership behaviours and needs of faculty and students in the arts. Finally, I summarize some potentially positive outcomes of servant leadership as well as some of the model’s possible drawbacks and challenges.

This article explores how those involved in leadership roles in institutional settings can make effective use of strategies, methods and processes common to visual arts practice and arts-based research as a means to participate in an authentic way in a culture of change. It is argued that, to claim institutional agency leaders of academic arts units need to create an alternative discourse to counter the fatigue of business rhetoric. This can be accomplished using a participatory approach that makes use of tactical action and the open-ended search structures of artistic enquiry. To move beyond the business of education, three notions of leadership are proposed that involve creating fluid working structures, participating so as to gain institutional agency, and putting initiatives into practice that enable others to thrive.

In this reflective essay, I draw on my experience as the Director of the art+education programmes at New York University to explore what happens if we shift art education practices from primarily an object based understanding of art that is unconnected to our daily lives to one where art is a living form that makes things happen. By focusing on an art-as-instruction exhibition where the audience enacts the instructions, I open a discussion on the notion of visibility and invisibility in art education practices, in the hope of rethinking the ways we train art teachers.

Art-centred integrated learning is a version of art integration that uses art enquiry processes to promote deep and holistic understanding of concepts and ideas that matter to our students while fostering their abilities to handle complexity and think flexibly, capacities they will need in order to prosper in a complex and uncertain world and become leaders in shaping that world. To meet these needs of their students, the Alameda County Office of Education in Northern California has adopted Integrated Learning, an approach to education that promotes integrative thinking and integrated knowledge through art-centred learning. Because Integrated Learning presents solutions for education across the board, it provides a model that leaders in general education could consider when formulating pedagogy. And since this model draws from contemporary art practices, it provides both education in the arts and a strong rationale that art education leaders can use to argue for a robust presence of the arts in education. Moreover, the Integrated Learning approach delineates a set of principles and practices that are germane to creative leadership and could be integrated into leadership education.

The concept of integrating the visual arts with other school subjects resurfaces periodically in educational discourse, but the classroom practices that follow are often disappointing, as implementations dilute the rich possibilities envisioned by theoreticians. Leadership is needed in order to clarify the nature of truly integrated pedagogies, and to prepare teachers to collaborate with specialists in other disciplines to initiate projects that call upon multiple languages to accomplish and document learning. Structural changes in the nature of teachers’ work and the structure of the school day are needed if truly integrated project-based learning is to occur. Leadership is required, in schools and teacher preparation programmes, to accomplish these ends.

This article tells the story of an elementary school math teacher faced with the challenge of preserving a classroom devoted to innovative and creative learning, as his independent day school moved towards standardization and traditional educational approaches. After being informed that his instruction needed to come into closer alignment with the rest of the school he invited his students to brainstorm ways in which they could inconspicuously remain empowered agents of their own learning. The class decided to set aside one hour each week as a time for self-directed learning. During this time they produced math-based carnival games culminating in an event they called ‘Math Palooza’. Reflecting on this experience, the author realized the importance of using critical self-reflection to interrogate the status quo and as a safeguard from falling into habitualized methods of instruction and obsolete forms of curricular design.

Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most conservative country in the Middle East. The display of art is not allowed, or extremely limited, under Sharia law. This article explores a three-week adult art education class taught to women at the Al Baylasan Art Center in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia. With the goal of empowering women, it challenged two American art educators to develop and present a curriculum that was respectful of the culture but allowed the students to push the limits of their thinking about what might be possible in their changing cultural context.

The arts have a long and rich history of connecting and transforming communities through creative collaboration. This article highlights the community-based art education curriculum and practices of a holistic pre-service/in-service art education programme as a possible best practices model for developing creative leaders for careers in and beyond the P-12 classroom. Community-based art education, service learning and transformative learning theory are discussed as effective frameworks for planning and implementing creative, transformative community collaborations and opportunities for leadership development with participants across the lifespan.

This article discusses the National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) SummerVision DC program, which combines blended learning with ongoing professional development grounded in an intensive four-day expeditionary engagement, exploring diverse museums as vital learning sites while building a professional learning community (PLC). To comprehend the interactive nature of the SummerVision DC experience and its creation of optimal conditions for growing a supportive and professional learning community (PLC) within the museum environment, this article reviews key stages in the evolving process – from virtual preparation/anticipation to actual learning experiences, revealing the interweaving of the preparatory work with museum educators and participants, the hands-on/on-site experiences, the collaboration and relationship building, the time for reflection, the opportunity to apply what one is learning and walk away with lessons that can be used in the classroom, the use of technology to expand and extend the learning (before the event), and the community connections (after the event) that are continued and expanded through social media with ongoing NAEA support for collaborative networking and insightful and creative leadership.

The digital age and the need for visual literacy in a creative economy increase the importance of equitable and accessible art education. While Congress has recognized art education as a core component of a well-rounded public school education, students now in fact have less access to art programmes and the opportunity to pursue these programmes is less equitable in many communities. To address this paradox and to bring curricular parity, art educators must become the champions of their professional field. Grass-roots leadership cannot be taken for granted. The National Art Education Association (NAEA), once a traditional professional association, has addressed the need for organizational transformation, using creative leadership strategies to mobilize its members, to build robust communities of practice, and to create agile structures that empower art educators to become stronger leaders and advocates.

The fields of general education and art education are in an unprecedented period of change. Educational leaders at all instructional levels have experienced new challenges, problems and opportunities that required higher levels of creativity, innovation and visionary thinking than ever before. Advances in neuroscience, creativity studies, charter schools, technology, national curriculum standards, high-stake assessments of learning, teacher evaluations and numerous other developments have contributed to making leadership development a priority in all school districts and communities. Opportunities for leadership development and professional learning are limited. In order for the field of art education to meet these growing leadership challenges, the field needs to increase its emphasis on leadership development for all art educators. Those in positions of leadership must engage in and emphasize policy studies in art education. At a fundamental level, art educators and leaders must refine and develop their understanding of the nature and structures of leadership. In order for these things to occur across the nation, creation of professional development opportunities must be made available on an ongoing basis so that art educators can continue to develop and refine their skills as leaders. Among the full array of leadership development needs in art education, there are significant opportunities for leadership growth and involvement in the areas of public policy, educational partnerships and teacher training programmes. Concentrating leadership development in these key areas holds potential for producing leadership outcomes that can positively influence art education in all schools and communities across the country.

This manuscript appeals to arts education leaders to consider how their current advocacy messages may be missing an emphasis on learners who are excluded from access to any artistic learning in public education. I make a personal call for more critical and human-centered messages by drawing on exchanges among artists, learners and teachers. Maxine Greene’s theory of wide-awakeness is animated as an accessible advocacy theme in the form of four letters: one to the editors of this journal, one to a school board commissioner in a struggling urban district, one to a national arts advocacy leader and one to Maxine Greene. Issues of messaging are examined as part of a dynamic ecosystem among academic, policy and practice-based perspectives.