2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
Looking for a chapter event?
Past SPE Annual Conferences
exhibitions
Northeast Chapter Conference Schedule
print this pageInterupting rote influence, teaching divergence
Sarah Houghton Pfohl
Friday, November 08 - 10:15AM to 11:00AM
Teachers, particularly in higher education, have an enormous amount of power to mold learners, yet often do not want their students to mimic or imitate their own work completely. Many art teachers produce students that make work vastly different from theirs. Some examples of this include: Jan Groover and Gregory Crewdson, Josef Albers and Eva Hesse, and Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha, Vija Clemins, and Chris Burden. This presentation uses a combination of artist writings on teaching and arts education research to examine the following question: What strategies do art teachers use to exercise influence in the classroom that cultivates student work that moves beyond rote mimicry of the teacher's example? The literature presents 4 practical solutions: 1) promoting and embracing failure as a practice and, by extension, cultivating a classroom climate in which learners feel able to and supported in pushing boundaries 2) listening carefully to each learner's intent and goals for their work, a move that implicitly increases curricular individualization 3) the prioritization in the classroom of thinking skill development in tandem with mastery of necessary technical procedures and 4) making the teacher's bias explicit during feedback or critique and building structures into instruction to counter or challenge that bias. Operating with these ideas in mind, notions of top-down influence that moves directly from teacher to student body begin to dissolve as learners gain credibility and the learning environment design and demeanor of the teacher begin to surface and meet each learner as intentional individuals.
After framing the terrain broadly, I will examine each of the 4 practice-based solutions set forth above through quotes from artist writings and/or arts education literature. To conclude, I will share some practical strategies for incorporating these moves into the classroom to challenge and counter direct, undeviating influence between art teachers and art students.
speaker
About
Join
Members
Annual Conference
- About the Conference
- Overview
- Speakers
- Schedule
- Registration
- Announcements & Deadlines
- Volunteer
- Sponsors
- Exhibit
- Anti-Harassment Policy
- Hotel & Travel
- Location + Travel
- Hotel
- Schedule of Events
- Schedule
News & Events
Chapters
Exposure Journal
About this piece
Comments about this piece
Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.