Higher Education Division Representative
Resources
The TSA reports no shortages in teacher education in the visual arts here in WI since at least 1990. Link here
Wisconsin DPI Supply and Demands reports are available. Link here No Child Left Behind: A study of its impact on Art Education , Feb. 2010. This report is available in several versions from NAEA. Version quoted is the Executive Summary. Link here “Obama to seek sweeping change in ‘No Child’ law", Sam Dillon, NY Times Link here ** I would love to post higher education news here. Please share what you are doing. Thanks! lia. | Technology and responsibility Writing this on my I-Pad, I am thankful for the opportunities that technology affords in the work that we do as well as in our leisure time. As art educators, however, it is essential to remember that ours is fundamentally a sensory endeavor - much of what we do is to engage and train children to respond to and manipulate sensory physical material. A variety of technologies are brought to bear on those engagements and yet, at the mention of "technology," the first images that come to mind are the electronic and the digital - Smartboards, I-Pads, computers, cell phones and all the rest. While there are, undoubtedly, some valuable applications for the digital to our teaching, the ubiquitous character of these electronic devices can cause educators to emphasize technologies that fundamentally diminish sensory engagements or limit those engagements to the superficially visual. Our lives are deeply entangled in the commercial and the economic priorities of the society. The fundamental nature of the popular media is to be self-serving, to cause us to spend more time with our digital devices and to convince us that we cannot remain content with our current devices when newer versions are available (Oppenheimer, 2004). The thirst for novelty fuels the economy. Individuals and institutions (schools) alike try to remain on the "cutting edge" of hardware, software, and expertise. Of course, there is a cost to all of this, in money, time, and in our mental, physical, and spiritual orientations and dispositions. "Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness." John Ruskin (Ruskin, 1872) As teachers, we have a wealth of technologies at our disposal and it is our responsibility to make thoughtful and prudent selections. It is a commonplace to refer to computers and other devices as "tools" but we are better served by thinking about them in terms of media. Media tend to condition our thinking, to demand our response and engagement in ways that simple tools do not (Postman, 1999). In order to clarify the types of mediations generated by various technologies, it is helpful to group our technologies into four general categories: 1) physical extensions of human abilities, 2) mechanical surrogates for human action, 3) analogues for human physicality and 4) proxies - simulacra that serve as replacements for human physicality (Baudrillard, 1983). These four forms of technology mediate human sensory interaction at increasingly high levels and, correspondingly, reduce the physical resistance experienced. Physical extensions include simple tools such as hammers and saws for increasing available strength and power but also devices such as microscopes or telescopes that extend our sensory capabilities. These extensions often maintain a high level of physical resistance and a low level of mediation or distancing since their intervention of experience is rather direct. Technological surrogates may be thought of as replacements or models of experience. They often replicate or mechanically mimic human action. Machines such as sewing machines or bicycles duplicate and extend human motion with only moderate physical resistance and a low level of mediation. Analog technologies translate human experience into alternate, analogous forms. Television, radio, the telephone and photography convert human physicality into electronic or chemical replicas. In doing so, our human experience becomes highly mediated and distanced while the level of physical resistance is low or entirely imperceptible. As technologies move from the realm of the analogous to the digital, mediation, as such, ceases and our human physicality is replaced by the simulacrum, or proxy. Combinations of 1s and 0s take the place of language, sound, and image. The results may be thought of as metaphorical for those experiences that were once direct and physical. Resistance and mediation are no longer of any concern. Art educators should neither promote nor resist the growing range of contemporary technologies. Our responsibility as educators is to choose wisely, to select those types of experiences that will most effectively and positively impact our students. Such choices need to take into account the context in which our students learn, developmentally and culturally. As art educators, we understand that much of our task is about educating the senses and the issues of mediation and the distancing of the physical senses cannot be overlooked or taken lightly. Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. Semiotext(e). Oppenheimer, T. (2004). The flickering mind: Saving education from the false promise of technology. New York: Random House. Postman, N. (1999). Building a bridge to the 18th century: How the past can improve our future. NY: Random House. Ruskin, J. (1872). The eagles’s nest. London: Smith, Elder & Co. |
