Looking into the canon: Art curriculum in British Columbia

Definitions of art help us to discuss ideas, inform student practice, and demonstrate our knowledge. While the absence of language is a core feature of most of the world's art we insist upon language to ensure that others have understood what we have understood. This is our need to communicate, and, in some cases, to dominate.;We must provide education which is about important things. We must demonstrate understanding of both the constituents of artistic practice, and the pedagogic enterprise of promoting engagement and learning.;We begin by analyzing contemporary theories and definitions of art, including theory which denies the possibility of such definition. In the course of this analysis both the implicit and explicit definitions which provide the foundations for our current art curriculum will become apparent, as will contradictions and inconsistencies.;Institutional and aesthetic theory are at the core of our curriculum. These theories are employed to support an instrumental perspective which seeks to validate art for reasons other than its worth as meaningful and satisfying human activity. I will trace the origins of this instrumental rationalizing and chart its current application in the service of creating "good corporate citizens".;The field of Outsider Art provides a challenge to the theoretical models mentioned above. Other marginalized groups of artists emphasize and address questions of democracy and inclusion. Although multiculturalism is our national policy, and cultural pluralism is our purported perspective, there is little support of either in our curriculum.;If our current model of art education has been constructed upon exclusionary, outdated, irrelevant, or even faulty premises then it is in need of revision. There is substantial theory to support a critical reconceptualization and reorganization of the art curriculum. At the very minimum, contemporary theory should be incorporated to open the question---and identify that there is a question---about the constituents of art and art education. This paper will open the question, and provide some resolution through the model of Teacher as Artist in Residence, a model which recognizes not only philosophical and theoretical dimensions of teaching, but also the embodied artistic understandings of the artist.