The Art Education program at City College of New York prepares students to be reflective artist-educators who can teach in multiple settings, including schools, community centers, museums, and alternative learning sites. In addition, students gain a critical understanding of the social significance of art education as they develop the skills to actively contribute to the field through their creative and academic work.
Program Commitments
Art education is contextual: Since art education takes place in multiple settings with diverse learners, students must understand how and when to use different approaches to engage their students
Teaching is a social, political, and cultural practice: To be an effective teacher requires active reflection and critical engagement with theory and practice.
Making art is empowering: Art education should encourage learners to actively engage with creating and analyzing works of art in ways that are personally relevant, empowering, and authentic.
Art can impact injustice: The act of making art can be a practice of critical social justice whereby artists impact conditions of inequality.
Effective educators are compelling advocates: To best serve our students, we must be articulate and informed advocates for the educational benefits of the arts.
Program Learning Outcomes
Students will:
- Develop the necessary dispositions to be a reflective practitioner (i.e. responsiveness, improvisation, leadership, problem-solving, reflection, etc.)
- Understand the cultural, political, social context/purposes of art education in our society.
- Analyze contemporary and historical trends in art education as they relate to educational theory
- Reflect on the role of power, privilege, and identity as they pertain to the responsibilities of educators
- Write critically about their own experiences in arts education and about current issues in the field of arts education
- Create and teach scaffolded, idea-centered, developmentally-appropriate, inquiry-based, and social justice oriented curricula for teaching art in multiple settings
- Understand the differences between teaching in multiple arts education settings (i.e. museums, schools, after school programs, community centers, etc.)
- Employ effective assessment tools for evaluating learning in the arts
- Design and implement self-directed research in arts education
- Integrate their own art-making with their own teaching practice
Note: This website is currently under construction–please be patient as we continue to add to it (7/30/2011).
