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. 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.
CCNY Art Ed believes…
Education should be a space for individual and collective transformation (for all)
We believe education should be a liberatory space for growth and transformation for both individuals and communities. Through arts-based practice, research, and teaching, we engage in critical reflection, analysis, dialogue, and action that moves us towards a sustainable and just world where we coexist with dignity, care, and the capacity to thrive.
Context matters
Who we are and the people we teach are all shaped by social, political, economic, cultural, and identity forces that surround us. To teach and create art effectively, we need to critically reflect on the many layers of our identities and purposes as well as those of the learners with whom we interact. Through an asset-based approach to education, we prepare educators and artists to examine and navigate the unique contexts of the people, places, and moments in which we work.
Power should be shared
In an effort to redistribute power more equitably in our society, creating art with other artists, educators, learners, and collaborators is a method for sharing and redistributing power. Shared power requires us to thoughtfully examine existing hierarchical power structures and seek out collective ways of making decisions, building knowledge, and making art.
Art should cultivate growth
Art should cultivate growth – not only in skill but in thought, connection, and action. We include and stretch beyond typical studio media, embracing tangible and intangible, tactile, auditory, and visual ways of making both collectively and individually. Art is multifaceted–from work created in conventional art studios to community-based practices, folkloric traditions, and activist art–it is a method for how we question, reflect, and engage with the world. Art can be a potent tool for transformation, fostering a deeper understanding of ourselves as artists, educators, and researchers, for our communities, and the world around us.
Knowledge production expands collective understanding and action
As we bring our ideas together and delve into deeper understandings of the intersection of art and education, we engage in critical research that seeks to expand our views of what is possible in art and education, lifting up knowledge within our fields. Drawing from experience, empirical data, and existing scholarship we produce knowledge that transforms how people understand, value, and promote art and education.
Joyful creativity and love are radical actions
We believe that community-building requires expansive imagination and radical love. Making things and cultivating understanding across difference with joy and compassion enables our communities to nurture the foundations for more a more sustainable and equitable world.
Program Goals
- 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