Dreading, Pivoting, and Arting: The Future of Art Curriculum in a Post-Pandemic World

Dreading, Pivoting, and Arting: The Future of Art Curriculum in a Post-Pandemic World

New and emergent models of art curriculum in response to Covid 19

Over the past several months, new models of curriculum and the enactment of these models were devised and worked out in real time so that students might continue to learn and thrive despite abrupt changes to their day-to-day realities. Professional collaborations were key for many art educators adapting to online, at-home schooling, myself included. It was a collaboration with my colleague, Gloria Wilson, that led me to abandon my carefully planned art curriculum in favor of teaching toward the unknown. Over long Zoom sessions, we shared our anxieties about being asked to pivot to teaching online with only a few days in which to do it. We both wanted to offer students a curriculum that would help them (and us) cope with the dislocation from school campus and disruption to routines and relationships. Besides dread, we also saw in the pivot to online instruction an unusual opportunity to experiment with curriculum design and equity pedagogies in art and visual culture education. Our students ended up pursuing creative investigations focused on understanding and participating in the visual culture emerging in the time of COVID-19 (see Figures 1–3). They used arts-based methods to attend to what was new and changing in the world around them, collect and document what they noticed, and then visualize it in symbolic forms.

Kraehe, A.M.

Art Education, (7)4, 4-7

Taylor & Francis Online

16 June 2020

Kraehe, A.M.

Editorial in academic journal

English

Online academic journal

https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2020.1774320

International