First, tool theory.
The main point of instrumentalism is to emphasize the educational value of art education, that is, to regard art as an educational tool and think that art education can promote children's growth and development. Instrumentalism attaches importance to the creative process and ignores the creative results, and advocates that teaching methods should conform to children's natural development and analyze children's growth characteristics as the evaluation scope. This view of instrumentalism is directly related to Dewey's progressive education theory and the progressive education movement at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century. Understanding Dewey's thought is helpful for us to grasp instrumentalism more comprehensively.
(1) Educational ideological basis of instrumental theory: Dewey's educational theory is the main ideological basis of instrumental art education view. John dewey (1859— 1952) is an American pragmatic philosopher, educator and psychologist. He called his philosophy "instrumentalism" or "experimentalism". In Dewey's view, both formal education and informal education are actually undergoing experience transformation, and the transformed experience must be closely integrated with life and can promote personal growth. Therefore, Dewey believes that "education is the transformation of life, growth and experience." Only real life is the right way for physical and mental growth and experience transformation. Therefore, in order to turn the school into a controlled special social situation and the classroom into a paradise for children's activities, the teacher's duty is no longer to impart knowledge, but to guide and guide children to participate in manual, on-site visits, performances, building houses, surveying and mapping activities, so that children can directly contact with various facts and gain useful experience in activities, that is, ". Dewey abandoned the teaching materials of different disciplines and opposed to imparting knowledge of various disciplines. He believes that the real center of the relationship between school subjects is not science or literature, but children's own social activities. In Dewey's view of education, children are paid great attention to and all educational measures are organized around them. Dewey once pointed out that "children are the starting point, the center and the purpose. The development and growth of children is the most ideal education. For children's growth, all subject knowledge is only in a subordinate position, they are tools, so they serve various elements of growth, not knowledge and hearsay knowledge, but children's self-realization. " From this sentence, we can clearly see the ideological tone of instrumentalism art education view. Instrumentalism regards art education as a tool for children's natural development, and the fundamental purpose of art education is to promote children's natural development; Art teaching should be based on children's interests and nature, and teachers should not have too much participation or guidance. In art class, children can do art activities at will. In the teaching plan, art can be combined with other disciplines, and in many cases it has become a vassal to serve other disciplines. The main representatives of instrumentalism are Herbert Reid and Victor Tam Field.
(2) Reed's view of art education: Herbert Read, a famous British art educator, art theorist and critic, advocated promoting children's personality growth through art education. He believes that children have many innate potentials and different types of expression (children are divided into eight types according to thinking, feeling and intuition), and art teaching should be guided according to different types.
Reed spoke highly of the position of art in education, and believed that art is the most effective means to adapt to the self-orientation of human personality in society. He believes that the misfortune of human beings mainly stems from the suppression of individual spontaneous creativity and the obstacle to the natural growth of personality. Only by using art can education get rid of this situation and realize self-realization. In other words, the goal of art education is to promote children's spontaneous creativity and natural growth of personality.
Reid believes that human artistic expression forms are highly related to human psychological types. According to Jung's point of view, he divided human psychology into thinking type, emotional type, feeling type and intuition type, and each type has introversion and extroversion. In this way, there are eight basic types of human psychology. Reid believes that these eight basic psychological types have their own unique forms of expression of beauty. Take modern art as an example: thinking-realism; Sensibility-surrealist; Sensory expressionism; Intuitive-constitutionalism. There are introversion and extroversion in psychological type, and subjectivity and objectivity in artistic type. When it comes to children's art, Reid's point of view is that children are born with artistic potential and have different types of expressions. They are: organized, pseudo-emotional, rhythmic pattern, structural form, enumeration, expressionism, decoration and imagination. These eight types of children's artistic expression are influenced by children's specific personality types, which are equivalent to children's different psychological tendencies: extroverted thinking-enumeration, introverted thinking-organization; Extroverted emotional-decorative, introverted emotional-imaginative; Extroverted feeling type-imitation type, introverted feeling type-expressionism (tactile type); Extroverted intuition-imitation, introverted intuition-formation. Because of the interdependence between artistic types and psychological tendencies, teachers should have a type attitude in teaching, recognize the status of various types, and give encouragement and guidance according to children's natural temperament.
Children's art is not only influenced by children's specific personality types, but also by a series of original impressions or prototypes "from the subconscious". According to Reid's view, children's art is a prototype function left in human consciousness as a remnant of human evolution. The most common prototype is the Datura theme, including all concentric circles, centered circles or squares, and all radial or spherical arrangements, such as flowers, crosses, wheels, Datura, etc. These symbols naturally and repeatedly appear in children's paintings of various cultural backgrounds, thus providing evidence for human nature.
Reed imitated the progressive viewpoint and put forward the curriculum and teaching methods of art education. He pointed out that "curriculum should not be regarded as a collection of subjects. The middle school stage, like the primary school stage, should be a place for creative activities, and teaching should be implemented only when it is inevitable or helpful to realize the purpose of these activities. If in early childhood, these activities can be called game activities, in primary school, they are called projects, and then in middle school, they are combined into constructive courses. " [1] Art should become a part of school daily life, and the curriculum should adopt an integrated model. The school is an internship workshop, which meets the aesthetic standards. The teacher should be the intermediary to introduce the individual into the environment, and he should understand the "tolerant" students. Reid's view is consistent with the theory of progressive education.
(3) Ron Feeder's view of art education: Victor Ron Feeder is a famous contemporary American art educator and psychologist, and a professor in the Department of Art Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He integrated the theory and practice of art education, formed a set of influential views on art education, and became the core and leader of the progressive art education movement. Roenfeld believes that in art education, art is only a way to achieve a goal, not an end. The goal of art education is to cultivate creative and healthy people. Creativity is the potential that every child has. In order to realize this potential, teachers or parents should eliminate interference for children, avoid letting children use color picture books, and don't evaluate children's works from the perspective of adults. In this way, every child will freely use his own creative desire and use his own senses to feel and experience life. This is the best way to bring his creativity into play.
Roanfield divides the development of children's art into six stages: the graffiti stage (2-4 years old) is the first stage of children's self-expression; In the pre-stylization stage (4-7 years old), children make their first performance attempt; Stylistic stage (7-9 years old), appearing in the form of physical concepts; The age between the Party and the masses (9- 1 1) is the stage of rational germination; The reasoning stage (11-13) is the realistic stage; The crisis of youth (13-) is a decisive period for the development of children's art, and Ronfeld believes that these stages are the result of the natural development of perceptual procedures inherited from heredity. The development of each stage is like the development of each genetic program. Although each child's development characteristics and speed are different, the overall form and steps are similar. Children need to go through one stage before they can enter the next. Since these stages develop naturally, teachers should not interfere with children's art study. Don't try to teach children how to draw, just provide materials and stimulation, let children express themselves at their own speed and in their own way, and develop their artistic ability.
Roanfield regards children's creation as a reflection of their feelings, wisdom, physiology, perception, sociality, aesthetics and creativity. From the children's works, we can see their growth in these aspects. For example, if a child loves someone (something), he will emphasize and exaggerate it in his works; When their sociality and collectivity develop to a certain stage, there will be activities to express groups in their works. Children's development is the all-round development of physiology, emotion and society, and the creative process is the most important for children's all-round development. Therefore, Roenfeld emphasized the creative process and ignored the creative results, and clearly pointed out that "the most influential thing for children is the production process, not the finished product."
Ron Fidler didn't mention the concepts of visual mode and tactile mode when explaining the characteristics of children's art. According to Roanfeld, there are two modes of perception-vision and touch. Visual type is objective type. Visual individuals love the environment and are bystanders of the world. They ask nature for advice in their paintings, and their paintings tend to be concrete and realistic. The tactile type is subjective. Tactile individuals are participants in the world, not bystanders. They pay attention to the interpretation of subjective experience, and their paintings are often highly subjective. When children grow up, most people (about 70%) face the world in one of two ways (about 47% tend to be visual and 23% tend to be tactile). 〔2〕
Roanfield believes that the difference in perceptual characteristics is hereditary, so don't expect visual children to draw pictures with tactile characteristics, and tactile children will draw highly realistic works. There are two types of children's creativity-visual and tactile, which puts forward requirements for art teachers' teaching guidance. "We must pay more attention to these two experiences in the stimulus. If we stimulate him with subjective experience, emotional essence or physical experience, we will frustrate a' visual' person. Similarly, if we only use visual experience to stimulate the subjective person, we will also hinder him. Because traditional art education mainly focuses on visual stimulation, a large number of children are not only ignored, but also frustrated. Many art educators use visual stimuli in middle school, but they don't realize that modern performance art is also a non-visual stimulus in today's life. " [3] Therefore, realistic expression should not be the only criterion for criticism. Teachers should treat the attitude of experiencing the world and the way of visual contact equally. Artistic stimulation should include both tactile sensation and visual experience, so as to truly face all students.
Reid and Ron Fidel are both representatives of tool art education, and they both advocate "education through art". Reed's contribution lies in the value of art education and the achievement of philosophy, while Roanfield has his own characteristics in the research of art development psychology and teaching materials and methods, which complement each other and combine together. From their exposition on art education, we can clearly see the influence of Dewey and the progressive education movement, and even the shadow of Rousseau. In fact, Dewey's educational theory is closely related to Rousseau's theory, although Dewey himself refuses to admit it. Instrumentalism has made great changes in art education classroom, and children have become the center of art class.
Dewey attached importance to perceptual experience and paid attention to children's interests, which created a new era of child-centered education. However, "the facts tell us that Dewey's pedagogy is probably not widely used in schools-it still is." [4] Dewey-style education exposed the shortcomings of American schools, such as "lax discipline, incompetent writing, and serious shortage of elementary mathematics and scientific knowledge", which caused dissatisfaction among parents and social people. In the field of art education, the practice of instrumentalism makes school art education in a spontaneous state of children, without teachers' intervention and evaluation, and without paying attention to the final works. Art is not a learning course, but a tool for children to express themselves. The main function of visual art in school is only to provide students with an opportunity to express their creativity and vent their emotions. Strictly speaking, this state is "uneducated". In the 1960s, things began to change. The main opportunity for change is the launch of the first artificial satellite in the former Soviet Union.
Second, the essence theory
1957, 10 year10.7, the former Soviet union sent the first artificial satellite "Pusta nica" into the sky, showing the leading level of science education in the Soviet union. The need to compete for the world led the United States to carry out a large-scale curriculum reform movement in the 1960s. The theoretical basis of reform is the structuralism theory advocated by Bruner. On this basis, essentialism has gradually formed and developed in the field of art education. This educational reform triggered a discipline movement. When natural science, mathematics and foreign languages (that is, the "new three arts") are particularly favored, art education has gradually transformed into a discipline in order to survive in schools. Marcand played an important role in this transformation. He believes that art has the right to be a discipline, and art education as a discipline includes studio research, art criticism and art history, which influenced W.D. eisner and W.D. Gnagher, who were later representatives of essentialism. Essentialism was formed and gradually developed.
(1) The educational ideological basis of essentialism: Bruner's structuralist education theory is the main ideological basis of the essentialist art education view. Bruner is a famous American psychologist and a representative of structuralist education school. He is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and Oxford University and the director of Harvard Cognitive Research Center. He applied the structuralist psychology founded by Swiss psychologist J Piaget in 1950s to the curriculum reform in middle schools, and put forward quite original educational ideas. 1960, his book "the process of education" was published, which expounded four central ideas of educational reform: ① to enable students to master the basic structure of disciplines; The basic principles of any subject can be taught to anyone at any age in an appropriate way; ③ Attach importance to the development of intuitive thinking; The best motivation for learning is interest in learning materials. After its publication, the book was highly respected and called "an epoch-making work" by western educators. Soon, under the guidance of this book, the United States set off a teaching reform movement with curriculum innovation as the core.
The educational thoughts of Bruner and Dewey are quite different, which is mainly based on their differences in philosophical epistemology. Dewey is a real subjective idealist, and the core of his thought is "experience", while Bruner, on the other hand, emphasizes that the field of knowledge exists independently and can be recognized, and the regularity of "experience" or "things" is the fundamental reason for people to pursue knowledge. Textbooks should be composed of things that record these laws; Structure is not found inside the material, but is "added" and shaped by people; Knowledge can be composed of experts and scholars from various disciplines into a coherent model to construct the knowledge that children deserve. Under the guidance of this epistemology, he pointed out: (1) the development of ability and intelligence should be the purpose of education; (2) Take the basic structure of the subject as the educational content; (3) The four teaching principles are motivation, structure, procedure and reinforcement; (4) The teaching method is discovery.
Under the influence of Bruner's thought, the discipline movement began to rise. When others turn foreign languages, physics, chemistry and mathematics into disciplines with clear structure according to Bruner's theory, art education researchers also begin to pay attention to the structure of art. Art education has shifted from focusing on "self-expression" and "creativity" to helping students to discuss the structure of art disciplines independently, that is, teaching students how to learn art, thus developing an essentialist view of art education. However, these ideas did not gain a foothold at that time except for publicity in magazines. 1982, paul getty Trust Company established the Getty Art Education Center. The center promotes formal and systematic art education, helps schools to develop and enrich essentialism in practice, and gradually the discipline-based art education (dbae) begins to take shape and become popular.
(2) Essentialism view of art education: Essentialism emphasizes the essential value of art education and advocates discipline-based art education. Essentialists believe that art teaching should be subject-oriented and serialized, advocate systematic curriculum design and guidance methods, and evaluate children's academic performance with subject standards.
The representatives of essentialism are eisner and Genach. Eisner emphasized that the main value of art education lies in its unique contribution to personal experience. He pointed out that "art is an extremely special aspect of human culture and practice, and the most valuable contribution that art can make to human practice is directly related to its characteristics." The contribution that art can make to human education is exactly what other disciplines can't. Therefore, any educational plan that takes art as a tool for other purposes first will dilute the meaning of art, and art should not condescend to serve other purposes. [5] Art education is not a tool to serve other purposes, but it plays a unique role in basic education, so the status of art in school curriculum has been valued and improved.
Contrary to the instrumentalist, Eisner proposed that artistic ability is not the result of natural development, but the result of learning and education. "Art learning is not the natural result of children's growth and maturity. Art learning can be promoted through education and guidance. " [6] In that case, what can be taught? Eisner thinks that the field of art teaching should include three aspects: artistic creation, artistic criticism and artistic history. To make these three aspects of teaching effective, we need a systematic and continuous curriculum design, instead of calendar-centered teaching of painting turkeys at Thanksgiving and decorating programs at Christmas. And teaching should be evaluated as much as possible, because both tangible and intangible evaluation is of great benefit to teachers and students' teaching and learning.
W.Devin Genahr's view is similar to eisner's. Genahr advocates the outline of dbae. He first used the term "discipline-based art education" in the article "A discipline-based art education: taking art as a discipline research method". This popular educational thought is abbreviated as dbae. In fact, it originated from the educational concept that appeared in the 1960s, but it was only integrated with the ideas of artistic creation, artistic criticism and art history teaching put forward by Bakken and Eisner in the 1960s. Genahr believes that dbae can "cultivate educated people with knowledge of art and production, and can respond to beauty in art and other objects."
Dbae has three main characteristics:
1. The fields of study include aesthetics, art criticism, art history and artistic creation.
2. The teaching content is from simple to complex.
3. Strict written course design and systematic teaching.
Dbae has strict course center positioning. It not only attaches importance to the generation of image, but also attaches importance to the understanding of image. It requires that creation, appreciation, understanding and evaluation be integrated into the same teaching unit, embodied in the general curriculum, and carried out systematic and coherent teaching.
In the learning field of dbae, art creation is to let students learn production, skills and organization through practice; Art criticism is to let students develop their ability of image analysis, deduction and judgment through observation and appreciation; The study of art history enables students to deepen their understanding of history and culture through the understanding of the author and time and space background of the works; Aesthetics, on the other hand, enables students to strengthen their judgment ability and lay the foundation for theoretical study by discussing the essence of beauty, the experience of beauty and the position of art in human activities. Of these four aspects, art creation and art history are easier to understand, while aesthetics and art criticism are more difficult to understand. Below, we try to explain aesthetics and criticism briefly.
Regarding aesthetics, eisner, who actively supports dbae, once explained: "The specialty of aesthetics is to introduce a set of long-standing and insightful ideas to children and adults, as well as some unanswered questions." [7] For example, does a work of art have to be beautiful? Do great works of art necessarily contain such main ideas as strength and nobility? Is it necessary to know the artist's creative intention when evaluating the artist's works? These questions aim to open an artistic world for children, let them participate in this eternal dialogue and make some aesthetic thinking, which is exactly what video creation can't do. How does criticism intervene? Criticism is actually about art, and criticism can be successfully introduced into the classroom by using the characteristics of children's love of talking and arguing. Generally speaking, criticism can be divided into four stages:
1. Simple description stage: What do you see? Including objects, shapes, colors, lines and so on.
2. Formal analysis stage: how to organize the works? Is the picture symmetrical? How are the lines connected? What technologies and materials are used? Wait a minute.
3. Meaning interpretation stage: What does the author want to explain? What is the meaning of the work? What is the relationship between social economy and culture, the author's ideological character and this work? What atmosphere, ideas and thoughts are conveyed in the works?
4. Value evaluation stage: What's your impression? Are you infected? What do you think of this job? Wait a minute.
The first two stages focus on what you see, not what your impression is, and prevent students from jumping to conclusions too early. In the explanation stage, teachers can use appropriate language to explain works and improve students' artistic quality. On the basis of the first three stages, finally let the students evaluate the value of the work.
The course design of dbae is integrated, that is, integrating artistic creation, artistic criticism, aesthetics and art history into a complete unit teaching, teaching at the same time, and developing systematically from simple to complex. In this way, it can help students expand their artistic knowledge, understand various cultural meanings, and exchange ideas through visual arts. Therefore, dbae requires a series of special teaching themes, which are strictly designed and reflect the cultivation in four aspects. For example, teaching with the theme of scenery can include: discussing whether the scenery of nature can be called art (aesthetics); Learn to judge whether a Dutch landscape painting is violent or lonely from the form and analysis (art criticism); Identify the typical styles of realistic and imaginary landscape paintings in Holland, France and China, and study how nature is idealized and abstracted (art history); Use the skills of chalk and sponge painting to create the illusion of space and natural scenery (artistic creation). As an art teacher, we should be good at starting from simple art behaviors, such as common landscape sketching. Although the four aspects of dbae do not need to be taught separately, teachers should clearly understand each of them and combine them organically.
Dbae emphasizes the essential value of art education and the integrity and systematicness of curriculum structure. Students should not only learn how to make works of art, but also learn how to appreciate works of art and understand the relevant background knowledge of the times-the social environment in which works are produced. Due to the research, experiment and popularization of the Getty Art Education Center, this theory has had a wide impact. People expect that it can effectively improve students' artistic accomplishment, make them understand the relationship between culture and art, content and form, learn to evaluate works of art objectively, and have more artistic knowledge.
Because dbae is guided by strict course center and has strict curriculum design, it is expressly stipulated that students should study in four fields: creation, criticism, art history and aesthetics. So some people ask, is art education close to behavioral science or physical science education? Will education like dbae be too similar to other disciplines and lose the uniqueness of art? Will it be too strict and lead to rigidity and boredom? Based on the structural curriculum theory, Dbae attaches importance to the cultivation of students' aesthetic ability, but ignores the inspiration of spontaneous performance and emphasizes aesthetic experience and creative development. In art education, we must pay attention to structure while strengthening flexibility.
Instrumentalism and essentialism are produced and developed in different educational backgrounds, and they have different values, different goals, different contents and methods. Instrumentalism takes pragmatic education theory as the development soil and advocates children-centered art education. It attaches importance to children's interests, emphasizes the cultivation of children's spontaneity and creativity, but ignores the systematic teaching of artistic knowledge and skills. Therefore, it is impossible for this kind of art education to cultivate children with rich artistic knowledge and skills. However, limited artistic knowledge limits the development of children's high-level artistic creativity, because high-level creation must be based on rich knowledge and ability. Essentialism is based on structuralist education theory and requires teachers and teaching materials as the center. Paying attention to the comprehensive cultivation of artistic creation, appreciation, understanding and evaluation is not enough to stimulate spontaneous expression. In addition, strict curriculum design and teaching are often formal and boring.
Comparing these two theories, we can find that they have their own advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, it is obviously inappropriate to apply any one to our art education alone. We can absorb and transform them reasonably according to the requirements of quality education and the present situation of art education in China, so as to make foreign things serve China and promote the development of art education in China.