Disability Studies in Art Education Column: Fall 2023

Column by: Alice Wexler, Professor Emerita, SUNY New Paltz; Karen Keifer-Boyd, Professor of Art Education, Bioethics, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University. Email: kk-b@psu.edu

Virtual Forum for Post-COVID Current-Climate Dialogues: History in the Making

Register here to receive the Zoom link to join the September 30 (12:00–2:30 pm EDT) International Disability Studies, Art & Education (iDSAE) inaugural virtual forum.

You are warmly welcome to network, dialogue, and engage with artists, educators, activists, scholars, and students about contemporary issues in the interdisciplinary field of disability studies as it pertains to the field of art education. NAEA’s Disability Studies in Art Education (DSAE) Interest Group joins the International Disability Studies, Art & Education (iDSAE) network to raise questions, plan actions, and find support.

We will form several topical breakout rooms, based on a call to DSAE members to collect topical questions, concerns, and issues for conversation at the September 30 iDSAE virtual forum. Participants may select breakout Zoom rooms for inclusive small-group discussions, and then join the full group to learn from the other groups’ summary presentations. Your questions and perspectives are vital. The two-time rotation from small- to large-group dialogues offer informal yet hot-topic deep discussions and succinct summaries in the making of history, with recognition of actions of the past and present impacting the future. What is your history with disability studies and arts education? Join the virtual forum on September 30 and be part of history in the making.

A History of Disability and Art Education

[[image #### "Book cover for an August 2023 publication."]]

In other current news, in A History of Disability and Art Education, Claire Penketh (in press), associate professor and head of disability studies at Liverpool Hope University,

suggests that arts education, like all educational practices, has omitted and critically avoided disabled youth in school curricula, research, and community. She tracks this history of ableist omission from the late 19th century until the present time in the U.K. and the United States, as the inevitable result of social and cultural practices that prioritize “normative” bodyminds. The relationship between art education and disability, she writes, has been marked by absence, segregation, and exclusion. It is important to note, however, while Penketh attempts to create a historical trajectory, she nevertheless emphasises the need to resist reductive histories and coherent stories, “recognising the impossibility and undesirability of a comprehensive historical account,” lest certain narratives are privileged over others. (n.p.)

In the introduction to the book, Penketh begins her argument by examining arts education’s historical representations evolving during the industrialist 19th century, and later the capitalist 20th century and neo-capitalist 21st century, all of which continue to influence the development of formal art education in some form.

Through the lens of disability studies, Penketh brings theoretical insights to and a critical reading of classic art education texts “that have contributed to the production of a normative social order” (in press, n.p.). Historical texts that chronicle the education of disabled students are dominated by specialist discourses that, she argues, are profoundly embedded in the policies and practices of education in the past century, and specifically special education in both countries. And while special education was intended to include disabled children, it nevertheless separates them in the way they are valued and thus the way the arts are used and conceived in special education.

Most disturbing is the lack of discussion of the advances in disability rights since the 1990s in recent critical historical texts about art education. “This absence of disability is particularly striking given the emphasis on social and intellectual movements relating to gender, race and class, the civil rights movement and the significance of the 1970s for sexual and personal liberation” (Penketh, in press, n.p.). For example, while the editors of Steppingstones: Pivotal Moments in Art Education History (Kantawala et al., 2021) discuss colonialism, racial and social prejudice, white supremacy, and intersectionality, they fail to confront the social and cultural attitudes that have dominated disability in education.

Table of Contents

Part I – Historicising Disability and Art Education. 1. Crafting Ocularnormativity: The Dominance of Vision. 2. Curating Deafness: Aesthetics and the Politics of Display. 3. Erasing Identities: Eugenics and IQ. 4. Child Art: The Making of Normative Youth. 5. Psychology: Troubling the Art-Education-Therapy Nexus.

Part II – Recent Histories. 6. Containing Curricular: Regulation and Agency. 7. Modelling Diversity: (Dis)Placing Contemporary Art Practice. 8. Crisis and Precarity: Austere Times for Disability and Art Education. x. Epilogue: Advancing an Anti-Ableist Pedagogy.

References

Kantawala, A., Stankiewicz, M. A., & Bolin, P. E. (2021). Steppingstones: Pivotal moments in art education history. Teachers College Press.

Penketh, C. (in press). A history of disability and art education. Routledge.

Kelly Gross, DSAE Chair