Judith Burton discusses the need to focus on the personal expression of youth and adolescents in art making rather than directed art techniques and outcomes. In her article, “The integrity of personal, experience, or the presence of life in art,” she explains the developmental stage of youth and adolescents, and breaks down the thought process during art making for these age groups. Her article also discusses how fostering youths’ expression of personal experience with imagination can cultivate better perspectives toward the arts, be it: visual, written, auditory, or performative. If art education was directed in such a manner, then much of the youth would not find it to be pointless but pertinent.
Burton’s essay arouses many questions for me. Many focusing around Rolling’s Analytic form of Arts Based Research (ABR). The main overarching question was how do you foster Analytic self-expression with youth when administration and parents’ perceptions are similar to Burton’s statement that, “in the western world, grown-ups were not so comfortable with the works that denied acceptable standards of beauty or realism in the art of the children however young,” (p 13)? I have a tendency to think that art education is run the way it is currently in public education settings because many districts’ administration view art education this way (this bias only coming from the perspective of my current district where I am employed). The overall arching theme of education currently is statistic and data based research. Administration in my district has a tendency to only support the arts if we can focus it in this direction—which I believe is discipline based arts. Burton also made me question my current teaching because I do fit into the realms she describes as ineffective. I would love to implement strategies that focus on youths’ imaginative creative self, but the few times that I have tried, my students didn’t take interest. I fail at the implementation. I have started several lessons with my students where it has been working through materials. They stop about half way through a thirty-minute class and ask if we can start the real lesson. How do you carry on lessons that are self-explorative in theme? What if the overarching theme you introduce for some direction and scaffolding doesn’t fit? To be honest, I find frustration in these articles because, yes, these ideas are beautiful, and I do agree with them to a certain extent; but, how do you affectively approach implementing said ideas? In a bias, bold statement of my own narrowly formulated opinion, I feel these theoretical ideas seem untested in a variety of environments. I feel that these practices are implemented in settings that have income and support flexibility in the teaching atmosphere.