The history of art appreciation education has received increased attention since a 1985 Getty Center for Education in the Arts' report entitled, Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. The Getty report challenges teachers to reform art education, to shift from viewing art as a tool for self expression to art as a body of knowledge based on the four disciplines of art history, art criticism, aesthetics, and art production. One hundred years ago, classroom teachers promoted the study of reproductions of art in a movement called picture study. This dissertation compares the picture study movement, and its remnants extant in the progressive era, to the discipline-based art education movement of today. Period textbooks from three sources provide the primary data about early art appreciation education. First, a discrete picture study pedagogy is established through an analysis of three textbooks devoted solely to picture study. Second, an analysis of ten general art education textbooks from the progressive era shows that art appreciation remained an integral part of an overcrowded art curriculum. Lowenfeld's seminal Creative and Mental Growth shows a shift in attitude toward art appreciation in a text that has been regarded as having only negative bearing on the art appreciation movement. Finally, the contemporary discipline-based art education movement is chronicled and cross-compared to its forebears. The cross comparison is based on the following: philosophical foundations, approaches to curriculum, teacher audience and media, and format options. The researcher argues that the picture study movement of one hundred years ago and the discipline-based art education movement of today share an essentialist philosophy and imply a shared pedagogy, thereby establishing an important historical and conceptual niche for a heretofore neglected movement in art education history.

This study reports the stories of ten K–12 studio teachers, ten artist teachers at the higher education level, and twelve practicing artists from the mid-Atlantic and New England states as a means to describe the ways in which each person has been inspired to arrange and structure his or her work to gain joy, pleasure, and purpose from studio teaching and/or plein air landscape painting. Researchers, including Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1966; 1968a; 1968b; 1975) have studied creativity in artists, art students, and high achievers across various disciplines. Yet, a vital underpinning about the motivation to engage in artistic practice remains to be defined; hence the research question: What factors may impact sources of artistic inspiration? The significance of the problem, rooted in both the personal and professional interest of the researcher, was to consider factors that shape the training and practices of art teachers and artists who paint directly from the landscape and who shared the belief that observational and perceptive skills provide a foundation for artists who work figuratively or in a realistic tradition. The intent was neither to develop nor refine an existing theory. The study began with a proposed conceptual framework that was applied while interviewing the participants using an a priori protocol adapted from Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) study of creativity. While the use of predetermined protocols of questions often helps researchers to distinguish respondents’ participation in the interview from any information that is contributed by the interviewer, the presence of an a priori conceptual framework and/or an a priori questioning protocol, may bias answers in predetermined directions. Nonetheless, descriptive responses from the interviews, as well as information gathered from ancillary or enrichment conversations, were also examined for patterns of comparative alignment and contrast. Findings from this research illustrate how and why the artist is interested in the work for its own sake rather than trying to prove a theory or make a name. Though both of these goals may be of interest, results indicate that the artist subjugates them to the discovery and invention of meaningful and personal imagery.

Through this dissertation, I set out to investigate how craftivism as a way of making with/for meaning might foster transformative experiences within the discipline of art education. My motivating questions for this research project as I began my qualitative process follow. In what ways does my art-making inform my teaching practice? How do both my art and teaching practice inform my research practice? In what ways does my feminist identity impact these practices, ways of thinking and knowing, and the process of becoming who I am? And why is this research relevant to the field of art education? Given the nature of my research questions, I employed qualitative methods to critically explore, research, gather data, analyze, to better understand my place within making with/for meaning and to ultimately discuss my findings.

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