- Who We Are
- Topics
- By Subject Area
- dummy
- By Level
- Projects
- Projects Column 1
- Agency by Design
- Aligned Programs for the 21st Century
- Artful Thinking
- Arts as Civic Commons
- Causal Learning Projects
- Children Are Citizens
- Citizen-Learners: A 21st Century Curriculum and Professional Development Framework
- Creando Comunidades de Indagación (Creating Communities of Inquiry)
- Creating Communities of Innovation
- Cultivating Creative & Civic Capacities
- Cultures of Thinking
- EcoLEARN Projects
- Educating with Digital Dilemmas
- Envisioning Innovation in Education
- Global Children
- Growing Up to Shape Our Place in the World
- Higher Education in the 21st Century
- Humanities and the Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)
- Projects Column 2
- Idea Into Action
- Implementation of The Good Project Lesson Plans
- Inspiring Agents of Change
- Interdisciplinary & Global Studies
- Investigating Impacts of Educational Experiences
- JusticexDesign
- Leadership Education and Playful Pedagogy (LEaPP)
- Leading Learning that Matters
- Learning Innovations Laboratory
- Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn
- Making Across the Curriculum, an initiative of Agency by Design
- Making Learning and Thinking Visible in Italian Secondary Schools
- Making Learning Visible
- Multiple Intelligences
- Navigating Workplace Changes
- Projects Column 3
- Out of Eden Learn
- Pedagogy of Play
- Reimagining Digital Well-being
- Re-imagining Migration
- ROUNDS
- Signature Pedagogies in Global Education
- Talking With Artists Who Teach
- Teaching for Understanding
- The Good Project
- The Next Level Lab
- The Studio Thinking Project
- The World in DC
- Transformative Repair
- Visible Thinking
- Witness Tree: Ambassador for Life in a Changing Environment
- View All Projects
- Projects Column 1
- Resources
- Professional Development

An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse: Art Education from Colonial Times to a Promising Future
PUBLISHED: 2021AUTHORS: Ellen Winner
Resource Summary
An Uneasy Guest recounts how art education has been conceptualized, justified, and taught in the United States in the face of the persistent marginalization of the arts in the American education system. The teaching of art has often been justified in terms of some non-art outcome. In the 19th century children dutifully copied, line by line, pictures given to them by their teachers; this training was meant to develop drawing skills for industry. In the first part of the 20th century, with the rise of John Dewey-inspired progressive classrooms, children were encouraged to express themselves freely; now the goal was to nurture the artist in the child and to promote emotional well-being. Later, with the accountability movement in education, art education was justified in terms of its putative ability to raise standardized test scores. Since the 19th century, there have been recurrent pendulum swings between progressive and traditional approaches to art education in the United States, documented in this book along with vivid comparisons to the traditional approach the author observed in China (much like the American 19th century approach) and the progressive approach the author observed in preschools in Northern Italy. In the face of this uncertain past, 21st century art education has exploded with a wealth of new ideas aligned with -- but going far beyond -- the progressivism of the early 20th century. Art educators on the vanguard today base their teaching on the practices of contemporary artists, where art is idea-driven, investigative, personally meaningful, interdisciplinary, and socially conscious. This book documents what art education in America used to be, and portrays how it can become a strong and central presence in the schools of tomorrow.