Assessment in the visual arts: Challenges and possibilities

Abstract

Assessment in art is notoriously difficult and is probably best approached with skepticism. Artistry is notoriously difficult to assess. Yet measures of student learning in art are needed for both advocacy and art education policy. Assessments, particularly large-scale assessments, influence funding and educational policy at all levels. This article explores some of the challenges of assessment in the visual arts and critically examines the Advanced Placement Studio Art Portfolio to illustrate how a product-oriented assessment might influence teaching and policy.     

Public Policy and Music Education in Norway and Finland

This article applies the Toulmin argument model of rhetorical analysis—which features identification and dissection of the components of prominent enthymemes—to scrutinize concepts within both educational policy documents and relevant music education literature from Norway and Finland across the past decade. Our analysis examines how understandings of “music education” are formulated through the cosmopolitan rhetoric of public policy, enabling rigorous assessment of relationships between the prospective limitations of these formulations and the actual concerns of music teachers evident in professional periodicals since the start of the twenty-first century.     

Resituating the Place of Educational Discourse in Anthropology

This critical essay examines the place of educational discourse in contemporary anthropology. I address the growing influence of "cultural studies" frameworks in anthropology—especially in research on popular culture, media, and identity—and the corresponding neglect of specifically educational discourses and practices, in and out of schools. To illustrate, I briefly examine recent research by four noted cultural anthropologists who mention the effects of schools at their field sites but pay insufficient attention to complex educational discourses and practices. Then I address the reasons why most contemporary anthropologists outside the subfield of "anthropology of education" ignore or downplay the role of modern schools in structuring identities and power relations, both locally and globally. I end with a programmatic synthesis: to recognize and account for the continuing power of schools in most contemporary ethnographic sites, even as we broaden our vision of "education" and extend our analytic tools well beyond schools. This resituating of educational discourse in anthropology might accomplish two important things. First, it could arrest the trend toward subfield specialization and provide a more unifying research program. Second, it would promote anthropology's renewed engagement with some of the most pressing problems of democracy and public policy, fostering an organic link between our multiple roles as teachers, researchers, and institutional actors, [education, identity, cultural studies, ethnographyJ     

Ethnic school context and the national and sub-national identifications of pupils

In various European countries, policy-makers strive for educational desegregation to enhance pupils' national identifications. Since little empirical evidence supports such a policy and social identity theorists emphasize the importance of context, this article examines the impact of ethnic school composition – measured by the proportion of non-natives and ethnic heterogeneity – on the national (Belgian) and sub-national (Flemish) identifications of pupils. Multi-level data analyses from the surveying of 2,845 pupils (aged 10–12) in sixty-eight Flemish primary schools reveal differential effects for natives and non-natives. While the proportion of non-natives at school is negatively associated with non-native pupils' identifications, it is positively related to native pupils' identifications. In general, the ethnic heterogeneity of the school is negatively associated with pupils' national and sub-national identifications. Our findings indicate that the relation between ethnic school composition and pupils' identifications is mediated by the latter's inter-ethnic friendships. The consequences of these findings for educational policy are discussed.     

Negotiating the New Health Care System in Cape Town, South Africa: Five Case Studies of the Acutely Chronically Ill

This article examines the experiences of chronically ill disadvantaged patients in a newly reformed health care system against a backdrop of inequalities still prevalent in the wider postapartheid sociopolitical economy of the Western Cape, South Africa. Patients negotiated a hierarchy of spaces at the national level of transformation and policy and at community-, secondary-, and tertiary-level facilities. The institutionalization of patients meant that expensive medical treatment was mobilized in accordance with different stages of illness and that certain services were available only to "qualifying" categories of diagnoses.     

Uncertainty, ecology, sustainability and policy

Using an Australian focus to explore theoretical and policy issues of wider concern, this article examines linkages between public policy and the science of ecology. This is done within the broader framework of sustainability, emphasizing the problem of decision making in the face of uncertainty. Insights from the ecological, risk, sustainability and policy literatures are used. The sustainability-uncertainty problem is characterized, and the adequacy of existing policy support techniques and approaches noted, particularly the precautionary principle. The problem is further defined using the notion of ignorance. The treatment of ignorance and uncertainty in ecology is discussed. We suggest that the science of ecology has had a limited influence on policy formulation and discuss the basis of this using biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management as examples. We conclude by considering challenges for handling risk, uncertainty and ignorance in ecological science for policy formulation. We emphasize the need for improved communication between the science and policy communities, greater recognition of the limits of quantitative techniques in addressing uncertainty, and contingency planning.     

Pedagogy as View Sequence: Popular Culture, Education, and Travel

This article examines the economic and cultural construction of Latin America as an educational site, using analysis of brochures advertising educational tours, fieldwork in an educational tour organization, and interviews with educational travelers in the United States and Mexico. Representations are manipulated to define Latin America as colorful, exotic, and pristine and U.S. travelers as omniscient, sophisticated, and invisible.     

Being Seen and Heard: Listening to Young Women in Alternative Schools

This interview-based study examines nine young women's perceptions of their disconnection from high school and reconnection to school in an alternative program. Rather than focusing on a fixed notion of what "at-risk" students "need," the students and author note the importance of working with the messy, partial, and complicated sense of students' identities to gain better understandings of the schooling experiences of marginalized youth. With an eye toward practice- and theory-oriented representations and sense-makings, this article presents theoretical constructions of student disconnection and connection, student testimony as one useful pedagogy, and policy implications for schools.     

Having Arrived: Dimensions of Educational Success in a Transitional Newcomer School

This article examines a program for newly arrived, non-English-speaking immigrant children in a major California city. Focusing on students of Mexican and other Latino origin, I explore the local model of success and ask, How is student success defined and fostered? This study lays the ethnographic foundation for a comparison between settings for first-generation students. The research demonstrates how a nurturing setting, a culturally flexible teaching approach, linguistic and cultural validation, and a valued spatial environment can contribute to newcomer students' success and educational confidence. Further, it addresses both the personal and political tensions that can arise when such programs are physically separate and distant from the "home" or neighborhood school.     

Claiming respectable American motherhood: homebirth mothers, medical officials, and the state

Based on ethnographic research regarding public policy and grassroots organizing for midwifery in Virginia, this article explores how medical discourses around appropriate health care practices intersect with state discourses about what practices are considered "respectable" versus "pathological" for its citizens. In recent legislative debates about the legalization of direct-entry midwifery, medical officials have extended their criticism of midwifery and homebirth to mothers who resist state-sanctioned childbirth practices. This article examines how medical officials challenge the respectable mothering practices of homebirthers by linking them with women they deem pathological--child abusers, negligent mothers, and drug users--and placing them outside the cadre of "normal" American mothers who acknowledge the "logical" and "natural" superiority of biomedical childbirth practices. I also address homebirth mothers' responses, which assert that their political advocacy for midwives is a respectable mothering practice because they are responsible citizens who desire what they deem the best care for their children.     

Talking with the Donkey: Cooperative Approaches to Environmental Protection

In recent years, governments throughout the world have expressed growing interest in cooperative approaches to environmental protection, including negotiated rulemaking, flexible approaches t o enforcement, and voluntary codes and agreements. It is often argued that cooperative approaches are more cost effective, more conducive t o innovation, and better able t o promote fundamental attitudinal change than traditional "command and control" regulation. However, the overly broad term "cooperative approaches" fails t o acknowledge fundamental differences among these novel po I icies, including distinct ions between mandatory and voluntary programs and between those that involve bipartite negotiations between government and business and those that invite participation by a broader range of interests. This article analyzes these cooperative approaches first by offering a framework to distinguish among various cooperative policy instruments. Second, the article critically examines theoretical arguments and empirical evidence concerning one class o f cooperative approaches, voluntary challenges and agreements. The most striking finding is how little we know about the effectiveness of voluntary approaches. This is a function not only of the quite recent experience with these approaches, but also of more fundamental inattention t o program evaluation and obstacles to evaluation inherent in voluntary programs. The article concludes with a call for a more rigorous program of research to examine the effectiveness of the new policy instruments and t o compare them with traditional regulation and market-based incentives.     

The Cultural Politics of the Texas Educational Reform Agenda: Examining Who Gets What, When, and How

This critical policy examination of the economistic discourses that control Texas's accountability reforms explores how over the last three decades Texas business elite utilized the policy process, power relationships, and educational value conflicts that promote accountability as the paradigm for education reform. Attention on "who gets what, when, and how" finds the balance of educational values is distorted on behalf of the business-power elites and undermines the democratic authority of accountability reforms.     

Bridging the gap: How the National Core Arts Standards forge the divide between the arts and assessment-based learning

ABSTRACT

This article is a review and thematic analysis of the 2014 National Core Arts Standards (NCAS). Historically, there exists a gap between the arts and assessment-based educational practices. Thematic analysis of the NCAS reveals a policy striving to bridge the gap between the way arts educators envision arts in schools, and the current reality of assessment-based schooling in the United States. This policy could become the foundation for the recognition of the arts as academically rigorous subject matter, capable of existing and thriving in an assessment-oriented world; it remains to be seen as to how and if arts educators will use and adapt NCAS. Is the NCAS merely a symbolic policy or does it have the support behind it to be a material policy that truly creates change in the educational system?     

TV is Moving in

Visual arts teachers engage in complex work on a daily basis. This work is informed by practical knowledge that is rarely examined or drawn on in research or in the development of policy. Focusing on the work of secondary visual arts teachers, this article reports on a research program conducted in a regional area of New South Wales, Australia. The research engages in a collaborative process of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism to examine and discuss classroom practice. The process is underpinned by a belief in research as an act of discovery and is guided by a framework that provides a language and grammar of practice. Drawing on qualitative data, discussion focuses on how the collaborative process enables the mobilization and generation of new knowledge. The article concludes by considering the relationship between teaching practice, research, and policy development and by recommending support for collaborative research-based initiatives that foreground the knowledge of teachers.     

Swimming: On Oxygen, Resistance, and Possibility for Immigrant Youth under Siege

In this article, we consider the ways in which educational policies and institutions today enable or obstruct young people who are immigrant English-language learners as they seek to cross cultural and educational borders. Contrasting a class action suit in California protesting high stakes testing that will significantly limit graduation rates, and an ethnographic analysis of the international high schools in which immigrant youth engage with cultural and educational depth and support and graduate at exceptional rates, this article challenges the current policy climate in which immigrant youth are increasingly under siege and at risk of being multiply undocumented. In the spirit of protest, we trace the many sites of resistance and possibility dotting the nation, in which educators, communities, families, advocates, and youth are demanding educational access and justice.     

Toward a New Generation of Environmental Technology: The Need For Legislative Reform

Given near unanimity in the environmental and industrial communities about the need for a new generation of environmental technology, the policy process unfortunately lags behind in moving toward this objective. This article examines causes and remedies for this gap in the context of American environmental policy. U.S. environmental laws continue to be pervaded by structural biases against new technology, and the complexity of their administration exacerbates the problem. Within the last few years, several important reform initiatives have arisen from inside the regulatory community; however, these can only go so far, given the current statutory framework Congress, too long quiescent, needs to become involved. A legislative reform package is proposed consisting of four main elements: a legislative mandate that makes promotion of technological innovation an explicit environmental objective; elimination of structural features in current law that impede innovation; creation of a new framework for standard-setting and enforcement that puts every firm on a trajectory toward environmental and technological improvement; and enlisting regulation as a "demand-pull" for environmentally superior technology.     

The circulatory system: blood procurement, AIDS, and the social body in China

The market for blood thrived in China for more than a decade, preying on rural villagers desperate for cash. Profit motives and unhygienic collection created an AIDS epidemic, where now up to 80 percent of adults in some villages are HIV infected. Today, illegal blood banks continue to operate in some areas. Moreover, better screening and blood testing do little to address the underlying cultural reluctance to give blood. This article examines what is at stake for blood donors in the circulation of blood through both the physical and the social bodies in China today. I argue that public health and social policy solutions require consideration of the symbolic meanings of blood and the body, kin relations, and gift exchange. China's HIV-contaminated blood procurement crisis demands a critical reexamination of the hidden processes embedded in a "circulatory system" that has inseparably bound the "gift of life" and a "commodity of death".     

Creating Partnerships With Government,Communities, and Universities to Achieve Results for Children

In recent years, a strategy of partnership and collaboration between government and communities has started to emerge as policy makers and service providers call for a more responsive system to address the health and well-being of children, youth, and families. The trend toward a comprehensive, holistic strategy is driven in part by concern over the effectiveness of a patchwork system of categorical health and human services designed to solve one problem at a time. At issue also is the movement "devolving" more responsibility for child and family well-being from the state to local governments and the challenge this change represents to communities. This article proposes a comprehensive, community-based strategy for reform of health and human services and examines the approach of one state that may be useful for other states interested in reform.     

The European Union and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive: Continuing the Development of European Ocean Use Management

The European Union has been engaged in an effort to develop a marine strategy to protect the marine environment and a more encompassing integrated maritime policy that would provide a comprehensive system for the management of the uses of the marine areas of Europe. An earlier article by the author described the beginnings of this policy development; this article examines the subsequent 2008 Directive of the European Parliament and the Council, which establishes a framework for community action in the field of marine environmental policy. The Marine Strategy Framework Directive provides a plan of action with designated responsibilities and obligations and a schedule that is to be adhered to by member states and the European Commission. It represents a significant step in the European endeavor to advance ocean use management and sets the stage for future development of European marine policy.     

Ethnicity and Educational Performance in the United Kingdom: Racism, Ethnicity, and Variability in Achievement

This article examines recent research on the variability of educational performance in Britain. The composition of Britain's minority population is reviewed, followed by a discussion of differences in attainment. The bulk of the article explores some of the social processes that lie behind the statistics, especially concerning teacher racism and student adaptations. The possibilities for improvement at the school level are considered briefly within the context of national reforms that prioritize market principles and marginalize equality concerns.