| Exploring the beauty parlor metaphor as a way of understanding art and art making helps define art as language. Art as language has been acknowledged since the time of Plato (Allen, 2002). It is a social force that we have marginalized in education, and made ancillary to the more politically correct content areas such as math, science, and reading. As language, art is defined as a mode of communication among people and through artists, to convey life's stories or expressions, indicative of a certain culture, shared by a specific time in history. Art and art making are defined as special forms of experience (Dewey, 1980) which can and does provide mental, tangible, imaginative, and transformational knowledge creating growth in learning. With the overwhelming literature in art education toward the study of visual culture, art making as aesthetic experience has been cast to the sidelines. By investigating art and art making as a form of language in education reflective of identity and culture, it can be resituated in such a way as to allow for both the visual culture and aesthetic theoretical underpinnings to be negotiated and understood in scholarly literature and classroom settings. Visual culture is seen as having a conflictual view of society (Duncum, 2005; Bolin & Blandy, 2003; Barren, 2003), while aesthetics is seen as taking a more expressive role (Duncum, 1999; Sullivan, 2003; Smith 2003). The central role of this narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Olson & Craig, 2001) is to explore the relationship between art and language and its role in accessing the learners' knowledge communities (Craig, 1995) in the experiences of pre-service teachers in an art education classroom context, in a Research I university setting. |
