Artful utility: Rethinking John Dewey's theories of experience, education, and inquiry in the context of contemporary visual arts education

The visual arts curriculum known initially as Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) was formally introduced by the J. Paul Getty Trust's education institute in 1984. All DBAE-related programs separate visual arts information into four disciplines---aesthetics, criticism, art history, and studio---with elements of each required in art experiences at all K--12 levels. As a curricular model for visual arts education DBAE is unsatisfactory for three reasons: First, the four-categorical formula is based on structuralist models used in the domains of science curricula during the 1960s and 70s partly in response to education reforms of the same decades. In superimposing a highly structured model on an ill-structured domain in the context of a postmodern era, DBAE curriculum makes an overly rigid, false accommodation for the diverse localized needs and aesthetic standards of K--12 art curricula. Second, the expressed major purpose of DBAE curricula is mastery of a body of information prescribed in each of the four disciplines. Contemporary learning theory focuses on the utility of the visual arts as a means of interdisciplinary learning and communication. DBAE thus unnecessarily limits the benefits and purposes of arts education. Third, course content in the DBAE disciplines was built on modernist Western assumptions of consensus regarding taste, judgment, and valuation in the arts, a legacy of (a) late 19th-century museum practices and (b) modernist discourse on aesthetics and criticism. DBAE planners consistently attempt to oblige disparate voices in the contemporary arts community. However, because DBAE curriculum retains fundamental belief in consensus on such modernist assumptions, it is a hegemonic and often irrelevant curriculum that inaccurately reflects the ethos of the postmodern era. DBAE has thus made whatever contributions it was capable of and now must be superseded by more comprehensive models.; John Dewey's work on art, experience, and education practice offers a better foundation for 21st-century art education curricula than does DBAE because it is appropriately flexible and because it accommodates the postmodern penchant for ambiguity and contingency while remaining sympathetic to an emphasis on social context and the enriching aesthetic, but nonetheless practical, utility of the visual arts in K--12 curricula.