Identifying teachers' concepts of art history in secondary school art programs

We know very little about secondary school art history instruction (Alexander, 1980) and of art teachers' concepts of art history. Numerous researchers including Gagne (1970); Elbaz (1983); and Peretz, Bromme & Halkes (1986) have concluded that teachers' personal subject discipline concepts greatly affect the qualitative levels of their classroom instruction. Consequently, to improve student learning in art history, it seems imperative that we investigate the degree to which teachers identify (i.e., agree/disagree) with art history concepts.;To do this, major tasks include: (1) Development and validation of an instrumentation assessing teachers' agreement/disagreement levels to varying concepts of art history; (2) Development of an instrumentation assessing teachers' biographical data; and (3) Collection and analysis of the data (including reliability).;Three categories for art history were generated following an extensive review of art history and related literature: Socio-Cultural, Intellectual, and Structural.;Data obtained from instrumentations completed by 440 public, secondary school art teachers of Wisconsin were statistically treated and analyzed appropriate to these questions: (1) What conceptions of art history do art teachers possess; (2) What background and training in art history do they bring to its instruction; and (3) What relationships exist between art teachers' concepts of art history (i.e., the dependent variable) and their background and training (i.e., the independent variable).;Secondary art teachers express statistically significant differences of agreement/disagreement toward art history categories. Teachers agree most highly with the Structural category followed by the Socio-Cultural and Intellectual categories, respectively. A narrative description of the Wisconsin public secondary art teacher constructed from biographical data indicates twenty percent to be over 50 years old and only two percent less than 30. Five statistically significant relationships among art teachers' conceptions of art history and their background and training were revealed: three with the Intellectual category, and two with the Structural category.;This study recommends continued research in classroom art history instruction, namely the correlation between art teachers' professed agreement/disagreement levels toward varying concepts of art history and their enacted classroom instruction of art history concepts.