This course takes shape between art and education. We will engage and examine pedagogical structures within art practices, historical models of art education, hierarchy and horizontality across social categories and organizations, noninstitutional frameworks of learning, and the convergence of power and politics in education. Art encourages interdisciplinary avenues of exploration; it entangles together disparate narratives to create a space of genesis, making it an ideal framework for fostering critical thinking and navigating the complexity of being an individual within a community.

While it is easy to wax poetic about the importance of art education, there is also a very real economic dimension that drives artists into the classroom for the stable, though insufficient, income teaching provides. Thus, our course will also take into account the labor of education, both from the perspective of the student and from that of the instructor. The teacher has increasingly become implicated within the labor struggle as teachers’ unions strike for better pay, fairer treatment, and more agency in school governance. Because the top-down, corporate model of authoritative management dominates education in America, this course will focus instead on collaborative models of teaching and institutional organization beginning in the classroom and extending through the nature and structure of the school as a whole.