Art and Teacher Education

Introduction

Teacher education in the field of arts varies in perception, organization, connection with the society, and different educational systems. Consequently, it also escapes any attempts at definition. In mid-twentieth century, the art educator and philosopher Herbert Read visited numerous British schools to observe work being done in art classes. He found out that the best results were not correlated with a particular teaching system or teachers’ academic background: some of the best works were found in schools where there was no art teacher as such! This illustrates abovementioned difficulties and resides in the very nature of the art. There is a long history of unresolved discussions about nature of art, its cognitive status, and its value in human affairs, and art teachers live these uncertainties on daily basis (Efland 1995). The arts, unlike the sciences, are an ill-structured domain. Based on Rand J. Spiro, Arthur Efland (1993) argues that ill-structured and well-structured...