Abstract
Redressing the marginalisation of the arts is often linked with attempts to redefine and broaden their cognitive structure. Recent evidence of transferability between knowledge in the arts and other curriculum domains is currently advanced as one useful approach. Taking a social realist approach to education in the arts this paper argues that the meaning of cognitive transfer, including evidence of a cognitive structure shared with other domains, varies according to its representation within different values of arts educational practice. This paper examines the impact of three frameworks of value on the evidence of cognitive transfer in the arts.
Brown, N.C.M. (2001). The meaning of transfer in Arts education. Studies in Art Education, 43(1), 83–102. Reprinted with permission of the National Art Education Association, http://www.arteducators.org
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Notes
- 1.
Extremists argue that this hyper-singularity of the arts, in particular the visual arts, makes them resistant to teaching because it isolates them from the tutorial advantages provided by linguistic knowledge. Teaching programs are inefficient in the arts by comparison with other disciplines, it is suggested, because the resources of written knowledge offer few guarantees of producing artistically valuable outcomes (see Brook 1999, pp. 34–36).
- 2.
In post-structural epistemology critical reasoning is enacted as a function of the causal relations between the network of agencies which make up the knower’s extension of a relevant concept, for example, in their concept of art (Searle 1996, Chapter 1). In structuralist epistemology critical reasoning is conceived of as the pragmatic rehearsal of entrenched rules embedded within conventional codes (Goodman 1976).
- 3.
Studies conducted in early childhood reveal the innate ability of infants to “chunk” melodies into smaller phrases and to recognise rhythms. At neonatal levels the mental faculties responsible for the discrimination of musical pitch are shared with those that underpin the phonemic stage in learning to read (Lamb and Gregory 1993).
- 4.
Hargreaves describes this transition in music as “The distinction between generalist and specialist music education.” The distinction has led to tension within the music teaching profession (1996, p. 167). Music education is polarised on the one hand by children’s normative or native access to musical explanation, and by their access to specialist explanations on the other. Normative versus specialist sides of musical knowledge are accompanied by their own parallel vernacular and specialist theories of developmental reasoning as well.
- 5.
Michael de Certeau attacks the monolithic compartmentalisation of creative activity. Compartmentalisation disconnects creative activity from cultural practice. It is the diversity of everyday social practices, he says, that invest creative activity with meaning for those who effectuate them. Creativity without context disabuses creativity from a place within intentional thought thereby relegating it to a marginal role within cognition (1997, p. 67).
- 6.
Whereas, for example, tertiary institutions in the visual arts once believed drawing to be the universal predictor of giftedness, drawing has been replaced by tertiary entrance rankings as the basis for selection into programs of art and design (College of Fine Arts 2000).
- 7.
Music education has long accepted that musical giftedness is indivisibly linked with accelerated opportunities in musical training. This view is evidenced through its continuing support for conservatorium schools. However, musical giftedness only makes sense as it is differentiated within the localised and changing practices of musical performance. This is not to overlook the fact that within the biology of music there is convincing evidence, at neonatal levels, of mental faculties responsible for the discrimination of musical pitch (Lamb and Gregory 1993).
- 8.
Entire university faculties, for example, identify themselves as the “creative arts”. In Australia the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs has commissioned reports into the “creative arts”, and K-12 school syllabi are united under the category of the Creative and Performing Arts (Strand 1998).
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Brown, N.C.M. (2017). The Meaning of Transfer in the Practices of Arts Education. In: Studies in Philosophical Realism in Art, Design and Education. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42906-9_16
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