Elizabeth J Garber. (2019). Feminist Art Curriculum.
Can be accessed online at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118978061.ead090
(Accessed 23 October 2023)
(Women's catalog cover, 1972. Showing Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago's Womanhouse - an important feminist art installation from the seventies.)
Abstract
Discourse: The article discusses how the feminist ideas that guide curriculum have changed over time.
Context: The article identifies that contemporary approaches emphasise that feminist curriculum is not a set of values or approaches, but one that develops around a range of knowledges (emotional, intuitive & sensory), a range of voices and around collaborative learning environments.
Methodology: This text reviews the concerns of feminists involved in art and design curricula in different eras and highlights persistent issues and ideas.
Introduction
Practice and theory
A feminist art and design curriculum is accessed through an ecology of theories and practices.
Critical Conscious
In Feminist approaches to education, teachers foreground principles of social justice and the building of relationships between learners and learning.
This means that Relationship building and social justice is presented to students as a means through which they can develop their own learning. It is through this process, therefore, that students develop a political awareness and a critical conscious in relation to their identity.
Applying this to the classroom, we can consider how students can critically reflect on and express their opinions on things that matter to them. Accessing the foundations and processes of art through affective discourses.
This enables students to create socially meaningful work, that empowers student voice.
Feminism as a consistent concern
'A feminist curriculum consistently engages gender and gender issues.'
This point is important as it does not limit the concept of a feminist pedagogy as one which includes a single 'feminism in art' lesson, but realises it as a constant concern which affects how we show representations of women.
This facilitates a pedagogy which is engages with: social justice, student voice, consciousness-raising and critical reflexivity, dialogue and collaboration, action and struggle, problem-solving, and principles of democracy.
For our pedagogies to be feminist, they should also address gender in relation to other curricular themes and concerns.
Contextualisation
Feminism in Art and Design education grew out of the second-wave feminist movement that began in the 1960s.
This created a lot of material from which to draw from, and in adapting these issues to the classroom we can identify a range of ways to formulate a feminist pedagogy:
- Raising issues of inequity based on sex
- Women's accomplishments in art and historical challenges that they faced.
- The structures and hierarchies within the art world
- The delivery of curricular content
- Creating role models for students
- How art teacher education could be modified
Lack of Representation
Art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin address the lack of women artists in art history textbooks. Using examples of female artists in lesson resources helps to negate this deficiency in representation. If there are a limited amount of female artists within coutnries or time periods we can also acknowledge, to the class, the struggles and cultures that might restrict women from creating art.
Boundaries of Art and Craft
The division between “fine art” and “craft” underlies much of the marginalisation of women's work in the arts. Including practices of clay, textiles and print projects is one way in which we can hope to eliminate this gendered border.
The Hidden Curriculum
It is outside of the content that is intentionally taught, which defines the sites where gender roles are taught. We can challenge these in our teaching practice by maintaining a more open disposition that does not assume areas of interest or concepts of character based on gender.
Teachers tend to give boys more attention – both in terms of discipline and of praise, resulting in a different educational experience for them: “Even the seemingly negative responses of teachers towards the nonconforming behaviour expected from boys can create sex differences by leading boys toward greater independence, autonomy, and activity” (Collins and Sandell, 1948)
It is essential therefore, to recognise that the 'attention' we give to students can be both negative and positive and to aim to balance the attention we give to both genders in accordance to that fact.
Feminist Curriculum in Art and Design Today
Many of the issues identified in the 1980s persist, from the exclusion of women's accomplishments in the curriculum, to biases in the way in which teachers interact with learners in the hidden curriculum, to what is considered “good” or notable art.
A Gender- Sensitive Curriculum
Patrick Slattery (2006) identifies a list of actions that teachers should take to enact a gender-sensitive curriculum:
- Recognising that sex and gender are not stable categories or dualities as they were perceived to be in the past
- Acceptance of students and staff, whatever their sex or gender
- Intervening in bullying practices
- Educating others about sex and gender through films and literature that expose learners to gender and identity diversity
- Reaching out to marginalised individuals and groups
Persistent Issues in the Feminist Curriculum
Despite efforts that span decades, sexist content and practices persist in how the arts are taught.
Women artists, who constitute more than half of undergraduate and graduate students and make up sizeable numbers in the professions (Garber, 2007) are underrepresented in school and university curricula.
Women's or gender studies is regularly a curricular unit at universities today. Yet gender is often given short shrift when it is subsumed into critical pedagogy, not just within art and other social justice curricular approaches.
Some of the values and tactics put forth as part of feminist curricular scholarship are incorporated into theory and practice, which means that, even though feminism may not be credited, the change is taking root.
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