Guest Editors
Martin Rayala and Paul Sproll
We were delighted to be invited to co-edit
this special issue of SchoolArts for a number of reasons. First, it provided us with
the opportunity to collaborate with each
other, and second, because of our long-shared interest
and commitment to expanding the curricular landscape
of elementary and secondary school art education to
include design education. The importance of the articles
in this issue, in our view, resides in how they invite K– 12
art educators to consider casting their nets over a larger
range of instructional content.
Our field has had its champions for broadening the
scope of art education to include design, notable among
them: Laura Chapman, Jerome Hausman, Vincent Lanier,
June McFee, and Ronald Neperud. Yet, in spite of such
advocacy, curriculum shifts in this direction have been
imperceptible. However, it is our sense that, with the
increasing visibility and interest in the role of design in
society nationally and globally, there exists a window of
opportunity not simply to add to the long list of things
art teachers are expected to teach, but for a major transformation within the field of art education. This issue of
SchoolArts will, we hope, act as a catalyst for a re-imagining of the scope of art teachers‘ instructional content.
Design education is new territory for many art teachers, so perhaps it is not too surprising that it was not easy
to find as many clearly prototypical examples of design
teaching as we would have hoped. There was a tendency
for some authors in their submissions to attach design terminology to lessons that had a fine-arts orientation. This
may have been due, in part, to the fact that teachers interpreted the call for lessons on “design” to be a request for
lessons dealing with the elements of art and principles of
design. In retrospect, this should not have surprised us, as
it is tradition within K– 12 art education for teachers and
their students to operate within the context of the artist
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October 2008 SchoolArts
and not that of the designer. A good number of submissions reviewed for this issue were articles that described
projects that were drawn much more from the traditions
of art and craft than the discipline of design. We found,
for instance, articles that described lessons using design
objects as the subject matter for painting and sculpture,
but where design problem-solving was absent. As design
education captures the interest of art teachers, we hope
that they will, from time to time, place their students in
the designer‘s shoes as an alternative to the familiar and
well-worn footwear of the artist.
As a guiding structure for this issue, we tried to
include examples of information design, object design,
environment design, and experience design. Design is
both verb and noun, and we believe both offer art educators remarkable opportunities to use the design process
as a framework for studio-based problem-solving in all
areas of design activity. Furthermore, when educators
focus on design as a noun, they open up to their students
the extraordinarily rich and encyclopedic visual world of
objects, things, and experiences for analysis and interpretation.
So, the intrepid authors in this special issue are to be
congratulated for exploring ways in which their students
could engage in design-based problems. Marty makes the
bold claim that perhaps with design we are at “a third
evolution of art education and visual culture.” While
we are not necessarily both prepared to go out on such a
limb, we would gladly settle for a rapid shift to art and
design education.
Martin Rayala, Ph.D. is assistant professor at Kutztown
University and a member of the Education Committee of the
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.
Paul Sproll, Ph.D. is professor and head of the department
of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design at the Rhode Island
School of Design.
