Commentary on Tenureland

The request to write a commentary on Savage's excellent paper had me reflecting on what has motivated me over the years to keep on writing. Though I have long since resided in Tenureland, I well recall the paranoia of being tenure tracked, and I offer the following in the hope that it helps othersFirst, since art education is applied and is, thereby, largely derivative, there are any number of opportunities to apply to it lessons learned from other fields-especially when, as so often happens, our own field lags well behind other fields During the 1980s, I applied Cultural Studies to art education, specifically the balance that Cultural Studies strove to manage between a critical and sympathetic approach toward popular culture This was not then common in art education discourse, and so, as a different kind of voice, I found it relatively easy to get published, including my advocacy of critical pedagogy Later, by the mid-2000s, pedagogy informed by critical theory had become ubiquitous in our literature This was despite critical pedagogy having long been savaged by literary and media educators for its spectacular lack of success within classrooms, and I was consequently motivated to write a critique of critical pedagogy in art educationSecond, so long as a researcher has a solid, broad theoretical grounding, new and emerging topics are always available to be investigated in a substantive way I have frequently applied my general Cultural Studies orientation to specific topics other than those addressed by my dissertation My doctoral studies focused on children's unsolicited drawing, but I have since employed Cultural Studies to consider such topics as consumerism; globalization; and adult images of children, including children as criminals, victims, and aesthetic objects Without such a broad theoretical position, academics are likely only ever to publish a few papers on the specific topic of their dissertationThird, sometimes one's theoretical position proves inadequate and it is necessary to go beyond it This happened to me in the early 1990s upon visiting Las Vegas and the Los Angeles theme parks Universal Studios and Disneyland all in the span of 4 days The experience left me bewildered; Cultural Studies had proven useful to deal with discrete artifacts like drawings and television programs but not the overwhelmingly immersive experience of Las Vegas or theme parks To begin to understand my disorientation I was propelled into post-modern theory, which greatly expanded the range of cultural experiences I was then able to address in terms of the postmodern sublime, including casinos and shopping mallsFourth, there is what is often referred to as milking, and who among us can plead not guilty? But, often there is simply too much to say on a topic for a single paper Mentors who suggest that a paper is really three or four papers in one are not only saying that the paper is confused; they are offering an opportunity to separate out different ideas and turn them into different papers Usually, when I set out to write a paper on a new topic, I end up writing three or four papers on it by using different examples and different perspectives For example, I wrote four papers on TV wrestling: one from the perspective of a so-called male aesthetic, another using TV wrestling as an example of instant aesthetics, and another from the perspective of the carnivalesque In the fourth paper, I compared the narrative of TV wrestling with the justifying visual narrative of the Iraq war following the 2011 attacks in New YorkFifth, the use of new terms that capture new perspectives to describe familiar topics can act as an incentive Although some academics are inspired by making up their own words to deal with emerging realities that they feel need naming, I have been content with terms made up by others New terms allow me not only to say things along the same lines of previous papers but also to add new and broadened perspectives They provide both a new hook and a new framework For me, new terms have often come by way of invitations Some years back, I was asked to present on prosumers, which had me rushing to find out what the word meant, only to find that it had been around since the 1980s and described perfectly the kind of children I had studied for years; yet, the concept of prosumers allowed me to theorize more broadly than before More recently, I received an invitation to address the topic "Art Education in the Digital Age," and I began writing a paper on youth and digital networking only to find that the conference theme had been changed to Art Education in the Big Data Era I confess that initially I thought Big Data was a weird Chinese translation of Digital, only to find out that Big Data is, again, not a new term at all, just one with which I was unfamiliar The idea that the term Big Data is meant to capture is allowing me to reconsider my original topic in a different and much expanded lightSixth, when stuck, one can always survey the work of others From time to time I have been asked to present or publish on topics I had not previously investigated and felt I knew little about, but the lure of foreign travel was too great to say no This proved the case when I was asked to address the topic of public space In instances like this I have gone immediately to the literature of art education to see what others have done, and I have written what are essentially critical literature reviews that categorize different approaches This has meant reading outside what I would normally do and finding in most cases extremely valuable practices and authors to admireSeventh, taking issue with colleagues can be motivational I have jousted in print with Kevin Tavin on the value of aesthetics and with a range of colleagues on the visual culture orientation in art education Sometimes I have set out to argue against them-other times, to incorporate their perspectives Taking on adversaries has helped me greatly, not only to better appreciate their perspective but also to clarify my own views Our field would be greatly enhanced by the kind of vigorous, ongoing intellectual exchange characteristic of some other fields; instead, we tend just to do our own thing and, in print, I believe we are too tepid and are, as a field, diminished as a resultEighth, as Savage comments, one's own teaching practice often provides material to write on, and I have often done so For me, the motivation has always been to illustrate how a visual culture curriculum might be operationalizedNinth, scholars write because that is what scholars do; they write to understand Although I have published a great deal, I have written at least as much that has never seen the light of day Much of this material was written in order to understand issues or to fill gaps in my knowledge One example is the years spent studying and writing on the development of philosophical aesthetics as a discipline While unpublished, because this writing is not in any way original, it has provided me with material to mine for papers that have addressed topics sufficiently emergent to be publishedTenth, at some level, writing is almost always a way to understand either oneself or others Among my as-yet-unpublished material are papers on popular aesthetic lures like the erotic, the exotic, the miraculous, horror, and humor The original starting point was a study of British seaside postcards that are characteristically lewd and scatological Although I did not find the lewd humor funny, I did at least understand what was meant to be funny With the scatological jokes, I could not even determine the intent, and this had me turning to the literature on the carnivalesque in order to understand, not myself, but other peopleLast-by no means least-there is fun I have been consistently motivated by a sort of serious mischief; what can I get away with and still call myself an art educator? …