The Ceiling is the Sky: Affective Constructs, Event, and Community in the Marginal Spaces of Art Education

Art Education at the Periphery of the CenterIt is not a matter of perception that the current educational landscape of K-12 schooling and universities has positioned the teaching of visual arts education at the margins of these institutional structures. Specifically, it has been our experience at the higher educational level that art educational discourse, especially PK-12 licensure for art educators, is considered peripheral by other faculty, administrators, and the public. In addition to these perceptions, the phenomena of "last resort" cannot be discounted as a reason art students completing their BFA or MFA filter into programs of art education thinking wrongly that teaching art is "easy" and a way to cure their dread of securing future income. Furthermore, we encounter the art educational discourse of arts- based research (ABR) within the context of fine arts degree programs (BFA/MFA) being viewed as either a social science or a type of "writing" about art akin to historiography. Often MFA degreed faculty are not educated in and familiar with ABR, thus this new discourse further marginalizes art education research programs at the higher education level. In our experiences, arts-based research is seemingly viewed as not about making "real" art, but a way for PhD trained faculty to make "art objects" with their "primary" research (writing)-a different ball game.Concurrent with these experienced perceptions of art educational discourse, we also encountered the marginal positioning of our research-practice in the built environments and political spaces of our art school and fine arts department. The connections between art and the forms of its pedagogy, research, and discourse have diverse roots and manifestations in the hearts and minds of our particular faculty and school, which we suspect are also found in many other faculties and schools of art across the United States. We will not tackle those perceptual issues of art educational discourse through an examination of the factors that have led to the conditions we find ourselves in stated above. Rather, the focus of this narrative is on how art education operating from the margins is actually an advantageous position for the field. In essence, this essay is a report on how these authors in a particular context not only survived the conditions of perceptual and physical marginalization, but through a series of vignettes and descriptions presented here, paint a picture of how we reconstituted these marginal positions-redefining the capabilities and value of our field within our university community.This paper attacks the contextual, architectural, and perceptional manifestations of marginalization by reclaiming those spaces for productive "events" as art education. As a result of our work, the spaces of marginalization have become generative openings for the reconsideration of the spaces of artistic inquiry, community building, and knowledge production. This article examines these three themes through a careful philosophical discussion of space and the event of art education, and by presenting the collected evidence of lived experiences from instructors and students during a set of foundational courses for state licensure that operated "from the margins." Informed by the experiences and subsequent reflections of a professor of art education, a graduate assistant, and students, this article builds a case for the transformation of the explicitly marginalized spaces of art education into powerful engines for artistic inquiry and community, thus implicitly transforming the perceptional issues stated above.1We structure this essay as a series of vignettes, or what we call landings, in order to tell the story of how participants in a foundational course in art education came to rethink marginal spaces for our context. These landings will sometimes be in the first person, resemble "empirical" reports, inform our philosophical foundations, and reflect theoretical positioning in action. …