Approaching Art Education as an Ecology: Exploring the Role of Museums

By whatever name you choose to call it - out-of-school learning, informal learning, free choice learning, or lifelong learning - there exists a growing interest in better understanding the ways in which learning is supported in environments that lie outside the purview of schools or formal education. From our perspective, a focus on out-of-school learning should be seen as a complementary venue to expand opportunities for students (of all ages) to engage in powerful learning experiences.In art education, the formal and informal have been working closely together for many years. A recent Rand report illustrated how community-based art educators have become key providers of both school-based educational experiences and teacher professional development. In addition, their work provides other outof-school learning opportunities in the arts for a wide range of authences (Bodily, Augustine, & Zakaras, 2008). While school-based art education provides access to a certain kind of structured learning experience, typically characterized by scaffolded and sequential instruction, informal organizations are often positioned to provide other forms of experience. We argue that formal and informal arts education organizations, in tandem, are a key component of a healthy lifelong learning ecology.By ecology, we mean the landscape of art learning opportunities that exist across a network of informal and formal educational organizations (Russell, Knutson, Crowley, Kisa, & Steiner, 2010). By employing the language of ecology, we deliberately call attention to two properties. First, an ecological perspective emphasizes the strength of diversity. Just as biodiversity is a measure of the health of an ecosystem, diversity In the organizational forms that provide arts education programming in a region are indicative of a robust learning ecology. When diversity is viewed as an advantage, we can appreciate how institutions capitalize on their unique affordances rather than necessarily expecting that all learning should conform to a standardized notion of quality arts education. For example, museums can take advantage of their collections to create opportunities for learners to respond to and critique master works. Ceramics class in a high school can make use of classroom studio facilities and the expertise of the teacher to create opportunities for learners to develop their artmaking skills.Second, the ecological perspective calls attention to the web or network of relations among constituent entities. By thinking carefully about the connections or Interdependence of educational organizations, we can evaluate the extent to which a region provides a full range of art education experiences across institutions, rather than assuming that all components of an arts education be provided within the constrained resources and capacity of a single organization (e.g., schools).While rarely studied in the arts education sector (Bodily, et ai, 2008), the distinct but complementary role of formal and informal education organizations has been taken up in science education. In a recent synthesis of the research literature on science education, the National Academies (National Research Council [NRC], 2009) suggest that while the formal and informal share some characteristics, informal learning environments are distinct from formal environments. They further suggest that each environment is well suited to a particular type of activity and authence. Formal environments support regular systematic instruction within a domain, but they are perhaps less effective at responding to learner interests. Informal environments are better positioned to respond to lifelong learning interests and learner-directed experiences in a domain.We believe that there is much to be learned by better understanding how learning takes place outside of the school environment, and how different kinds of educational experiences cumulate over time and across place within an educational ecology (Russell, et al. …