Cultural Knowledge: The Unrecognized Responsibility of Art Education

Art educators are a subgroup within the larger culture whose role it is to communicate information and skills in the visual arts for guiding individuals to find greater personal satisfaction in the visual arts, to gain knowledge of the visual arts as areas of specialized interest, and to become aware of the contribution the visual arts make to their cultural heritage. This paper proposes that the kinds of information that future art teachers gain while training in their specialized area fails to prepare them adequately for their role. A parallelism discovered in the work of cultural geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) and the recent work of cognitive psychologist, David Feldman (1980, 1984) suggests that different forces or domains of knowledge interact in ways that guide and direct the formation of ideas. In the following paper, the work of Tuan and Feldman are used as a basis for a greater understanding of the contradictory elements in the education and role expectancy of the art educator