The Future of Ethnic Studies // The field is under assault from without and within

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By Gary Y. Okihiro

On May 11, 2010, less than a month after signing SB 1070, which many people hold legalizes racial profiling, Arizona's Gov. Jan Brewer signed HB 2281 into law. That law bans schools from teaching classes that are designed for students of a particular ethnic group or that promote resentment, ethnic solidarity, or overthrow of the U.S. government. "Public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people," it reads.

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Teaching History // North Carolina Public Radio WUNC

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Deciding how to teach history involves making tough decisions about what the past means and how we should remember it. That can be a messy process, as the N.C. Department of Public Instruction learned last winter. Their proposed changes to the history curriculum drew an impassioned response. But the classroom isn't the only place where history is taught. Public art also aims to portray a narrative of the past, with monuments saying as much about the societies that erect them as those being memorialized.

How Do We Experience Art? // Multiple Intelligences

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From Art:21 Blog

by Shannon Burton

I teach art at a school where the subject is not just a once-a-week occurrence. New City School is a Multiple Intelligences school where art (using spatial intelligence) is used daily by teachers in every subject to help students explore, process, learn, share, and demonstrate. Howard Gardner developed the Multiple Intelligences (MI) Theory in 1983 to expand the scope of what intelligence encompasses. Gardner has now defined nine intelligences: linguistic, logical-­mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, bodily-­kinesthetic, musical, naturalist, existential, and spatial. The first two, linguistic and logical-­mathematical, are heavily favored in the vast majority of schools.

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Learning is not a passive process in education or in art. John Dewey’s Art and Experience is an interesting testament to this. So how does all of this play out in art class? Here are some examples from a conceptual paper portrait project I do with my 6th graders.

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MLitt in Theology, Imagination and the Arts // Spots Left in St. Andrews Masters Program

The Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) is a research institute based at St Mary's College, the Divinity School at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

ITIA aims to advance and enrich an active conversation between Christian theology and the arts - bringing rigorous theological thinking to the arts, and bringing the resources of the arts to the enterprise of theology. As part of this, it seeks to explore the role of the imagination in the arts, as part of a wider theological interest in the imaginative aspects of our humanity.

ITIA pursues this aim through rigorous academic research, undertaken by its staff and postgraduate communities, as well as high quality publications arising out of this research.

***A few places remain available on the ITIA MLitt for entry in September 2010. Apply now.***