Loving Art Education

This blog has been prompted by lots of conversation with different people over a couple of months. It seems like there’s no end of places to go online to find ideas for great art projects, and of course loads of places too where you can find great art but not many (if any) places to think about some of the perhaps more challenging aspects of art education – its theories, histories, debates, controversies etc. This, particularly in England, where there is currently A LOT of debate about what makes a good art education, is a big oversight. There’s a lot of books you could read, but what art teachers have time for reading a lot of books? – some, but not most!

I was going to call the blog Art Education Knowledge, but thats a rubbish title and actually, my instinct is that it is only those that really LOVE art and design education that are motivated enough to engage more deeply with questions of theory, history, curriculum design, pedagogy etc. – so, I’ve called it Loving Art Education instead.

I’ve set myself the challenge of doing a few posts over the summer of 2021 initially.

About me: I’m Carol Wild. I am Programme Lead for the MA Professional Education in the Centre for Teacher Education at the University of Warwick. I’ve a degree in Visual Arts (specialism sculpture) from the University of Lancaster, I was a secondary Art & Design teacher for 12 years teaching across Art and Design Technology, I completed my MA in Art and Education at Birmingham School of Art, BCU and I have a PhD in the Sociology of Education from the University of Birmingham (my thesis looked at what Artist Teacher Practice does in the classroom and I hope to publish it as a book very soon) and I love art education and find this stuff kind of interesting. Hope you do too.