THRESHOLD CONCEPTS: A CRITICAL POINT

Developing our Threshold Concepts for Art has been a rewarding collaboration. The enthusiasm with which other teachers have welcomed these is also greatly valued. Alternative viewpoints and new challenges to our thinking are equally welcome and when thoughtful others choose to question, engage and contribute we are always keen to listen.

Neil Walton is Subject Leader for PGCE Art & Design at Goldsmiths, University of London. We are very grateful for his contribution here, reflecting on Threshold Concepts, their potential pitfalls, and that tricky issue of where to begin teaching art, craft, and design.  
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We should be thinking historically about art. Here’s why.

By Neil Walton

Installation view of 'The Ancestors', Cathie Pilkington & Alison Wilding, 2019.

I’m a big fan of Artpedagogy’s Threshold Concepts. They provide welcome structure and rigour in what is arguably a period of drift in art education, and they’ve sparked some great conversations and further developments among teachers. But, for my money, the Threshold Concepts have a weak spot. They don’t highlight strongly enough the fragmented and contentious situation we’re in with art. 

When we talk about art now, we seem to be talking about a mind-boggling array of different things.

Most art teaching uses a familiar range of materials, techniques and themes: drawing, painting, printmaking. But in galleries of contemporary art, art could be a warehouse-sized installation or a pile of blankets or a communal meal or many other banal or spectacular items. Then again, we surely want to teach some skills to support creative making, but at times the emphasis on traditional skills seems an obstacle to innovative thinking and connecting to the contemporary world. 

In short, some pretty contradictory ideas show up when we try to get an overview of all the things we call art today. That’s tough for young learners to get their heads around, especially for those with less cultural capital. I reckon if we want to teach Art and Design and teach it ambitiously not just superficially, we’d better have some accessible way to convey this confusing and fractured state of affairs. The alternative is that we end up teaching a random and parochial patch of the large territory that art now covers. That’s bound to narrow the horizon of possibility for our students.

New views of art have emerged to challenge the old, complicating though not erasing what has gone before. So what we need now is a broad but accessible framework to get across the complexity of what art has become Neil WALTON

Here's my suggestion: thinking historically is essential to getting a handle on how we should be teaching Art and Design now because the concept of art has significantly shifted over its history. New views of art have emerged to challenge the old, complicating though not erasing what has gone before. So what we need now is a broad but accessible framework to get across the complexity of what art has become (and, N.B., its changing relationship to craft and design). Several conceptions or paradigms of art are knocking about now and they don’t fit neatly together, far from it. For shorthand, let’s call these the traditional, the modern and the contemporary. Each idea of art has its distinctive values, characteristics and different pedagogies too. For traditional art, continuity across generations and socially shared understandings are what lend its forms and meanings resonance. To teach art traditionally is to transmit the inheritances of a culture, its forms, skills and meanings. In response, the modern idea of art rejects established practices and instead values originality and self-expression. The force of the modern idea of art depends on the sincerity and perceptiveness of the artist. In the modern paradigm, to teach art is to facilitate experimentation and discovery, to break down the habits and conventions that overlay the sources of art. The contemporary conception of art radicalises the modern challenge. Its force is in destabilising and deconstructing every aspect of art, its mediums, conventions of viewing and even the boundary between art and everyday life. This idea of art is the most radical in pedagogical terms as it questions all institutional framings. Democratising and merging the roles of teacher and learner, it conceives of education as a non-hierarchical, collaborative process.
Some key ingredients of these different paradigms of art are set out in the table given here:

This layout highlights how different and contradictory the ideas in each column can be. As teachers we will have our own passions and commitments, but we should present these alternatives to students with a minimum of prejudice to encourage them to make up their own minds. The contentious character of art today is a great opportunity to foster debate. We should be putting that right up front.

The contentious character of art today is a great opportunity to foster debate. We should be putting that right up front.

Of course, the conceptual scheme I’ve sketched here is simplified, as it must be for younger learners. But I truly believe this little narrative of big ideas can be made accessible to students, and I think some historical conceptual scheme is needed to provide a foundation adequate to art’s current complexity. Notice how this scheme not only sets out different views of art but also different approaches to teaching. I think the best way to demonstrate these big ideas of art is by deliberately shifting and varying our teaching practices. To give an example, the near ubiquitous ‘formal elements’ project that many secondary schools use as a foundation in Year 7 could be taught explicitly as a modern, formalist approach. To my mind, there should be a much bigger emphasis on experimentation and personal discovery than is usually the case. A contrasting project could highlight following rules, rehearsing skills, copying models and observing decorum in a traditional manner (bearing in mind there are many traditions outside art academies). This is a more vivid and honest way of introducing different paradigms of art to students than bolting on an art history timeline or adding piecemeal references to individual artists.

Finally, I don’t see the approach suggested here as opposed to the Threshold Concepts and I expect more parallels to come out of ongoing discussions. It does, however, place a greater emphasis on the essentially historical and contested identity of art.

Neil Walton, Subject Leader for PGCE Art & Design at Goldsmiths, University of London
[email protected]
 
(N.B. the conceptual scheme presented here owes much to Thierry de Duve’s brilliant analysis of art education, ‘When Form Has Become Attitude and Beyond’ (1994) https://readings.design/PDF/ThierrydeDuveFormAttitude.pdf