This week is practice theory in my theory class. I like practice theory. In an exchange with a fellow student he asked if I had found any research in my area.
I was sitting in traffic heading to my preferred swimming pool (because heated!) thinking about the question and getting the sense that I had felt this feeling before. No, there is not a lot in the literature about the student teacher relationship among artists. That relationship that makes up the practice of art education. There is plenty of information about art information seeking. Pacey and Hemmig and Cobbledick all covered that a while ago. Gorichanaz and Tidline write about art as information. Challener covered the difference between information seeking of art history teachers and studio artists. I could go on and on. I haven’t found, and I keep looking for, a study of the practice of art education which would encompass information sharing, information seeking, information creation...and I remember what I tell my students in library instructions -- you are not going to find an article that covers everything you want to write about because you have not yet written it.
But that feeling I have when I am searching brings me to another world of practice I inhabit. That feeling of staring into the void. I remember when my oldest was an infant. I knew something was different about him. I couldn’t say what it was. I would stare at him all day wondering. My husband would come home from work and I would toss him the baby and frantically start reading baby books. I just couldn’t find him there. Baby books didn’t have the information and I was staring into the void wondering if my son was the Kwisatz Haderach. Recently I participated in a skills deficit assessment for that same son. It’s a thing you have to do to get adult medicaid services. It can be rough because it focuses on what can’t be done. But the practice element was really in play. The interviewer and myself and a teacher and my very sleepy son and a document we had to look at the whole time that outlined the deficit scales.
Anyway, I keep thinking about that assessment and how that feeling of seeking is the same in both of these completely different cases. Staring into the void.
