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Winter
2001 Volume 3, Number 2
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 Program inspires art teachers to look at Festival of the Arts in new ways By Susan J. Burlingame Though the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts has been going on for many years in State College, few have thought of it as subject matter for art itself. Perhaps even fewer have thought of the festival in terms of “visual culture” and what the event says about the people who participate as artists or as spectators. What kind of statement does the festival make? And doesn’t it make a different statement to each individual who perceives the festival through his or her own eyes or other senses? All the people who attended the Arts Festival — observers, artists, judges — brought with them to the Arts Festival a unique summation of their life experiences. These helped shape the way in which each person was affected by what he or she experienced at the festival. Plus, festival experiences included far more than merely viewing works of art. There was food to taste, see and smell and music to listen to. There were people to observe — young and old, savvy and innocent — who in many ways were works of art or visual culture themselves. What do all of these images tell us about our culture, the world, ourselves? These abstract considerations intrigued Penn State art education professors Dr. Brent Wilson and Dr. Marjorie Wilson. They decided to take advantage of the phenomenon that is the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts and develop a graduate-level course to take place during and within the Arts Festival. The purpose of the course would be to inspire Pennsylvania elementary, junior high school and senior high school art teachers to create their own works of art, motivate their students and begin to develop a curriculum for the upcoming year. The Arts Festival: Visual Culture and Art Education was held in July. Ten art teachers from around Pennsylvania participated in this unusual experience. Participants earned 3 graduate credits. Dr. Patricia A. Book, associate vice president for outreach and executive director, Division of Continuing Education, encouraged the development of the course as part of a town/gown partnership between the University and the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts (CPFA). As president of the CPFA board of directors, she is an avid patron of the arts and recognized the value of using the Arts Festival as a starting point for exploring issues in the arts. “The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts has grown into a major celebration of the arts,” Book said. “Each year, the festival attracts hundreds of thousands of artists and participants from throughout the United States and around the world. Having the Arts Festival serve as the basis for a course on art is a wonderful way to make the most of a truly special resource to expand the knowledge and experiences of Pennsylvania art teachers. They will take what they have learned back to their classrooms and inspire countless young people.” The course began with discussions of visual culture, theory and spectacle. Course participants were challenged to respond to provocative questions regarding making art out of art, how much one could learn from a simulation of art as opposed to the art itself, and what items are simulations of simulations (called “simulacra”) and what might be their contribution to art. Discussions ensued about the Internet and digital art in terms of what impact these representations would have on the viewer and on art itself. Following many discussions and sessions conducted at various venues on the University Park campus, including the Crafts National Exhibit and the faculty exhibition in the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, each student was given a digital camera with which to photograph images at the Arts Festival. These images would then be loaded into a computer and each student, for the final deliverable of the course, would work with those images, altering them, combining them and adding text to develop a hypertext web of text and images. Brent Wilson, recognized internationally for his research on children’s artistic development, among other related subjects, suggested to the students that they needed to see themselves in the visual culture context. “This is really all about determining what is your role as a contributor to visual culture and what is the role played by the teacher?” He also postulated that the important objective in the students’ final projects would be to find “ways to place yourself into the web you’re about to build.” Following their hours photographing images at the Arts Festival, students spent time in the computer lab learning the technologies, as well as transforming their images. The objective was to start with an image or an idea and build from there using the technology available. These digital artworks, which included the festival images, would be used as the basis for creating instructional units for elementary and secondary schools. “Though I don’t know where each person is,” commented Marjorie Wilson at one of the early sessions, “I’m hoping to take them [the participants] beyond where they are in terms of the way they look at art and the way they teach.” Her research centers on the pedagogical applications of hypermedia and technology in art education. She was therefore the perfect facilitator for assisting the students with the computer programs (Adobe PhotoShop and Story Space) and the new available technologies — many of which the students had never worked with before. In the computer lab, deep in thought, 10 different students were going in 10 different directions with their projects. Some were starting with a single word and finding a way to connect images to it. Others were taking an image and altering it with color or combining it with other images to make a statement about the Arts Festival or art itself. In a sophisticated hypertext document, images or words can lead people on completely different paths, rather than in one line with one thought or theme to convey. The challenge for the students was to learn how to use the hypertext program and how to put all their concepts together in a project that can literally continue on infinitely, much like Internet searches can encourage a stream of consciousness, taking participants far from their original destinations. The students came to the art course with many different expectations. One student wanted to use the final project for high school students in a rural Pennsylvania farm community to “show them what’s out there, as well as bring the Arts Festival to them.” Another student, Sam McCaughey, from the Canton Area School District, was interested in seeing new and interesting things to take back to his students. Martha Blaisdell, a teacher of grades seven through 12 in the Claysburg — Kimmel School District, said she wanted to get a feel for graduate work and learn about the new technologies available to artists. “This is also a great way to teach students how to look at art differently and look at the world differently,” she added. Yet another student was simply pleased to be in the company of people who understood her and the concerns she has with representing art digitally or photographically since she became an art teacher after being an independent artist for 10 years. In the end, the students completed their “webs” to the best of their ability, given their knowledge of the technology and the time constraints of the course. They presented them to each other and critiqued the projects, offering suggestions as to how to work the projects into curricula at their respective schools. Brent Wilson commented that “it is possible in your hypertext project to take more than one position: spectator-teacher, spectator-artist, spectator-student.” The participants in the Arts Festival: Visual Culture and Art Education brought their many roles with them to the course and left with their eyes open a little wider as to the possibilities art and the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts provides for reaching — and teaching — students. 
An outreach program of the College of Arts and Architecture
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U.Ed.OCE 01-8002/mkm/GSM