BYU Professor Talks about Inclusive and Place-based Education
“This is not a textbook for teachers,” says the spirit of René Magritte. It is a collection of field notes for teachers written by BYU’s Mark Graham. Graham is field guide director, children’s book illustrator and art education professor.
He wrote “Reimagining the Art Classroom: Field Notes & Methods in an Age of Disquiet” during the pandemic. Clark Goldsberry, a former BYU graduate student and American Fork High School art teacher, co-authored and designed the book and published in April 2024. The field guide was written and visually designed by the authors for accessibility and inclusion. It includes artist interviews, notes from field study programs in Nepal, India, Ecuador and Malawi and more than 200 photographs of various artists’ works. “We were very concerned that the book represented artists of color, women artists, and indigenous artists,” Graham said. “It’s a very important issue for the teachers that we work with who will be teaching in a diverse population.”
“I am really proud of the book and how it accomplished what we wanted to do,” Graham said. “It’s the book I always wanted to have as an artist and art teacher. There are really important themes like the spiritual elements of art, making, ideas about contemporary art, collage, curriculum and drawing.”
In our Q&A, Graham talks about his book and insights into art education.
Q: What inspired this field guide to art?
Graham: We decided to be less prescriptive, actually and call it ‘field notes.’ It is a guide but we didn’t want the title to say “this is a guide for you.” These are notes we have taken throughout our experiences and we wanted to extend the emphasis from what happens in the classroom to be the kinds of things that we do that go beyond the classroom.
Q: What do you hope readers will gain from reading this book?
Graham: First, greater familiarity with artists they may not know about. Second, some methods and methodologies of thinking about art and art making with critical issues in mind. For example, we have chapters about nature that deal with ecology and place and give artists and teachers a framework to explore important ideas.
Q:You wrote that healing and enlightenment “might be a legitimate purpose of education?” What did you mean by that?
Graham: Even though social-emotional learning is a big topic right now in learning, we often shy away from students dealing with spirituality or religion in public education. Socio-emotional learning and religion are also spiritually connected to healing and wholeness in public education.
Q: Do you feel working at BYU influenced that view on spirituality?
Graham: Yes. I feel like this book encapsulated what BYU scholars can do with their unique vision to talk about the Spirit, wholeness and healing and experiential learning. This is not a book about Mormon theology but it engages with those really important questions.
Our schools are secular and they should be secular. They do not hold on to any particular religious code, but most of the world of art and art history has dealt with religious and spiritual themes. To avoid these themes is to break down, for example, a painting of Christ on the cross through shapes and lines and colors instead of ‘why is there a man here who is suffering?’
Until the 18th or 19th centuries all societies throughout the world understood seeing the world as a sacred, holy place and created sacred spaces in that world. In the last 200 years we haven’t thought of the world as being sacred unless we are members of a faith, like ours, where we believe in temples. We ask students to think about questions such as, what does it mean to have a religious or spiritual experience? What does it mean for a place to be sacred? What does ‘sacred’ mean in artwork, art making, and in the history of art? How is that important?
Q: Can you clarify what you talk about in the beginning and end of your book about artistic fluency?
Graham: In our conclusion of the book, “Occasions for curriculum: On provocations and assignments” we talk about the importance of developing artistic skills with an experienced master. The chapter on collage is about how to create a safe environment to develop those skills and feel safe failing until you get it right. Part of creating that environment is having students create a rubric for grading that includes things like craftsmanship, effort, exploration, research. Then there are lots of ways to succeed.