Concepts, Reasoning and Art History in Art Education: An Inferentialist Approach
Neil Walton

In this talk I will make a case for an approach to art education which places concepts, reasoning and art history at its centre. More specifically, I want to show how Robert Brandom’s inferentialism connects these elements and supports my case. The proposed approach is needed, I argue, as a corrective to common views about art education that centre perceptual experience and/or attentiveness to materials, sometimes positioning these as inherently educative. I further specify these views by referring to Elliot Eisner’s claims for the primacy of the senses (Eisner 2002), and to the new materialist stance of Emily Jean Hood and Amelia Kraehe (Hood and Kraehe 2017). By contrast, my argument is that art is better understood as discursive, rational and historically grounded, as concept using and reason sensitive, as essentially a disjunctive set of historical normative practices. Art education is then best thought of as a critical introduction to the know-how of those practices, as making explicit their proprieties, entailments and contradictions, and the choices that are thereby made possible and necessary.

Neil Walton is a lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. After training at the Royal Academy Schools, he received his MA in History of Art from Birkbeck, University of London. He worked in London secondary schools and taught art history at various art schools and colleges. His interests are in the history and philosophy of art education and philosophical aesthetics. Current work includes integrating art history into the secondary curriculum and examining how Robert Brandom’s inferentialism can inform art education. He has previously been a Trustee of the Association for Art History, co-editor of the International Journal of Art and Design Education and Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy Schools.