KA: Dr. Johnson and Dr. Button both mentioned your time teaching in Seville with two different groups of students. Were there any specific ways that you were able to relate to your students the Spanish culture through Spanish art? Did you receive any feedback from the students?

DF: I consider global understanding to be one of the foremost tasks of art ed for this century. I was able to increase it with my American students by broadening their definition of art to include more than what is in the Spanish museums, as marvelous as that is. We looked at the art of everyday life, art in the streets, the store signs, the advertisements, how they compared to signs in the United States. We found interesting differences in the priorities of the Spanish. Their cars, the “smart cars,” look quite different from our bigger cars. That revealed how their economy differs from ours, the price of gas and so on. And clothing styles. In Spain people dress up more than we do in the United States. Then again, almost everybody dresses up more than we do in the United States. The women are made up, high heels, dressed up, often emphasizing their sex appeal. The men dress up too, in the sense that they wear nice slacks, shirts, and polished leather shoes. I would not say they emphasize their sexuality. Their financial success perhaps. Hardly anybody in Spain dresses in cutoffs and t-shirts. We looked at clothes as an art form. One thing we never saw in Spain was women wearing shorts. Shorts are code for prostitution. We were told of two American women in a prior class who wanted to go jogging. They put on shorts and got on the bus. The men wouldn’t leave them alone. How unpleasant that must have been.

We did go to a number of museums and historically important buildings because I wanted them to see the fine art while we were there, but they get that in U.S. art history classes, so we emphasized the art of the everyday. The imagery of the everyday effectively reveals cultural values. For example, take bullfighting advertisements. Bullfighting is not allowed in the United States. These advertisements were everywhere and certain matadors have rock star status. So much of it is visual rather than textual, or a blend of the two. The enthusiastic acceptance of bullfighting is the first thing that unlocked a door to understanding the Spanish people.

Christianity has a bloody side, such as the revolting notion of drinking Christ’s blood, his dying on the cross with blood gushing from his side. The Spanish embrace that side of Christianity more than any other country I've observed. I understand better now why the Inquisition occurred in Spain. And all of this was observable in their visual culture.

We can use the category of art for our conversation but it’s not as useful as the category of visual culture, which includes art but also everything else visual. That’s something art teachers need to start understanding if they want to adapt to the needs of this new century. By thinking in terms of visual culture rather than just art, we were able to understand Spain better.

KA: I was reading different articles from your website and saw that you were a teacher for 10 years in public schools before you received your doctorate to teach future art educators. What methods for teaching art do you emphasize in your classes? And how do these differ from methods you experienced during your time as a public school teacher?

DF: Well, my experience with art as a kid was having art on Friday afternoon if we were quiet on Friday morning. It was recess in your seat, and what we did contained no content. If it was November we traced our hands and made a turkey, and in February we folded a red paper in half and cut out a heart. The idea that art has content that is complex, deep, rigorous seemed to be lost on the teachers. Quite different with math, science, reading, where we actually were taught the content. So my peers and I back in the 1960s learned that certain school subjects have content and are to be taken seriously and certain ones lack content and are to be considered addenda. I believe “enrichment” is the current euphemism.

What I discovered as an art major and then an art teacher for ten years is that the attitude toward art that I had been raised with is pervasive. I remember a parent chastising me because I gave homework. She said, ‘When I took art we didn’t have homework. Art is supposed to be a course where you don’t have homework.’ Note her attitude of casualness about it—art’s just an easy, automatic pass. We need to do two things: Insert content back into the art curriculum, and adapt that content to fit the world's new needs. The arts foster creative problem solving arguably more than many other subjects. You learn a visual language, so you essentially become bilingual if you study art. You learn how to decode imagery in ways that you could never do without sound art instruction, and you learn to think in divergent ways. Here’s what I mean by that: In math 5 x 5 can equal only 25. Everybody is compelled to come up with 25; in other words, they must converge on one solution. The process of problem solving is diametrically opposite in art. Give 25 art students each a square, a triangle and a circle. Ask them to create the most satisfying composition they can with those three elements. They come up with 25 different solutions, from which we can pick the best.

Images are replacing text more and more to convey information. To find an equally image-based time we have to go back to the beginning of writing 7000 years ago. The shift from text back to image seemed to start with the invention of the camera. Then movies come along, then television, and now computers and the Internet. All of those media depend on images as well as text to convey information. Because we are living through this particular moment in history, we might not realize that this is happening. Rather than realize too late that our children need to be visually literate, we need to realize it now. Faculty in university art teacher preparation programs need to step up to this task. There is such a thing as reading the image, of discriminating between its intended and its unintended messages. Images are just as manipulative and agenda-laden as text. The new mission for art in the schools is to make children visually literate so that they can realize when they are being manipulated.

KA: Merry M. Merryfield says in an article that only 5% of teachers are prepared to teach with a global perspective. From your experience as a public school teacher and now as a professor for future art educators, would you agree that most future educators lack a global perspective?

DF: [laughs] Yes, they don’t even have a U.S. perspective. Here’s the deal—the overwhelming majority of our teaching force is white, middle-class, well-behaved and female. That is certainly the case in art ed. Yet they teach the whole rainbow. I send my students out to Project Intercept, Lubbock's alternative school for kids who have been kicked out of school, for a semester-long field experience. I ask them facetiously, “How many of you have ever done time?” Well, none of them have ever done time.

“How many of you were ever busted for pot?” Maybe one hand, usually none. These young women know how to behave according to white, middle-class, heavily genderized rules. What they don't know is how to deal with the kids who behave according to different rules. Dark-skinned rules. Poor people rules. Jewish or atheist rules. Gay kid rules.

The kids at Project Intercept are there because they broke the dominant set of rules. I want my students to learn how to teach them. Under my supervision so that I can guide them. I want the Otherness to disappear.

I got into legal trouble as a young man for inappropriate behavior, and before that I was kicked out of school for inappropriate behavior. I’m a grown up version of the kids at Project Intercept. I remember how my teachers looked at me—it was not with affection. They were frightened; they didn’t know what to do with me. What do you do with kids you don’t understand? You kick them out of school. Poof, the problem is gone.

In 8th grade I was expelled, Ah, problem solved. Except that the problem still existed. Now I look back on my teachers and feel sorry for them. Their teacher ed programs failed to prep them to teach students like me. And I was far from the only one.

So when my students go out to PI, many are scared at first. I had one student tell me, “I think it is unprofessional of you to make us go teach these kids.” Some of them think the kids are dangerous. Yet I have taught this course for years and the end result is always the same: My students tell me:
“It was nothing like I thought.”
“Can I go back on my own time to finish my unit?”
“Do you think I could get a job there?”

My course evaluations are high. “This was the best experience to prepare me for teaching I had at Texas Tech.” That’s a quote from one evaluation. They experience a complete reversal of attitude. The PI kids are not monsters; they are 13-, 15-year-old kids who often don’t have guidance at home. They are victims who become perpetrators without effective intervention. So we intervene with art, which a lot of them are very good at, by the way. To answer your question then, I say our students not only are not prepared globally, they are not even prepared locally.

Of course the people at PI love us. When I first inquired about setting up this program, they said, “You are the first person from Texas Tech who ever contacted us.” It is 15 minutes away from campus! The College of Education is not interested in working with students such as these and when we look at the faculty we see why: Sure enough, it’s made up of white, middle-class women who behave. Even when they got their Ph.D.s, nothing intervened to change their attitudes toward us thugs. So they teach the next generation from a mindset of naiveté and fear. What a monumental disservice they perform to our future teachers.

KA: In what ways may teachers use international and cultural art to dispel stereotypes and generalizations?

DF: Try this: Name half a dozen famous European artists as fast as you can.

KA: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet, Degas, Picasso, Giotto.

DF: Now let’s open the question to include the other 95% of humanity. Name six famous artists from this entire remainder of the group, anyone but European men.

KA: [pause] I don’t think I can.

DF: Yeah, you probably can’t. I’ve asked this question to many audiences and they perform the same way you did. Even if I’m talking to an art crowd, they need a while to come up with six famous women artists or black artists or whatever.

That little exercise opens people’s eyes to their hidden stereotypes. I ask these audiences, “Is that because the rest of humanity lacks talent? Do European men own it all? No, they not only don’t own it; they are no more talented than any other group. It’s all about racism and sexism. Wow, those are some powerful societal forces. For millennia they’ve been two of the main shapers not only of art history, but of history, period. By recognizing our stereotypes we can dispel them.

KA: How can international forms of art help students to develop a more global and peaceful understanding about the world?

DF: Art teachers need to show non-male, non-European art. That alone will do worlds of good. The problem is that in their art education preparation programs, almost all they learn are the European men. So the art teacher out there says, “I see your point, Dennis. Yes, we should look at Asian art and South Pacific art and African art, but I don’t understand it. I don’t know how to talk about it.” Right, so education programs need to change—the tediously arch-conservative art history field needs to spend half the time researching and teaching art by women and people of color. When we get around to embracing the artwork of the entire globe, we art teachers finally will be doing our part to create international understanding.

KA: From my own personal experience with the education system and from the research that I have done so far, it is apparent that art is often seen as pointless in the education system and instead schools spend their time preparing for standardized tests. How do you think that standardized tests and unified curriculum harm the progress of arts in public schools?

DF: I just published three articles on this. I don’t know if Peggy Johnson said that I’m working in Washington D.C. on revising No Child Left Behind. When you were going through the twelve grades, yes, there were standardized tests, but they didn’t tyrannize the public system the way they have since 2002 when President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. When you, and even I, were going through school, there were two tiers of classes: The four core classes—math, reading, science, social studies—and then all the others, which made up a second tier. What No Child Left Behind has done is create three tiers: math and reading (the two tested subjects), then science and social studies, and all the others, now forming a third tier. Science is now beginning to be tested and so will be promoted back to the first tier.

The result of being moved from a second tier to a third is that a subject starts to disappear. Graduates of mine who are teaching email me and say, “My principal makes me devote 20 minutes from each period to math drills. What can I do?” That is what standardized testing does when it is the only thing that matters. And of course it spreads well beyond the arts. Right now our sixth graders have known no other kind of curriculum. They are half way to graduation. If nothing changes, they will be our nation’s first profoundly unprepared graduating class.

What my organization, the National Education Taskforce, and others like it are trying to do with No Child Left Behind is replace it with a more complex, accurate means of assessing what kids know. Any statistician will tell you a couple of one-shot tests on given days cannot represent learning across 180 days of teaching. Such a measure generates data that is truly junk. And yet we hold kids back because of how they did on that one day. Other terrible things happen. Kids get put into special ed. Kids are encouraged to drop out of school. Teachers and principals are fired if the almighty numbers aren’t what they’re supposed to be. We can’t be surprised when we hear so many stories of teachers cheating.

KA: I read several past interviews from your website that emphasize your advocacy of social theory in art and the importance of instructors linking art and social issues. Could you elaborate on this issue and how it may be related to introducing cultural art forms in the classroom?

DF: Yes. What art is about? Love, hate, religion, politics, peace, war, sex, violence. The best and worst aspects of life are what artists deal with. Yet the school art curriculum is bleached out, and white-washed. It holds at arm’s length the very things that art is about. Kids learn that art doesn’t have robust content. Art is meaningless holiday fun, recess in your seat. Only when the obvious occurs, the linkage of art education to the content of art, will the subject become a powerful educational tool that shapes kids’ development. Quite simply, that’s the social theory connection. The relationship is not forced; we are simply describing art the way it really is. Social theorists such as I just point out that what is being taught to kids in schools remarkably has nothing to do with what artists do. If we taught math that has nothing to do with what mathematicians do, parents would be up in arms. But because they grew up with the same whitewashed “art” curriculum, they don’t see the problem. Some of these uninformed parents sit on school boards making uninformed decisions.

KA: Right now I am exploring how the visual, performing, and literary arts affect the way students learn. Would you say that students respond to or show more interest in a particular form of art?

DF: I’m glad you refer to literature as one of the arts. An art form that has one of the strongest footholds in the schools is music. A lot of parents took piano lessons or were in marching band. Things like marching band pull students in because it’s fun, it’s an extracurricular activity, and you can go to the games free. Also music and theater are communal, group activities. I teach an introductory art course to theater and music doctoral students, and I find both to be gregarious and outgoing. The artists, I find, are more introverted. I don’t teach literature students, but I have published poetry and fiction and almost majored in English. I wonder if it’s because writing too is a solitary act.

A lot of communities have music booster clubs. You don’t see art booster clubs or creative writing booster clubs. You might have student clubs but not booster clubs, which are adult community support groups. Part of the reason is personality, as I mentioned. If you’re an introvert, you want your work to be what’s on the stage while you lurk over here in the corner viewing the people viewing your work. The same is true of a writer: Your book, your play, your poem is your surrogate on stage, not you.

Another reason for music’s comparative popularity is found in the history of Western religion. Music has been popular in the church since at least the Middle Ages. This is true of both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Visual art has been embraced by the Catholic church throughout its history, but rejected by Protestantism. Hence it is the next most commonly found art form formally taught in our schools. Theater has been viewed skeptically by both traditions and hence comes in third. Literature, as a humanity, perhaps has the highest status, no doubt because of the centrality of the Holy Bible within both traditions.

As a writer, an artist, and also a percussionist, I find at the age of 55 that the same creative impulse is fed by those three, but that their natures are different. When I am being a musician I think in a certain way, when I am being an artist I think in a different way, and when I am being a writer I think yet differently again. But the inner emotional thrust to express I think is the same.

KA: Do students react better if they get to create art themselves or if they just experience it?

DF: Another good question. They must do both. Our public school curriculum is set up to almost ignore the viewing and discussing of art. Again, art teachers are not prepared to do that. I hold university art ed programs responsible. Art ed majors take more studio courses than anything else. These courses tend to run about three hours. If studio faculty spent the first twenty or thirty minutes of each class viewing exemplars and analyzing what makes them great, they’d get better product than they do by devoting the entire three hours to production.

Then tacked onto all that studio are a mere handful of patriarchal, European art history courses in which no connections are made to the students’ studio practice. So the new teacher emerges from college with a reasonable studio background, and I hope good grounding in pedagogy, but that’s not enough. Most art teachers are at least somewhat competent in art production, some very good. Most are appallingly incompetent in art history, unable to breathe life into an exciting subject. And they tend to lack any sense of social theory—any sense of the inseparability of art to political, ethical and other profound concerns.

What happens then is that kids in school make a fair amount of art, which is good, but without an informed viewing component. One can have meaningful discussions about such concerns without offending the local community. I think part of the resistance of some is that they don’t realize this. They say, “Oh I could never talk about that.” In fact they can. They just need to exercise judgment.

I got a call Saturday from a woman on the verge of tears. She is the director of art education programs for a large urban district. As such she is above the principals; she supervises the curricula for hundreds of schools. Yet this powerful woman is near tears. She told me, “I read your books. I want to do what you say to do, but the teachers are throwing a fit. They have even contacted the media and one story has already appeared.” So now the community has been told that this supervisor wants art teachers to talk about “controversial issues.”

“What can I do?” she asked. So we talked for an hour, followed by lengthy emails, all of it about developing political savvy about how to go about this. Mainly, don’t tick off the community. Again, it’s quite do-able. In situations such as hers, don’t stand on your desk and scream, “Gay Power!” But do talk about the wisdom of tolerance and not being judgmental toward those who are different in some ways from us. That conversation can, and probably should, be held with first graders. And you know what—it’s pure social theory. Every major religion supports the tenets of social theory. Why the controversy?

Now, to finish my point about viewing art: If you don’t have it, then your students have to reinvent the wheel. Instead of saying, “Ok, kids, today we are going to work with line. Do a drawing that has five different kinds of line,” precede that by viewing.

“What did this great artist do with line in this work of art? What did that great artist do with line in that work of art?” The kids build mental tool boxes of visual techniques, in this case of how changing a line’s quality can alter the effect of their work. Then when you say, “Do a drawing that has five different kinds of line,” their work will be ten times better because they saw what the best artists did. Oddly, many art teachers have never thought of that.

And to return once more to pointing out the connections societally, let’s look at graffiti art. I encourage my students to teach it precisely because it’s street art, the art of a certain segment of “the People.” Tell students you are opposed to vandalizing property; they can make graffiti art with your art supplies right here. Seeing a teacher honor graffiti by teaching it as a legitimate art form is eye-opening to the kids, a lot of whom are taggers. What aspect of the lesson will they remember the longest? That one. And without a viewing part, that might have lost. The students will say, “Whoa, this teacher is cool. She understands me. I can’t believe this. All we looked at with the other art teacher was Van Gogh.” I say, why not look at both?