Media, Expression and the Arts

the art of teaching art. These concerns were evidence in his first book, A Foundation for Art Education,' and reappeared with regularity in the numerous articles, speeches, and books he was to write after his first book was published in 1955. One of the major characteristics of his book was that it was inquiry oriented. Not one to embrace dogma, Manny Barkan was always asking, seeking, inquiring into problems of the field. Writing of these problems in his signal paper in A Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development,2 he wrote: To the extent that curriculum problems are vaguely defined, knowledges and beliefs upon which to base decisions are used indiscriminately. The consequences are vague judgments, ambiguous predictions, and a la mode decisions. Just as often, they are glorified and unverifiable hopes. But perhaps more importantly, the clearer the identification of problems, the better the grasp of relevant knowledge, or inadequacies and gaps in knowledge, and of limitations of decisions.3 In that article he proceeded to deal with problems of curriculum and urged the creation of centers for work on curriculum development in art education. That paper did much, I believe, to facilitate much of the curriculum work going on today in the field. Taking his lead I have tried, in this article, to extend the conception of the arts and of the role of materials for their use in schools. The burden of this paper is to describe the relationship between media, expression, and the arts and to suggest what these relationships imply for educational practice, the arts, and media research. To do this, I will need to make brief excursions into the meaning of expression, into the components with which the artist works, and into the demands visual works make upon those who wish to encounter them on the plane of meaning. The content of this paper rests upon seven ideas. These are: 1. Expression is a consequence of intelligence. 2. The arts are one of man's major expressive modalities, hence depend