ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that art historical awareness should be recognised as crucial to the Art and Design curriculum because it enables learners to develop a richer understanding of the categories of art and design, an understanding that is adequate to their current complexity and heterogeneity. It draws on writing that combines history of art with philosophical aesthetics to argue that historical awareness is central to the subject because art itself is essentially historical. A historicist pedagogy addresses these issues by locating contemporary art within a broader temporal framework, by relating narratives that reveal art’s contingent and unfinished identity. It explores an extended temporality, connecting past, present and future, and in so doing provides the context that allows pupils, students and teachers to interpret themselves and their place within shifting and multiple cultures. The strength of anti-essentialist approaches to pedagogy is in challenging boundaries and taken-for-granted thinking; but these approaches bring their own problem.
