ABSTRACT
For much of the 20th century, teachers believed that art performed its educational function when school children expressed their experiences and their feelings through the creation of paintings and drawings, sculptures, and collages. Art-making in school was for the purpose of enhancing children's "creative and mental growth". When the change initiative began, elementary classroom teachers and visual arts instructors knew almost nothing about the interpretation of artworks. The collaborative interpretation of artworks emerged as one of the most educationally potent features of discipline-based art education (DBAE). During DBAE instruction, forms of interpretation that were neither pure history, nor criticism, nor philosophy, nor artist's talk began to emerge. In DBAE classrooms, teachers almost always led these communal interpretive sessions. The classroom study of artworks was no longer forbidden. Moreover, a comprehensive pedagogy, derived from Bruner's and Barkan's conceptions of education, began to take hold. Art instruction in the non-DBAE classrooms was directed toward art-making projects.
