Connectivity for Showing and Saying Across Differences in Art Education

This paper attempts to redress the current preoccupation with the idea of difference for structuring art curricula by reclaiming connectivity for realising value and strategic intelligence in art. In doing so, it makes use of the diverse role narrative plays in culture to establish a rationale for future art curricula, so that myth and mythic artistic methods that reconcile us to the world are given priority over the more recent preference for art to be subversive, like parable. This more complex analysis of the way story informs cultural activity is used to contrast with Efland, Freedman and Stuhr’s oversimplified use of narrative that neglects the importance of myth and its equivalent in procedural knowledge for understanding and making durable art. An alternative approach to structuring the art curriculum is mapped out that gives priority to connectivity (myth) over difference (parable) by drawing on meta-narratives over-looked in postmodern thought.