Review of Steppingstones: Pivotal Moments in Art Education History

Abstract

A rt education today might be viewed as a field ripe for novel perspectives, leading to research, pedagogy, and curriculum development related to critical historical perspectives and narratives (Bolin & Kantawala, 2017). In their latest scholarly pursuit, Steppingstones: Pivotal Moments in Art Education History, art education historians, pedagogues, and editors Paul Bolin, Ami Kantawala, and Mary Ann Stankiewicz offer a text of significant historical junctures and social contexts within the field by assembling an edited volume—a series of pathways (steppingstones) through past histories for exploring overlooked narratives tracing people, institutions, events, tensions, and international perspectives that have shaped the course of art education. It could be said that by establishing steppingstones, the editors are not only providing a nonlinear historical bridge of sorts but are also examining what has yet to be known beneath the surface (Bolin et al., 2000). What is offered in this text could be articulated as exploring beneath the tip of the iceberg. What is visible at the water’s surface level is but a fraction of a larger ecosystem. This idiom alludes to the phenomenon of a small part of a much larger, more expansive reality that remains obscured. Often, when curiosity strikes, we are made aware of the presence of something more. It is only when scrutiny arises that we begin probing the rest of the iceberg.