Responding to “Why the Arts Don't Do Anything: Toward a New Vision for Cultural Production in Education”

In the spring of 2013, the Harvard Educational Review (HER) published a special issue entitled Expanding Our Vision for the Arts in Education (Vol. 83, No. 1). Following a variety of forward-looking essays and arts learner reflections concerning the potential of the arts in education, the issue concluded with a provocative scholarly article, “Why the Arts Don't Do Anything: Toward a New Vision for Cultural Production in Education,” written by Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. In this piece, Gaztambide-Fernandez makes the case that advocacy for arts education is trapped within a “rhetoric of effects” because the arts, as we conceive of them in educational environments today, rely too heavily on instrumental and intrinsic outcomes while only shallowly embodying a commitment to, or a consideration of, cultural practice. Gaztambide-Fernandez further argues...