Abstract:
Claims of educational value in the arts are motivated by the realisation that, one way or another, the arts are more obliged than other subjects to spell out their wider educational relevance. The marginal position of the arts in education is largely a result of the unique kinds of knowledge they represent. For this reason redressing the marginalisation of the arts is often linked with attempts to redefine and broaden their cognitive structure. Recent evidence of transferability between knowledge in the arts and other curriculum domains is currently advanced as one useful approach. However, different ways of valuing the arts embrace different structural aspects of their knowledge. Thus the facts of transferability between knowledge in the arts and other domains vary according to their interpretation within different frameworks of artistic value.
This paper investigates the impact of three claims of artistic value on the facts of transfer in the arts. It emerges that the extent to which each value claim sifts out different properties of the evidence, weighed against the high levels of abstraction at which the transport of qualitative knowledge occurs, nullifies the usefulness of cognitive transfer as a stratagem against marginalisation in the arts.
This paper investigates the impact of three claims of artistic value on the facts of transfer in the arts. It emerges that the extent to which each value claim sifts out different properties of the evidence, weighed against the high levels of abstraction at which the transport of qualitative knowledge occurs, nullifies the usefulness of cognitive transfer as a stratagem against marginalisation in the arts.