Justin Sutters Nominated for Eisner Award
Recent addition to the SIUE Art and Design faculty, Justin Sutters, received a nomination for the, “2013 Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research Award in Art Education.” The award is given by the National Arts Education Association (NAEA) a national organization aimed at improving teaching of the visual arts in the United States. The Eisner award is granted to individuals who have recently completed their doctoral dissertations.
Sutters’s dissertation focused on how art educators come to know a place visually. His research deals with how art educators from suburban and wealthy environments learn to teach in urban and inner city schools. The aim of Sutters research is to help future educators be prepared to work in a multitude of different academic environments, a problem he had to face when beginning his career as an educator.
“When I did my student teaching it was in a rough inner city school and I couldn’t believe it,” Sutters shared, “it was forty minutes from where I grew up and it was just night and day.”
Sutters explained that art budgets are some of the first things to get cut when money is tight. He is concerned with how teaching has become focused on passing standardized test rather than helping students with creative problem solving, he feels that a foundation in art education can help students in the real world.
“Art allows us to address problems visually where as hard sciences take a different approach,” Sutters said, “throughout history artist have been ahead of the curve on social issues.”
Sutters will be attending the NAEA conference over break where he will also be presenting three papers. When not focusing on areas of art education he works with concepts of nature, math, order, and progress in his printmaking work.
“I’m very happy to be here at SIUE, I feel like they’ve been really supportive of my research,” Sutters commented.
Filed Under: Art and Design
