Art and Disability: The Social and Political Struggles Facing Education

In the past few decades, making art has been used in special education classrooms as a way of offering psychic freedom, if not bodily freedom, by providing a partial antidote to the social problems generated in an impoverished environment. The art that has emerged has redeemed the inevitable isolation and loss and become its driving force. Wexler argues that the arts are most effective when they are in service of social growth, critical to identity formation. This book balances theory with practical knowledge and offers critical research that challenges the biases regarding the nature of art and education. It includes case studies, examples of the author’s strategies with children and art students, as well as a chapter devoted to lesson plans.

Alice J. Wexler (Ed.D., Columbia University) is Associate Professor in the Art Education Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her expertise is in Special Education and graduate research. She has written many articles on the subject of disability for Art Education journals, such as Studies in Art Education, Visual Arts Research, and the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education. The social and political implications of disability and the crossing of boundaries among fields is often the subject she presents at national and regional conferences. In 2007 she was a visiting scholar at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies researching art of children from the Stolen Generation.