Examining Foundational Understandings: Ralph Smith's Contributions to the DBAE Challenge

by Margaret Klempay Diblasio


This essay is based on work I began several years ago when I undertook to analyze and compare the diverse descriptions of discipline-based art education that had appeared in the professional art education literature. It compared concepts of Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) presented in writings by Ralph Smith; Gilbert Clark, Michael Day, and Dwaine Greer; and Brent Wilson. At the beginning of this venture my intention was to challenge the claims that a "quiet evolution" has taken place in the development of the comprehensive approach to art education under the rubric of DBAE, and to show conceptual consistencies and inconsistencies in the claims made by the above five authors. That task escalated into a search for understanding of the many accommodations that had taken place since the concept was developed and implemented in programs through Getty-funded efforts of the 1980s and 1990s, and to relate these adaptations to the writings of Ralph Smith and the authors of the Discipline-based Art Education (DBAE) monograph. In conducting my conceptual analysis, I examined documented reports of an assessment completed by the external evaluators of the Getty- funded DBAE Regional Institutes, and compared these reports to earlier frameworks presented by Smith and Greer, et al., and concluded that a different conceptual paradigm had been employed by the evaluators and imposed in developing the postmodern concept of art education described in "The Quiet Evolution."