Always the New: Paradigms and the Inherent Futurity of Art Education Historiography

This article focuses on the use of paradigm as a historiographical concept in art education research from the 1980s onwards and examines what kind of understanding of time and history it has promoted. While Thomas Kuhn’s influential paradigm theory has lost it relevancy for the current historical research in art education, art educators still continue to use terms paradigm and paradigm shift especially when conceptualizing a new approach to teaching art or alternatively articulating the difference between past and present practices. I claim that even though Kuhnian paradigm theory and the post-Kuhnian “postparadigmatic” era proposed by Pearse (1992) have helped to approach the historical contingency of epistemological bases of art education research and historiography, they have not challenged the linear and chronological time of scientific knowledge production. By using the term paradigm to examine these temporal modalities of research, this article seeks to question more generally what kind of understanding of time and history do art education researchers put forward.