Laura Chapman:
Overcoming Sputnik

After the Soviets orbited their first Sputnik in 1957, Americans obsessed on improving science courses to help the nation catch up. Federal money flowed into K-12 science curriculum materials. The arts were forgotten. Laura Chapman was caught in that neglect of the arts.

Chapman's interest in instructional resources began in 1966 when she and colleague Manual Barkan at Ohio State University proposed a 10-year project for aesthetic education in art, music, dance, theater and literature, and won federal funding for it.

The project later moved to the Central Midwestern Regional Educational Laboratory in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the principal arts specialist for the CEMREL project and later a consultant for its arts and humanities research program. By the early 1970s, the project had developed excellent prototype materials, but publishers weren't interested in them. They would cost a lot, and the market looked small.

It was then, in the early 1970s, that Laura Chapman began writing a college text that built on her CEMREL work, but publishers turned down several drafts. Not all was lost, however. With many rejections came helpful comments from reviewers. She kept up.

Eventually, she found herself choosing between offers from Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich and Prentice Hall. Chapman chose Harcourt for Approaches to Art in Education. Published in 1978, it is still in print and widely cited. A chapter has been translated into Arabic. In 1993, the whole book was published in modem Greek. Approaches became just one of 34 books, two of them with co-authors. Her credits include dozens of articles and editorial scholarly journals.

Art as we see it every day

Chapman traces her drive to develop curriculum materials to a dissatisfaction with her own art education when she was growing up in Florida. "We did cute take-home projects, murals for social studies and the like," Chapman recalls. To help satisfy her yen for more, she took private painting lessons: "I loved it."

Not until college, at Florida State University, did Chapman learn about aesthetics or write any art criticism and art history. "Only then did I become aware of varied crafts traditions and arts we see every day -- architecture, fashion and graphic and industrial design," she said in an interiew. Topics like these are now in all of her books.

After graduating in 1957, she began her teaching career and honed her ideas about what children could learn. The teaching situations were less than ideal. She recalls having 1,200 students in two elementary schools for 30 to 50 minutes every other week -- too many pupils, too little time, and no art room. That required careful preparation and creativity, which later played a role in her work on instructional materials.

To broaden her experience, she entered a master's program at New York University. To make ends meet, she worked part-time in a graphic design studio, picking up skills she would use later in her books.

With her master's degree, Chapman joined the art education faculty at Indiana University in 1960 -- the start of what she calls her "Midwestern career." She taught courses set up programs for student teachers in rural schools and started a campus Saturday school in art. At Indiana, she published her first scholarly articles and continued exhibiting her paintings.

In 1962, Chapman moved to Ohio State to teach and begin doctoral studies. Then it was off to the University of Illinois for two years. On completing her dissertation, she rejoined the faculty at Ohio State, teaching there unfit 1969.

From 1970 to 1978 she taught at the University of Cincinnati, where she developed the doctoral program and a new model for training teachers.

Art in many languages

Laura Chapman began working on a series of elementary art texts and other resources in 1980. She contacted Davis Publications, in Worcester, Massachusetts, which has specialized in art books for schools since 1901. Davis published Chapman's Discover Art, 1-6, in 1983. It was the second series for American schools since the 1930s.

For Discover Art 1-6, Chapman wrote 12 books-six for students, six for teachers-and did rough layouts for them, including more than 1,500 images. She was else consulting author for two sets of large reproductions and a related kindergarten program. This series was adopted in many states, several Canadian provinces and for U.S. Department of Defense schools world-wide. Today the series is available in Dutch, from Muelenhoff Educatif in Amsterdam.

Chapman then wrote a condensed version of that program for schools that couldn't afford student texts. TeachingArt 1-3, and TeachingArt 4-6 (1989) are boxed materials. They include a teacher's guide with lessons, reproductions, and art games.

While those materials were being published, she started work on seventh- and eighth-grade books with teacher's editions, reproductions, and slides. Published in 1992, A World of Images and Art.: Images and Ideas won prizes for content and layout at the New England Book Show.

Since then, Chapman has written a new 12-volume series, Adventures in Art 1-6, which came out in 1994, with large reproductions, overhead transparencies, slides and more. It too was an award-winner at the New England Book Show.

Sill living in Cincinnati, Chapman misses regular teaching but enjoys the freedom to add her own agenda and do her writing without layers of committees.

She is a well-known leader in art education. Chapman has been named a Distinguished Follow of the National Art Education Association for her scholarly contributions, including work on gender and multicultural issues.

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 1997