The times they are a-changing. Throughout history, art and literature have stood as mirrors, reflecting society’s mindsets and values, and as society has developed and changed, the arts have adapted alongside them. Unfortunately our education system is often too static, too unable or unwilling to change to better accommodate new understandings of the world around us. By looking at how the arts or perceptions of the arts have changed over time, we can see how necessary an adaptable education system really is. By looking backwards, we learn how to move forwards.
Eventually the old ways of telling a story become inadequate. They are better suited for conveying the values of a different society. Modernity no longer relies on the epic and instead looks to novels vastly different from those written in the Victorian-era. In “Rebirth as a Symbol for Genre Emergence”, Trace Calloway details how a single work of Shakespeare can illustrate the transitory phase in genre development. Ange Han follows him with “Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss”: Portraying Role Reversal Within Love”, a look at how interpretations of art can change over time. Tequilla Richardson’s “The Effectiveness of Guided Notes in an Inclusive Classroom” and Lisa Shurtz’s “Social Media in the Classroom” conclude the collection with analyses of how the classroom should function in the modern world to best adapt it to the changes that have left traditional pedagogy in the dust.