Clayton Funk
Associate Professor Clayton Funk, Ph.D., teaches in the Ohio State University Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy. Funk's first teaching job was technical director in theatre at Goshen College. Later, he was digital resource librarian at Teachers College, Columbia University. He also taught research methods and current issues courses at SUNY New Paltz and Queens College CUNY.
Areas of Expertise
Funk's current activities focus on eLearning development in curricula of visual and musical forms in the context of American popular cultural history. Thanks to a grant from Ohio State's Affordable Learning Exchange, he has researched and developed this curriculum in the form of an open website and textbook.
- Histories of mass media and mass communication
- Histories of social efficiency, eugenics and intelligence testing
- Histories of wartime propaganda
- Histories of American vocational education and industrial arts in the early 20th century
- eLearning and web development and critical pedagogy
- Open educational resource
Research Interests
Funk has published articles, book chapters and encyclopedia articles on the history of art education. His work focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries in North America, particularly between 1890 and 1940. Looking through the historical lenses of material culture, technology and learning, his histories reveal webs of learning filters, learning ways and learning machines in schooling, museums and theaters in American urban spaces. This means histories of educational thought and of schooling are as important as histories of school buildings, technologies and what they imply about the cultures we value.