This paper reviews the current state of visual arts-based integrated curricula and problematicizes the lack of art educator involvement in the design, implementation, and assessment of arts integration in the K-12 schools. This investigation considered the impact that art educators' beliefs about art and artistic ability had on their perceptions and practices when working with visual arts-based integrated curricula. Using Bourdieu's (1993) model of the field of cultural production as a theoretical framework, the researcher conducted a phenomenological study of preservice art educators enrolled in a graduate course entitled Visual Arts-Based Learning . This course provided insight into arts integration through a series of interdisciplinary studio workshops that encouraged the preservice art education students' reflective practices as artist/educators. The study found that the preservice art educators' with traditional art backgrounds reflected the modernist perspective of artistic ability, that this skill is “caught” and not “taught” in the classroom, and of art, that artworks are defined by their “content” and not by the “context” in which they are displayed, and replicated Bourdieu's notion of the institutionalization of anomie. Specifically, by promoting the importance of personal expressiveness over technical skill and individual choice over cultural acceptance, the artist educators were in fact reinforcing the elitist notion of art that served to isolate, rather than integrate, art education in the school programming. The author concludes with recommendations to encourage a postmodern preservice training for art education students that includes a strong art historical component and provides training in general education practices in order to contextualize art and art education.