Vol. 10 No. 2 (2014)

IJEtA 10.2 Table of Contents

State of the Arts
Glen Coutts and Timo Jokela

pp. 141-143

 

Elliot Eisner: 10 March 1933–10 January 2014

Kit Grauer

pp. 144-148

 

Dragons and art education: Pre-service elementary teachers memories of early art experiences

Deborah L. Smith-Shank

pp. 149-162

Many primary school teachers are not comfortable with making art, nor are they comfortable teaching art to children. Some are even uncomfortable using art to reinforce ideas and learning in other subjects. This article reports on an ongoing conversation with groups of pre-service primary/elementary teachers enrolled in a required university course in art pedagogy in the Midwest United States. This course is required for their elementary education licensure requirements. Over a twenty-year period, I asked these students to share memories of their early experiences with formal art education and informal art making. Their stories serve as the foundation of a fairy tale focusing on their relationship(s) with art, art education and art teachers. Some pre-service teachers reported good experiences that resulted in happy endings but many others shared stories of bad art education practices that have negatively impacted a pre-service teacher’s life for years. As pedagogical tools, these memories of art experiences by non-art professionals are useful because in nearly every single saga, art teachers play a central role as either heroes or villains. As a cautionary tale, Dragon teachers are the focus of this article.

 

Performing an intervention in the space between art and education

Heidi May, Donal O’Donoghue and Rita Irwin

pp. 163-177

In this article, we consider and discuss an artist-teacher residency staged at our university that explored and examined relations between art, learning and teaching. Comprising artists, pedagogues, becoming teachers and researchers, this residency was initiated to examine how becoming art teachers (teacher candidates) come to understand pedagogy in their field, and to create an event where they would encounter qualities of pedagogy through art-making. The article begins with a short discussion of the pedagogical turn in contemporary art and interventionist art practices before describing the artist-teacher residency that bears similarities to certain socially engaged art practices. Drawing upon the concept of emergent knowledge, we reflect upon the teacher candidates’ accounts of the experience of participating in the artist-teacher residency. We consider the impact that these experiences had on teacher candidates’ understandings of art and pedagogy. Throughout the project, a/r/tography offered a rich form of living enquiry that initiated processes of learning to learn.

 

 

World alliance for arts education: A reflection upon seven years of advocacy

Ralph Buck

pp. 189-203

The World Alliance for Arts Education (WAAE) is a peak arts organization that aims to foster diverse and sustainable arts education. This article traces the journey and emergence of the WAAE from an idea in 2006 to an internationally respected alliance today. The journey of WAAE has included 1000s of arts educators across the globe. This account of the WAAE takes an insider perspective, providing a kind of travelogue, an auto-narrative noting key events, places and persons in respective organizations and vital partnerships. The article reflects upon dominant emergent issues raised over seven years and issues that inform the development of non-government organizations and alliances. The journey of this narrative begins by quickly highlighting a key destination we arrived at in Paris in 2012. Noting this endpoint upfront, contextualizes the journey of the article but also the journey of the WAAE.

 

Cultural mismatch and creativity in arts education

Samuel Leong

pp. 205-220

Culture has been found to impact upon creativity, which is valued as ‘a motor of economic and social innovation’ in a world that is experiencing rapid cultural changes and increasing cultural diversity. Recent research has given attention to the problem of cultural mismatch in education, with studies showing that children’s success at school depends on the extent to which the knowledge, background and values of their families match the school’s values and priorities. The greater the mismatch between the two cultures, the less likely the children would benefit from schooling. When schools fail to effectively address the mismatch, social inequalities and academic failure are perpetuated. But the problem is not confined to home versus school cultures, and can be present in other kinds of mismatches such as western-eastern cultures and traditional-popular cultures. This article discusses this problem in the context of creative education and the advent of prosumerism.

 

So we can dance! Towards a new inclusive Australian dance curriculum – power, contestations and settlements

Jeff Meiners

pp. 221-234

This article uses autoethnographic writing in a research study that encompasses aspects of a personal and professional journey to locate dance within school cultures. Critical Discourse Analysis was utilized to investigate factors impacting on the construction and realization of a dance curriculum for all primary school students in Australia. The investigation is informed by Bourdieuian and Foucaultian approaches to reveal discourses, struggles and the effects of power in the construction of a new school dance curriculum within the context of political and micro-political interests related to dance education. In the neo-liberal context of the globalized idea of a national curriculum, dance as a learning experience in schools is usually located at the bottom of a deeply entrenched curriculum hierarchy. The article provides insight into the dance curriculum deliberation and settlement process, contributing to arts curriculum development research.

 

 

Making things happen through networks: Connecting arts educators to enhance collective knowledge in the field

Teresa Torres de Eca

pp. 235-245

New open source movements are proposing cohesion and syncretism in social networks. Such movements present an alternative way of thinking and behaving through synergy and collaboration. In Arts education theory and practice we probably face the benefits of the many social networks in the field for linking people. Organizations and individuals are working together at a global level and at medium and small scales in a myriad of groups spread out in very different linguistic territories. As art teachers and educational researchers we may seek transformation tools, and the collective intelligence arising from these groups may bring us a rich array of possibilities to inform our pedagogical and artistic interconnected fields. From a networking point of view, visibility, dialogue and action are emerging possibilities for pedagogic/artistic real actions. The future strengths or weakness of arts education will depend on the actions behind these groups, on the way they circulated among the Internet and produce physical impact in different geographical and cultural sites.

 

Collaborative visual mapping as performance: Visual Arts pre-service teachers’ reflections on practicum

Alexandra Cutcher and David Rousell

pp. 247-254

This poetic, visual essay describes a collaborative, visual performance enacted by a cohort of Visual Arts pre-service teachers. The students mapped memories and experiences of their first teaching experience from practicum, motivated by discussion, stimuli and feedback. The mapping process had several loops where the students worked collectively to map their visual reflections onto large-scale canvases. These performance paintings became palimpsests, portraying layers of collaborative practice and learning. The networks of interactions, dialogue, relationships and group dynamics were exposed in the material practice of the participants. As an a/r/tographical rendering, the process simultaneously documented the group’s subjective expressions as well as their emergent teacher identities. The collaborative model was at once both powerful and provocative as the dynamics of collective art-making evolved into reflections of developing pedagogy. This representation is a multivocal portrayal of the research; the voices of the researchers, students and artworks compete with and complement the other.

 

Book Reviews

Katrine Hjelde, Maria Lim and Marek  Wasilewski

pp. 255-260

Artist, Researcher, Teacher: A Study of Professional Identity in Art and Education, Alan Thornton (2012) Bristol: Intellect, 96 pp., ISBN: 9781841506449, p/bk, £16/$23

The Art and Craft of Pedagogy: Portraits of Effective Teachers, Richard Hickman (2011) London and New York: Bloomsbury, 174 pp., ISBN: 9781847062901, p/bk, £24.99

Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, Vincent Katz (ed.) (2013) Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 352 pp., ISBN: 9780262518451, p/bk, £27.95