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  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 20 No. 3 (2024)

    Editorial

    Educational Futures

    Tara Winters
    Principal Editor, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau

    Education is undergoing much change post a global pandemic in response to inequitable access, the pervasiveness of technology and in preparation for future challenges. Principal Editor Tara Winters observes how many of the pedagogies and practices present in art education and research align with future-oriented transformations of education. Articles in this issue reveal and envision peda­gogical design and action that parallel many themes occurring in contemporary discourses on thinking differently about learning, teaching, knowing and being in the world.

     

    Article

    Exploring the challenges faced by elementary school students while learning socioscientific issues through comics

    Fadhlan Muchlas Abrori
    Johannes Kepler University

    Zsolt Lavicza
    Johannes Kepler University

     Branko Anđić
    University of Vienna

    The use of comics in education presents significant promise as a tool for enhanc­ing comprehension of educational concepts and advancing scientific literacy. Our research is centred on the development of comics to introduce socioscientific issues (SSI) content to elementary school students, recognizing SSI as a complex soci­etal concern intertwined with science, encompassing diverse scientific and social perspectives. This study adopts a case study approach and places a substan­tial focus on assessing the challenges faced by students in their utilization. We probed the obstacles experienced by elementary school students when engaging with SSI-laden comics through semi-structured interviews with ten participants. Thematic analysis was applied to scrutinize the collected data, leading to the iden­tification of three primary challenge-related themes: technical complexities of read­ing comics, unfamiliarity with genre conventions and difficulties in grasping SSIs. Most of our findings were rooted in both the structural aspects of comics (includ­ing technical reading and genre) and the complexity of SSI content. These insights offer valuable guidance for our future endeavours and for researchers venturing into the creation of comics for similar educational content.

     

    Visual Essay

    Mapping collaborative art practices with youth collectives

    Carolina Silva
    Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon

    Duchamp & Sons are the Whitechapel Gallery youth collective, a group of young people aged 15–24 that meet regularly to develop collaborative art projects. I worked with them as a participant researcher in the six-month project De/construct (2013–14), co-developed with architect Nick Wood (United Kingdom) and artist Steven Morgana (United Kingdom). In this visual essay, I present my diagram­matic drawings of their encounters, including research, discussion, experimenta­tion and decision-making moments. The latter create visual cartographies of the youth collective’s encounters and speak to their performativity. I use a selection of Duchamp & Sons tweets, which are posted by a different member of the group in each session, to create a timeline of the project. My reflections on collaborative art projects and the pedagogies that come together in these practices draw on notions of experimentation and proto-performance, emphasizing the processes rather than the outcome, in this case, an exhibition presented at the Gallery.

     

    Articles

    The creative act in the studio: A plea for rethinking potentiality in art education

     Tyson E. Lewis
    University of North Texas

    This article outlines three dominant ways in which the concept of potentiality is discussed in art educational literature, and in particular the connections between actualizing potentialities and creation. It then pivots to the works of Giorgio Agamben in order to problematize some of the basic ontological assumptions embedded within the three dominant views of the potentiality–actuality–creativity relationship. Agamben focuses his analysis on the (im)potential remnant of potentiality that remains within any given actualization and highlights the role of such (im)potentiality in creative acts. To illustrate this role, the article offers four ways that (im) potentiality exhibits itself in various art forms before concluding with implications for imagining the artist’s studio as a space and time for (im)potential acts of creation. 

     

    Harnessing the power of performing arts: Fostering pedagogical change in the education of special cultural groups

    Angelica Edna Calo Livne
    Tel-Hai College

    Noam Malkinson
    University of Haifa

     Irit Sasson
    Tel-Hai College and Shamir Research Institute, University of Haifa

    In education, performing arts offer crucial pedagogical tools, fostering verbal and non-verbal communication skills and essential ‘soft’ workplace skills. Particularly vital for minority communities due to cultural traditions, this qualitative action research centres on a Druze village elementary school in northern Israel. The study investigated a performing arts programme, designed to catalyse systemic pedagogical change, and prepare students for seamless integration into Israeli society. Data were collected through eleven interviews with the educational team. The study analyses the change process from initiation through implementation to institutionalization. Findings highlight how the successful integration of the performing arts programme enhanced pedagogical efficacy. This research empha­sizes the performing arts’ pivotal role in education, showcasing its potential to drive transformative changes in minority settings.

     

    Visual Essay

    Teachers’ data-based storytelling in a STEAM professional development programme

    Joy G. Bertling
    University of Tennessee

     Amanda Galbraith
    University of Tennessee

    Increasingly, contemporary artists have turned to data as a source of inspiration, artistic medium and site for enquiry, experimentation and discourse in ways that have blurred, complicated and transcended disciplinary boundaries. Research suggests that when arts-based data visualization is integrated into K-12 curric­ula, these approaches can support students’ art learning and creative data litera­cies. Despite the burgeoning interest in literature surrounding the benefits of data visualization for K-12 students, less attention has been directed towards the ways in which teachers can be supported in designing and implementing data-visualization integrated curricula. This visual essay explores a science, technol­ogy, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM), arts-based data visualization professional development programme that was centred on socially and ecologically

    engaged storytelling in the Appalachian region of the United States. Throughout this programme, teachers told stories of relevance to themselves and their commu­nities – a fundamental undertaking for teachers interested in empowering their students as data storytellers.

     

    Articles

    Creative Place-Based Education: Thinking, creating and inhabiting a commonplace with children

    Estella Freire Pérez
    Santiago de Compostela University

    Vicente Blanco
    Santiago de Compostela University

     Salvador Cidrás
    Santiago de Compostela University

    In this article, we advocate for the incorporation of a novel pedagogical approach in educational practice to mitigate the effects of standardized and decontextualized neo-liberal curricula. Conscious knowledge of our physical surroundings ensures a collective sense of belonging, transfers learning through so-called imaginaries of proximity and promotes an arts education sensitive to daily life. This Creative Place-Based Education research incorporates place-based education studies with a creative approach inspired by the design of workshops for children. As artists and teachers in a teacher training faculty, our research primarily focuses on designing workshops and pedagogical materials, which emphasize the importance of incorpo­rating ideas, methods, techniques and processes from the arts as fundamental tools for exploring, analysing and questioning our immediate reality. We exemplify this approach by analysing the proposal Inhabiting a Common Place, which was designed and carried out with different groups in primary and preschool education in L’Alcora, Valencian Community, Spain. 

     

    Self-care for preservice and in-service art educators: A matter of survival in the profession

    Audrey M. Hilligoss
    Bowling Green State University

    This article presents an overview of a case study that uses an arts-based research intervention to support the development of self-care strategies for preservice and in-service art teachers towards improved work-life balance. Three recommenda­tions are provided: (1) the necessity for teachers to individualize practices of self-care; (2) creating communities of care to support the collective design and use of self-care practices and (3) defining boundaries that promote a healthier work-life balance. The author shares reflections on how these recommendations influenced her own pedagogy at the university level, preparing preservice art educators and sustaining the practices of in-service art educators. Assignment prompts, exem­plars of self-care artist trading cards and juggling act visualization artmaking activities are presented as well as a discussion on how to model self-care practices for art educators.

      

    Visual Essay

    Archives, youth and firing up imaginations

    Natasha Doyon
    Concordia University

    This essay offers educator insights from a video project entitled ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’. I use videos, still images and text to suggest pedagogi­cal methods for developing historical empathy among 12–17-year-olds through cross-curricular trans mediation. In what ways can instructors engage students’ imaginations to consider historical artists, art educators and community figures who have impacted our cultural landscape? I suggest a morphing with the archive in artmaking, treating artefacts as living objects with stories to share.

     

    Article

    Using visual journaling in preservice teacher education and arts-based research: Discovering connections and building practice

     Alexa R. Kulinski
    Indiana University Indianapolis

    In this article, I revisit and re-analyse the visual journals that two graduate preser­vice art teachers and I created during my arts-based dissertation study. Through this re-search study, I sought to better understand the connections between how I used my visual journal to enhance my arts-based research process and how my preservice art teachers used their visual journals to enhance their development as future art teachers. Re-analysis of these visual journals revealed a set of three common, productive visual journaling strategies: (1) noticing and document­ing, (2) mapping and (3) discovering a personally relevant practice. Collectively, these strategies demonstrate how visual journaling can support dialogue, creative inquiry and knowledge generation in art education research and art teacher prepa­ration courses.

     

    Book Reviews

    Slow Wonder: Letters on Imagination and Education, Peter O’Connor and Claudia Rozas Gomez (2022), Series: Cambridge Elements in Creativity and Imagination (ed. A. Abraham)
    Reviewed by Kathryn Grushka, Independent Researcher

    A/r/tography: Essential Readings and Conversations, Rita L. Irwin, Alexandra Lasczik, Anita Sinner and Valerie Triggs (eds) (2024)
    Reviewed by Michael Whittington, University of Newcastle, Australia

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 20 No. 2 (2024)

    Editorial

    Ever-embodied arts and education

     Hyunji Kwon

    Editor, University of South Carolina

    As an editor of this journal, I have the pleasure of presenting the editorial for this issue. Introducing the contents, I observe how the concept of embodiment or the connection between the body and the world, is embedded in all the works featured. From authors across the globe, the discourse of an ever-embodied andever-evolving education through art is present, articulated through current practice and future visions of what is yet to come in arts education.

    Articles

    Supporting kindergarten pupils with developmentally appropriate activities through process art: Ghanaian teachers’ practices

    Rita Yeboah University of Ghana

    Bernard Sprehe Godomey Technical University

    This study focused on how kindergarten teachers engage pupils in developmen­tal art activities in Dodowa in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. A case study design was used to collect data through interviews and observations. A purpo­sive sampling technique was used to select eighteen teachers from the nine basic schools in Dodowa. While some of the kindergarten teachers had an understanding of process and product art, others were unfamiliar with these concepts. Product art is typically utilized by teachers to engage pupils in art activities, although this approach may deprive the pupils of the benefits of other developmentally appropriate art activities. Alternatively, process art helps the learners to construct their own knowledge, fosters self-confidence and creativity, and improves visual communication, problem-solving and decision-making skills.

     

    Children’s artistic expressions inspired by nature during early childhood garden pedagogy

     Inkeri Ruokonen University of Turku

     Jaana Lepistö University of Turku

    The aim of this case study was to investigate how children learn about gardens and gardening through art; how they express their thoughts through visual expres­sions and stories. The research data include eleven drawings and stories from chil­dren about nature and gardening and were collected during the summer of 2021 in Finland’s only campus garden for teacher education. Additionally, six teachers were interviewed about their experiences with garden pedagogy. The data were analysed using descriptive thematic analysis. The findings include: the natural garden environment supports children’s creative thinking as expressed visually and verbally; children learn a great deal about nature and gardening and outdoor pedagogy in gardens can be integrated with play, excursions, imaginary thinking and knowledge related to natural environments. The positive findings underscore the imperative to implement arts-based garden pedagogy in Finland, which has diminished greatly in recent years.

     

    Visual Essay

    Photographic practice as a mode of non-representational self-world engagement

    Wanfei Huang Chongqing Normal University

    This visual essay presents my journey of coming to experience and conceive photography through the lens of non-representational theory. In the light of non-representational notions of landscape and embodiment, photography is more than an aesthetic and representative medium of one’s outer and inner seeing of the world. Rather, photographic practice can be ‘a perceiving-with’, that with which the new camera-I (eye) sees, and the expressive photograph becomes embodiment as body a-where-ness. This journey of photographic artmaking and conceptual speculation has taught me to live photography as a set of creative tensions between self, camera and the world instead of merely using photography to express and represent one’s life. 

     

     Articles

     Art activities for staff in healthcare institutions

     Niina Oinas University of Lapland  

     Maria Huhmarniemi University of Lapland  

    Arts and arts-based methods are increasingly used in professional development. This study involved two artists facilitating art activities for 21 staff members from three care institutions in Finland: a nursing home, a day-care centre for individu­als with dementia and an organization that supports individuals facing challeng­ing life situations (e.g. unemployment or the need to relearn everyday skills). The primary objective was to enhance work satisfaction and well-being among staff members. Initially, the staff members displayed scepticism towards art activities, but their attitudes became more positive as they engaged in the artistic process. Interviews revealed that the activities positively impacted group spirit, improved individual well-being and inspired the staff to explore new methods in their profes­sional roles. Many participants suggested that art activities could be structured into regular work supervision sessions in their workplaces. The findings highlight the importance of further investigating the benefits of having artists and artistic activities within care organizations.

     

     Initial teacher education as a dialogic space for agile art curriculum design

     Will Grant University of the West of England

     Amelia Kidwell Green House Education Project

    In this article we draw on our positionality as teacher educator and student teacher to reflect on initial art teacher education as a forum for novel disciplinary curricu­lum design. We describe how, without new system thinking, much taught school art curriculum may remain conceptually esoteric, or cumulatively dysfluent, and therefore increasingly vulnerable to new measures of accountability. We review the English context and consider the discrete challenges curriculum designers face in this national policy landscape. In response to our findings, we propose a locus for curricular development that might satisfy expectations of external auditors, but more excitingly, connect school art to authentic artistic practices. Here, student art teachers are promoted to key stakeholder in the development of new materials, rather than positioned as inheritors of habit. We defend this proposition by high­lighting three potentially beneficial characteristics student teachers can contrib­ute to curriculum design: disciplinary relevance, objective criticality and latent agency.

     

    Visual Essay

    The tyro’s perspective: Art and science as an auto-didactic project

    Isabel Crabtree Parker Lancaster University

    The voice of the student reflecting on the processes of auto-didactic experimenta­tion is little heard, yet their perspective provides insights into the interdiscipli­nary contexts that inform and constitute diverse art disciplines. The artworks and discussion offered in this visual essay were inspired by the photographic archives of the European Space Agency, focusing on Mars and Lunar imagery. The inten­tion is to offer a feminist critique of neo-colonialist explorations of deep space and to project subtle visual messages in public space regarding the gendering of art. This visual essay conveys the need for closer engagement of formal art education with interdisciplinary knowledge, specifically science. Here, the esoteric and tech­nical language of the earth sciences is enriched by the alternative meaning-making practices of visual art.

     

    Article

    Hopes, dreams and regrets: Exploring the power of metaphoric imagery
    Hsiao-ping Chen Grand Valley State University

     This study outlines a new approach to engaging students in artmaking within an undergraduate classroom by employing metaphors as artmaking strategies. Mark Ryden’s painting, The Apology, was used to teach preservice PK-6 educa­tion students how to derive meaning from art. Strategies of exploring students’ hopes, dreams and regrets indicate the importance of curriculum design focusing on students’ lived experiences and their social world. The study also offers exam­ples of questions, creative inquiry and artmaking strategies that can be effectively integrated into students’ artmaking to foster deeper understanding and enhance conceptual thinking. Stories of students’ metaphoric images demonstrate how metaphor and imagery can be powerful tools for self-reflection and discovery as well as how teachers can develop art activities for and with students while empow­ering them to create a sense of self through art.

     

    Visual Essay

    Visual essay of the performance El peso del pensamiento

     María Vidagañ Universitat Jaume I

     Amparo Alonso-Sanz Universitat de València 

    Since the 1960s, performance has been one of the leading practices of feminist artists. This photo essay introduces our performance entitled El peso del pensam­iento (2020–22). It denounces the cultural and symbolic violence suffered by women in academic environments through the legitimization and dissemination of gender-biased scientific and literary publications. The performance took place in 26 libraries at three public universities in the Autonomous Community of Valencia (Spain), namely ten libraries at the University of Valencia (UV), five at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), and eleven libraries at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH). Within the context analysed, we conclude that the weight of academic thought is decidedly masculine.


    Article

    The Jarring Affects of Participatory Practice: A more-than-human reappraisal of the Linnentown Mosaic Project (LMP)

    Lynn Sanders-Bustle University of Georgia

     Using affect theory as a guiding theoretical frame, in this article a university artist/educator explores how participation in a socially engaged public art project might be rethought through jarring. Jarring refers to the use of jars as an artistic material and metaphor for participation which led to an installation titled, The Jarring Affects of Participatory Practice. Comprising 150 glass jars, the instal­lation served as an iterative reappraisal of participatory art through the creation of a material register of natural, manufactured and handcrafted items, loosely and directly related to the Linnentown Mosaic Project (LMP). The LMP was a community-led effort to create a permanent tile and mirror mosaic honouring Linnentown, a once-thriving Black community erased through urban renewal by the University of Georgia and the city of Athens during the 1960s. Jarring as a form of research-creation reveals moments of resonance that in their precarity suggest new ways for thinking about participating as ever-changing iterations for undoing, waiting and feeling forth

     
    Book Reviews

    De-/Anti-/Post-Colonial Feminisms in Contemporary Art and Textile Crafts, Katy Deepwell (ed.) (2023)

    Reviewed by Shelley Hannigan, Deakin University, Australia

    Inside Hong Kong’s Arts and Cultural Scene: Conversations with Hong Kong’s Leading Arts and Cultural Administrators, Educators, Producers, and Presenters, Patrick Lo, Rebekah Okpoti, Wei-En Hsu, Hermina G. B. Anghelescu and Dickson K. W. Chiu (2023)

    Reviewed by Yichang Liu, University of Newcastle, Australia

    The Cancer Plot: Terminal Mortality in Marvel’s Moral Universe, Reginald Wiebe And Dorothy Woodman (2023)

    Reviewed by Hana Tiro, Independent Scholar

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 19 No. 3 (2023)

     

    Editorial

    Re-worlding

    Rébecca Bourgault, Editor, Boston University

    Tara Winters, Principal Editor, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau

    Articles

    The cutting edge in Ghanaian contemporary ceramics

    Samuel Nortey, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

    This article discusses Ghanaian ceramic art and the critical interventions that are driving an emerging contemporary ceramic practice. Over the last decade (2011– 22), Ghanaian ceramic art appears to have had a stagnant traditional practice and has struggled to be seen, heard and valued within local and global contemporary art discourse. Reviews and reforms of art education in college and tertiary curricu­lum have provided critical interventions to address this situation. Discussing the works of Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng, Eugene Ofori Agyei, Frederick Ebenezer Okai, Alex Awuku and other artists, this article reveals how young Ghanaian contem­porary ceramic artists are navigating a path to creating new artistic identities and pushing the boundaries of conventional Ghanaian ceramics. These developments also point to the meaningful expansion of ceramics in contemporary art education more generally.

     

    Considering the arts in school assessment in the United States: An investigation of engagement and hope

    Tracey Hunter-Doniger, College of Charleston

    Kim Wilson, Winthrop University

    Arts education advocacy in the United States often relies on arts education research for its arguments, yet significant policy changes supporting arts educa­tion are inconsistent from state to state. This article highlights the investigation of a US Gallup Student Poll on South Carolina arts-rich schools. More specifically, the study focuses on how states determine a school’s effectiveness and can be held accountable for the ideals of a whole-child education instead of using the narrow lens of test scores. The authors delve into two poll categories that had significance for these schools. Engagement and hope stood out as convincing measures for the arts. The data presented in this article provide a persuasive argument for how the arts can account for school effectiveness. Although the project is closely related to schools in the United States, it is presumed that results from this study are rele­vant for colleagues in other countries as well, where similar accountability meas­ures prevail.

     

    Visual Essay

    Youth4Sea and marine debris: An arts-based, site-specific, youth-framed inquiry

    Alexandra Lasczik, Southern Cross University

    Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Southern Cross University

    Marie-Laurence Paquette, Southern Cross University

    Antonia Canosa, Southern Cross University

    Marianne Logan, Southern Cross University

    This arts-based project engaged youth (between 18 and 24 years of age) living in Byron Bay to co-design an inquiry addressing the increased pollution created during the period of Schoolies. Through a youth-framed participatory research design, the project team engaged local youth in researching young people’s marine pollution understandings, attitudes and behaviours. It then supported their ideas as they created, instigated and assessed an intervention campaign, targeted at Schoolies tourists, to reduce the amount of beach litter (Cutter-Mackenzie- Knowles et al. 2018). The young people conducted video interviews with their peers, created visual diaries, took photographs, and designed and implemented an intervention plan. Seeking a feasible action and realizing the enormity of the issue of marine pollution, they decided to target the beach as a specific site for intervention, and in particular, the issue of cigarette butt litter. The young people then engaged in a suite of arts-based analyses, including photographs of the inter­vention in-process, a documentary film, visual diaries (Lasczik Cutcher 2019) and a collaborative, large-scale canvas painting (Cutcher and Rousell 2014; Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin 2017) as an analytical riposte.

     

    Articles

    Crafting visual autoethnography to develop preservice art teachers’ reflexivity and teaching philosophies

    Ting Fang (Claire) Chien, Colorado State University

    In this article the author presents examples of visual autoethnographic journals that were part of an assignment she developed to foster preservice art teachers’ reflexivity and support the development of their teaching philosophies. This study analyses two preservice art teachers’ visual autoethnographic journals and reports on interviews conducted during the participants’ student teaching programme and post-graduation. The findings indicate that (1) teacher identities were formed by their past personal experiences, (2) past personal experiences influenced their teaching philosophies, (3) making art helped to synthesize ideas for future teach­ing and (4) developing reflexivity and clarifying teaching philosophies influenced future teaching. The results support an arts-based autoethnographic approach as a valuable method to foster preservice teachers’ reflexivity and the building of teach­ing philosophies.

     

    Artistic pedagogies in an emergency: Perspectives from nine visual arts teachers in the north, centre and south of Chile

    Alejandra Orbeta-Green, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

    Marcela Doren-Tello, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

    Claudia Sanhueza-Vega, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

    Due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21, schools in Chile suspended face-to-face activities. This led to an ‘educational emergency’, generating proposals for what some authors have called Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). This arti­cle describes the teaching experiences of nine visual arts teachers from north­ern, central and southern Chile, who implemented their pedagogical proposals by dispensing with the workshops and materials commonly used in visual arts classes. The study examined the processes of uncertainty experienced by the teach­ers by collecting and analysing ‘in situ’ accounts and arguments using a quali­tative approach. The main results indicate that the teachers showed agency and a great capacity to be flexible in response to changing scenarios. It can also be observed that ERT emphasizes the ambivalent position of visual arts as a subject in schools and demonstrates the difficulty that some students experience accessing and using certain technologies, questioning the belief that they are ‘digital natives’.

     

    Visual Essay

    The panoramic portrait: Educational strategies to create a distorted self-portrait Alicia Arias-Camisón Coello, University of Granada

    Rafaèle Genet Verney, University of Granada

    In art education, students reflect on and explore their identity. In the course ‘Plastic Arts Education’, required for a Primary Education degree at the University of Granada, Spain, students create a panoramic photographic self-portrait to engage in an exploration of self. The main purpose of this visual strategy is to experiment with visual identity using the self as creative subject and resource. Through the creation of these panoramic self-portraits, art education majors work creatively with different images to develop their visual identities and become conscious of constructing a self-image that will be projected on social media. This arts-based research approach allows students to be inspired by artists and discover visual and conceptual resonances between images.

     

    Article

    Co-creating digital art with generative AI in K-9 education: Socio-material insights Henriikka Vartiainen, University of Eastern Finland

    Matti Tedre, University of Eastern Finland

    Ilkka Jormanainen, University of Eastern Finland

    In this article, I revisit an art student-teacher observation in an elementary school in which I encountered unsettling approaches to discipline practices. Using process philosophy as a theoretical guide, I describe my arts-based inquiry into what transpired in the school that day as events that were produced in a field of relations. Sensing that there was something I was not initially able to recognize about the field of relations from which the events were catalysed, I pursued an alternate tracing

    of the events as juxtaposed with texts relevant to the history of schooling in the United States. This process brought to the fore the role of Whiteness – past and present – in the disciplinary norms around which schooling in the United States is centred. I further explore the role of Whiteness in the disciplining of bodies, sounds, affects and emotions in schools – all of which affect students’ and teachers’ ways of being in art classrooms.

     

    Book Reviews

     Researching the Teaching of Drawing, Raymond M. Klein (2022)

    Reviewed by David LeRue, Concordia University, Canada

    Art Therapy with Special Education Students, Dafna Regev (2023)

    Reviewed by Tess Rendoth, University of Newcastle, Australia

     

    Exhibition Review

    The Art of Curated Research, curated by visual art staff at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University

    Reviewed by Rebecca Heaton, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 19 No. 2 (2023)

    IJETA 19.2 Table of Contents

    Editorial

    Stewardship

    Tara Winters, University of Auckland

    This issue’s editorial is from our new principal editor, Tara Winters. She articulates her understanding of the role and responsibility of being an editor through the lens of stewardship. The contents of the issue are introduced, observing how the ethic of stewardship is present in every article from connections between art and ecology to sustaining a future for art education discourse through critical reflection and re-imagining research processes. 

    Articles

    Benefits, outcomes and challenges of teaching contemporary art in Wisconsin K-12 art classrooms

    Jaehan Bae, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

    This study looks at the lived experiences of Wisconsin K-12 art teachers who teach contemporary art. While research suggests that student learning is enhanced by meaningful instruction in contemporary art, more knowledge is needed to inform art education theory and practice. The study methodology was grounded in descriptive phenomenology and data included surveys, one-on-one interviews and focus group interviews, which were analysed using thematic analysis. Reported benefits of teaching contemporary art included enhanced relevance and increased student excitement and engagement. Other outcomes included the development of novel pedagogies by teachers and the increased visibility of art programmes in school and community. Challenges for teachers included the need to supplement material- and product-based lessons, the complexity of addressing controversial issues and the increased preparation time required to create original contemporary art units. Potential limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are provided. 

    How Ghanaian secondary visual arts teachers perceive the role of creativity in their teaching

    Enock Swanzy-Impraim, Edith Cowan University

    Julia E. Morris, Edith Cowan University

    Geoffrey W. Lummis, Edith Cowan University

    Andrew Jones, Edith Cowan University

    Globally, creativity is viewed as a twenty-first-century education competency that is acknowledged by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Ghanaian Ministry of Education (MOE) pre-tertiary curriculum framework. Ghanaian teachers are required to inspire, teach and develop creativity in secondary visual arts students using a social constructivist pedagogy. This necessitates exploring how teachers value creativity and its role in learning. The article investigated sixteen Ghanaian secondary visual arts teachers’ perceived role of creativity in their teaching and the challenges they faced developing creativity in students, using a qualitative case study approach. Interviews and participant observations were used to gather data across eight secondary schools. Interviews with teachers produced insights into how they are enacting creativity through pedagogy and the challenges they currently face, including attitudinal, administrative, resource deficits and external factors. Implications for policy and practice in Ghanaian secondary education that benefit the Ghana Education Service (GES) are discussed.

    In lieu of flowers: An a/r/tographic journey of apology and forgiveness

    Nancy Long, Concordia University

    This research-creation project explored the tension and evolving relationship between the author and the public memorial to the victims of the Montreal massacre, a space she had been avoiding for over twenty years. The victims were fourteen women, who, in 1989, were gunned down at their university in Montreal in a violent act of misogyny. A public green space, the Place du 6-décembre-1989, was inaugurated on the tenth anniversary of the shooting and houses a monument titled, Nef pour quatorze reines. The project stemmed directly from the author’s first-time visit. The creative process enabled a conversation with matter, allowing the author to reconcile her unsettling relationship with the site and its memorial. Discomfort and vulnerability evolved into an emergent pedagogical story, and an apology in the form of tracings, or visual letters, as peace offerings to each of the fourteen women and as an act of self-forgiveness. 

     

    Visual Essay

    The art of wildflower walks: Understanding place through creative practice

    Marni Stuart, RMIT University

    Susan Davis, Central Queensland University

    Art and design processes and practices can inform and stimulate knowledge building in powerful ways. Artist/designer Marni Stuart and artist/curator Susan Davis have employed creative practice to inform their own seeing and knowing of the natural spaces that surround them in South East Queensland, Australia. Through art and design practice they seek to share ways for others to ‘see’, appreciate and value these natural habitats and wildflower heritage.

     

    Articles

    Open design pedagogy: Revealing openness in early childhood education with digital technology

    Jaana Brinck, Aalto University

    Teemu Leinonen, Aalto University

    Lasse Lipponen, University of Helsinki

    Mira Kallio-Tavin, University of Georgia

    Today, more than any other period in time, digital fluency is regarded as a necessary life skill for both children and adults. The potential of digital tools in early childhood learning has been recognized as helping to reinforce academic skills, as a way to communicate ideas and develop social skills, to support children to learn at their own pace, to learn how to learn and to make learning fun. This article contributes to the current research by conducting a participatory study in a kindergarten in Finland over the course of one year. The empirical data are analysed to (1) identify the characteristics of educational activities that make use of digital technology in early childhood education and (2) reveal the pedagogical approaches behind these activities. The findings of this study show that pedagogical activities entailing playful interaction with technology and the production of tangible artefacts, accompanied by visual documentation and reflection, support the effective use of technology in early childhood education. The educators’ open approach towards the use of technology also played a significant part in the positive outcomes experienced by teachers and students. We call this approach open design pedagogy and propose it as a model for using digital technologies in early childhood education.

    Strange pedagogy: An artist-led educational model

    Joshua I. Graham, University of Utah

    This article highlights a series of artworks that reflect my approach to art education. Housed in an abandoned storefront-turned-gallery in Salt Lake City, the work was part of a project titled ‘The Wandering Art Center: From Lower Manhattan to the Colorado Plateau’. In my role as both artist and educator, I discuss how my art practice is the inspiration behind my teaching and how my teaching informs my art. This dialectic exchange includes the ecological, or more-than-human, members of my cultural ecology. The article maps this exchange as it explores the practice of walking, as both an artistic methodology and an educational strategy.

    Art, education and the actuality of revolution: Althusser’s aesthetic materialism

    Derek R. Ford, DePauw University

    This article contributes to research on materialism, art and education by introducing the aesthetic, political and pedagogical theories of Louis Althusser. It begins by situating the argument within the contemporary conjuncture of the global class struggle, particularly in the West, which is defined by an ideological break with the Marxist tradition in which the actuality of revolution is denied. Such a conjuncture demands not only scientific critique and persuasion but also, more importantly, an aesthetic experience in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of society. Analysing Althusser’s writings on aesthetics and politics and applying this analysis to Althusser’s own writing, it develops a theory of an aesthetic pedagogical encounter through which we can experience the actuality of revolution and the materiality of thought itself.

    Visual Essay

    (Extra)ordinary artistic and poetic responses to COVID lockdown (2020–21)

    Geraldine Burke, Monash University 

    Miriam Potts, Independent Artist-Researcher

    This essay is about the making of a visual essay as a response to the conditions of COVID lockdown (2020–21). It explores how two artists worked together and apart to develop inquiries through making and sharing art and text. We worked apart to produce artworks and together to construct the visual essay. Applying a duoethnographic method we created this visual essay to reveal our making processes within the limitations of COVID lockdown.
     

    Book Reviews

    Contemporary Art from Cyprus: Politics, Identities, and Cultures across Borders, Elena Stylianou, Evanthia Tselika and Gabriel Koureas (eds) (2021)

    Reviewed by Tereza Markidou, European University of Cyprus

    Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy and Purpose, Tim Doud and Zoe Charlton (eds) (2021)

    Reviewed by Rebecca Miles-Keogh, La Trobe University

     

    Published: 2023-06-27

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 19 No. 1 (2023)

    IJETA 19.1 Table of Contents

    Editorial

    Art, sustainability and partnerships

    Victoria Pavlou, Frederick University

    Raphael Vella, University of Malta

     Viewing sustainability as a process rather than a goal places artists, designers and art educators in a key position to contribute to sustainability. Following Anthony Giddens’s theories of structuration and socialization, we can see that established values, world-views, structures, rules and norms influence human behaviour. However, as individuals begin to recognize the potential of reflexivity and ask themselves how change is possible, they learn to modify their behaviour. Art education needs to promote reflexivity in order to contribute to a sustainable process of change. Artistic practices and art education stress the value of shaping the self and our relations with others, and can lead learners to transcend common boundaries through creative thinking and imagining alternative realities. Partnerships forged by art educators amongst themselves and with other  stakeholders can create new spaces of experience and empower individuals to achieve change. This Special Issue explores how art educators, activists and artists engage with processes of educational, cultural and political change and embrace sustainability inside and outside school.

     

    Articles

    Art activism: Art of dissent

    Mary Grace Vella, University of Malta

     Moviment Graffitti has, for the last 25 years, been active against the oppression and exploitation of people, animals and the environment with a vision of freedom, justice and radical democracy. Traversing different media, genres and styles, Moviment Graffitti has a dynamic, symbiotic and powerful relationship with art. This article will look at Graffitti’s passionate use of art as a pedagogical tool to create awareness and bring forth social change through the aesthetics of activism and the art of dissent. It explores the role, meaning and paradox of political art through the movement’s artistic sub-groups and the main artistic initiatives embarked upon. Deliberately eschewing the elitism of the art establishment, the commodification of education and culture and depoliticized notions of sustainability and development through art edu/activism (eduvism), Graffitti reappropriates art to agitate educators in revolutionary pedagogy to become pivotal actors in the promotion of progressive social change.

     

    Cultural engagement as a learning environment in the artistic encounter zone

    Rolf Laven, University College of Teacher Education Vienna

    In the middle of Vienna between the locations of a sculptor’s studio and an educational campus Spalowskygasse (‘Bildungsgrätzl Mariahilf’), an artistic encounter zone is being created through the participation of artists, schools and neighbourhood residents. This artistic intervention employs service-learning and engaged learning approaches. Based on cultural heritage and local history, plans for using various found materials and employing processes of recycling and upcycling have been developed. Such an artistic encounter zone initiates a public creative discourse. It aims to expand the circle of participants beyond already established knowledge alliances to create new synergies. The concept provides for broad participation from art and cultural institutions, schools, universities and social institutions. Participants are invited to take the initiative in community learning activities. This article reports on the initial phase of this service-learning project where workshops have already been conducted.

     

    Analysing eco-art installations for their value in affecting change

    Carmela Cucuzzella, Concordia University

    A distinctive form of environmentally driven art and design practice has emerged in urban contexts over the last few decades. This practice has developed a unique discourse aiming to inform and rally the public to action. The global eco-didactic direction of this artwork not only demonstrates an alignment with pressing ecological issues but is driven by an urgent need to explain unsustainable anthropocentric practices. Adopting the public realm as an audience is key for these works, since this enables human encounters with the issues collectively, contributing to the potential of ‘public space as a political forum’. This article poses the question ‘are these works a means of revealing the Anthropocene?’ A series of art and design installations are examined along with a discussion of the what these works aim to accomplish and how this can be achieved.

     

    Visual Essay

    Building, becoming, believing: Participatory land art for empathy and meliorism

    Nina Luostarinen, University of Lapland

     In this participatory land art workshop, nature was used as a play material to represent the motif of metamorphosis while participants role-played herrings for empathy. The aim was to shift the perspective from our materials – which are agentic in co-constituting conditions evocative of empathy – to observing the outcome from a bird’s-eye view. The workshop sought to demonstrate the power of collaboration, by presenting an allegory of the collaboration of herd species such as herrings. Alone they/we are nothing but, with determination and a clear goal, we can create visible change in the environment and in emotions and attitudes like environmental empathy. Earlier research and this case demonstrate how ecological paradigms can be stimulated with the use of place-based art.

     

    Article

    The Medium Is the Environment: Digital materialism, climate crisis and digital art as pedagogy

    Kevin T. Day, University of British Columbia

    This article examines the environmental implications of ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICT) manufacturing, operations and usage, using the theories of new materialism and digital materialism, and offers an interactive video installation as a case study for contemporary digital art’s pedagogical potential in response to such environmental issues. Contrary to the imageries of the cloud and the notion of immateriality as promoted by the tech industry, digital media systems are grounded in the material world and operate at the expense of the material substrate. Such a sociopolitical landscape warrants an exploration of potential counter tactics in the fields of digital art and art education. Being informed by digital materialism and hinged on the notion that encounters with contemporary art can cultivate critical and different ways of knowing, this article proposes that a focus on the material can function as an antithesis to the abstracting act of information/data and its purported immateriality.

     

    Visual Essay

    An interdisciplinary action for caring for the biodiversity of the Canary Islands through arts-based explorations

    Noemí Peña-Sánchez, Universidad de La Laguna

    Ascensión Camero-Arranz, Universidad de La Laguna

    This visual essay is a reflective interdisciplinary encounter between three undergraduate students in a Bachelor of Elementary Education participating in a final year degree project narrated by two educators, one from art education and the other from science education. It applies a situated art intervention to sensory land walking methodologies to raise awareness about the loss of biodiversity in the Canary Islands. Walking as a pedagogical inquiry method supports the humanities in the post-human era for a new relationship between science and art. Art connects to science through the facilitation of sensate and kinaesthetic experiences that interweave the knowledge and methodologies of the educators, connecting lived experiences and memories of all participants in reshaping our teaching and learning culture. Our interdisciplinary approach broadens the perspectives of future educators towards an artistic practice engaged with nature, building civic commitment that pursues a holistic vision of a sustainable education that begins with the care of our immediate environment.

     

    Articles

    Visualizing climate change: Here we come to save the day!

    Cathy Smilan, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

    Art educators teach visual literacy, criticism, multiple art media and technical skills representing many pupils’ only exposure to visual communication in school. Given curricular flexibility, art teachers redesign lessons to include important conceptual learning to accommodate department of education guidance addressing potentially controversial issues. Authentic art-integrative approaches provide opportunities for students and communities to interrogate serious issues like global warming and the impact of anthropogenic climate change. While not all teachers embrace this and other difficult conceptual learning, professional development and a supportive community of stakeholders are key for those who do. The following article presents a theoretical framework supporting a unit on an art-based inquiry into environmental justice from a recent course on social justice art education. Graduate student artist inspirations, art exemplars and learning activities are shared to inspire others towards art actionism.

     

    Art education through the sustainable design of learning spaces

    Ana María Marqués Ibáñez, Universidad de La Laguna

    Art education is a valuable tool for achieving quality education by fostering creativity and an appreciation of learning and culture. Well-designed learning spaces are conducive to art learning. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the author to review the design of learning spaces employed in previous pandemics and other outdoor learning spaces developed over time. A project was carried out at the university level with future secondary school art teachers to design a sustainable art learning space as a multidisciplinary exercise, combining art, architecture and design. Solutions were analysed across multiple criteria. The results demonstrate the suitability of the proposed activity to promote critical creativity among students in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This type of project in art education is essential for academics and educators so that they become involved in sustainability issues so present in contemporary life.

     

    Exhibition Reviews

    Documenta fifteen: The 15th edition of Documenta, curated by the ‘ruangrupa’ collective

    Reviewed by Costas Mantzalos, Frederick University, Cyprus

     Synergy: Art into Fashion, Kika Ioannidou and Maria Neoptolemou, curated by Filep Motwary

    Reviewed by Victoria Pavlou, Frederick University, Cyprus

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 18 No. 3 (2022)

    IJETA 18.3 Table of Contents

     

    Editorial

    Hopeful art education

    Nadine M. Kalin, Principal Editor, University of North Texas

    Mira Kallio-Tavin, Editor, University of Georgia

    Sheri R. Klein, Editor, Kent State University

    Alexandra Lasczik, Editor, Southern Cross University

     

    Articles

     

    Body mapping as embodiment and witnessing and its implications for art education

    Hyunji Kwon, University of South Carolina

     

    Body mapping refers to the process of representing a person’s lived experience and sociocultural contexts by creating a visualization of the person’s body, with accompanying texts and symbols. Despite the history of disembodiment in the western context, the wide use of body mapping as a visual methodology in various fields attests to the potential of body mapping in promoting embodiment and witnessing. By analysing three body maps that were created at three distinct teaching sites in community-based and preservice art education settings, I examine how body mapping can evoke embodied witnessing and explore its implication for art education.

     

    Exploring online art education: Multi-institutional perspectives and practices

    Borim Song, East Carolina University

    Kyungeun Lim, Kennesaw State University

     

    How can art educators transmit their passion and enthusiasm for art teaching and learning to cultivate human potential in the virtual classroom? As a collective case study focusing on our online undergraduate courses, this research examines how two instructors used instructional methods and technologies, and how their students responded to their pedagogical endeavours. Qualitative content analysis was utilized. Virtual art classes can encourage students to look into themselves and become more aware of themselves. Communicating and feeling connected to others are critical for students in online settings. As demonstrated in our course design, connectivity between students and instructors can be facilitated through a multilayered structure, providing for more efficient communication. This study also found blurred boundaries between real and virtual learning environments.

    When we facilitate fluidity and conceptual flexibility as online art educators, digital technologies may expand our thinking and expression frameworks.

     

    Visual Essay

     

    The tower of experience: The integral ascent of arts knowing

    Marta Kawka, Griffith University

     

    In this visual essay, I render my journey up the Tower of Experience. The tower has four levels – physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual – and each level expresses a different way of knowing and experiencing. These levels express a deep and broad interpretation of reality, and thus a way through which to understand artistic experience and inquiry. The tower illustrates perennialism’s hierarchical stages of ascent towards wholeness of Being, which inspire me to create integral and holistic arts learning experiences for my visual arts education students. The purpose of this essay was to visualize my felt-sense of the tower and connect this to my teaching concerns. In subsequent investigations, I will analyse the symbolism and phenomenological response to the tower artworks.

     

    Articles

     

    Educational approaches within US art teacher education: The status of ecological and environmental education

    Joy G. Bertling, University of Tennessee

    Tara C. Moore, University of Tennessee

     

    Over the preceding half century, ecological and environmental art pedagogies have been put forth within the field of art education. In this study, we sought to understand their contemporary emphasis in US art teacher education and how that emphasis compares with other educational approaches. Through surveying art teacher educators and pre-service art teachers, we found the emphasis of ecological/environmental art education was the lowest of the educational approaches surveyed. In contrast, multicultural education, visual culture and social justice were some of the highest-ranked approaches. The gap in emphasis, between these approaches and ecological/environmental education, represents an opportunity to draw attention to their shared characteristics. We recommend art teacher education adopt an ecofeminist orientation to facilitate its transition towards intersectionality in pedagogy, so it can effectively prepare pre-service teachers to engage with social, cultural and ecological content and issues through art curriculum and pedagogy.

     

     

    The stool that became a tree: Reflecting on a collaborative student project in design education

    Vibeke Sjøvoll, Oslo Metropolitan University

     

    Which possibilities are there for cultivating critical, creative, artistic and ethical thinking in collaboration with a major corporation in a student project? The project explored in this article involved first-year students enrolled in a BA product design course at the Oslo Metropolitan University. The research approach combined methods such as practice-led research with students, photo-elicitation interviews, autoethnographic writing and reflections. The article attends to potentials and failures in critical, creative and artistic practices that aim to challenge problematic modes of production in society today. The project initially set out to explore critical modes of creativity and making practices that are different from commercial design. However, the same project was embraced by Ikea, who both sponsored it and exhibited the final results. This embrace may have the effect of zeroing out, countering or incorporating attempts to be critical towards commercial design.

     

    Expressive portraiture as research: Exploration, ideation and discovery

    Linda Helmick, University of Missouri

     

    Expressive portraiture, as a form of arts-based research, is an emerging methodology that complements traditional approaches to qualitative inquiry. Marrying phenomenological methodology to arts practice, the artist-as-researcher can explore meanings that are often taken for granted. Expressive portraits facilitate the researcher’s reflections on participants’ experiences, allowing the development of complex ideas and feelings. The portraits became my entry point to understanding participants’ lived experience and offered an avenue to explore and deepen our relationships.  However, one participant and I unexpectedly diverged in our interpretations, a vulnerable experience for us both. In my quest to deeply understand the experiences of my participants, I found that I had to release my own preconceived notions. The arts-based method of expressive portraiture made visible my interpretation, that altered my conceptions of qualitative research, and who I am as an artist/researcher/teacher.

     

     

    Visual Essay

     

    Reconciliation with the pain through embracing the past: Message of hope and resilience via the Ugaritic alphabet

    Hala Georges, University of Northampton

     

    After witnessing my home country suffering through a vicious civil war, this inquiry initially intended to represent Syria in a positive light, as a place of civilization, differently to what we have been constantly seeing in the news in recent years. However, the research led me to more meaningful discoveries. With the help of Syrian participants, I discovered not only a way to promote the country as a place of peace and prosperity, but also a way to invite the viewer to reconcile with grief and adversity they have experienced by embracing the word ‘hope’. In this visual essay, I share an  invitation to reconcile with one’s self, past and hardship through the Ugaritic alphabet.

     

    Article

     

    An alternate tracing as artsbased inquiry: Recognizing past-present trajectories of schooling and Whiteness in an art student-teacher observation

    Christina Hanawalt, University of Georgia

     

    In this article, I revisit an art student-teacher observation in an elementary school in which I encountered unsettling approaches to discipline practices. Using process philosophy as a theoretical guide, I describe my arts-based inquiry into what transpired in the school that day as events that were produced in a field of relations. Sensing that there was something I was not initially able to recognize about the field of relations from which the events were catalysed, I pursued an alternate tracing of the events as juxtaposed with texts relevant to the history of schooling in the United States. This process brought to the fore the role of Whiteness – past and present – in the disciplinary norms around which schooling in the United States is centred. I further explore the role of Whiteness in the disciplining of bodies, sounds, affects and emotions in schools – all of which affect students’ and teachers’ ways of being in art classrooms.

     

     

    Website Review

     

    Art as Inquiry: https://www.artasinquiry.art

    Reviewed by Cindy T. Davis, University of North Texas, USA

     

    Book Reviews

    Popular Pleasures: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture, Paul Duncum (2021)

    Reviewed by Mary Stokrocki, Arizona State University, USA

     

    Making Artists, Melissa Purtee And Ian Sands (2021)

    Reviewed by Brooke Brei, Ponder ISD, USA

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 18 No. 2 (2022)

    IJETA 18.2 Table of Contents

     

     

    Editorial

     

    Vulnerable art education

    Nadine M. Kalin, Principal Editor, University of North Texas

    Mira Kallio-Tavin, Editor, University of Georgia

    Sheri R. Klein, Editor, Kent State University

    Alexandra Lasczik, Editor, Southern Cross University

     

    Articles

     

    Exploring empathy performativity in students’ video artworks

    Rachel Sinquefield-Kangas, University of Helsinki

    Antti Rajala, University of Oulu and University of Helsinki

    Kristiina Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki and Simon Fraser University

     

    This article examines events of empathy as they occur during artmaking using the lens of agential realism. We do this to trouble more traditional psychological constructs of empathy and, instead, rethink it as performative and relational. Drawing on new materialisms and Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we do not treat artmaking, young people and empathy in any hierarchy but want to understand how these come together as ‘things-in-phenomena’. Written recountings of a video artwork are used in mapping the entanglements of cats and dogs with three Finnish high-school girls as they answer the question ‘what is empathy?’.

    The study shows how objects/materials/matter(s) are agentic in co-constituting conditions invocative of empathy phenomena during artmaking. We conclude by suggesting that an agential realist account of art and empathy calls for art educators to pay close attention to objects/materials/matter(s) in their heterogenous connections.

     

    Meme layers in the times of pandemic

    Helena Sederholm, Aalto University

    Riikka Haapalainen, Aalto University

    Tiina Pusa, Aalto University

     

    During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, art teachers put remote teaching in Finnish comprehensive schools into operation in varying ways. One popular implementation was classical art memes, an assignment that art teachers shared through professional networks in social media. This phenomenon brought out the question: what kind of meanings did art history-related memes construct during the pandemic in Finland? The authors collected and analysed empirical data that consisted of a questionnaire for art teachers (N = 14), students’ meme works (N = 45) sent to the authors by the teachers, and assignments that were given. The research approach was critical inquiry. The main components of the theoretical framework were meme theories and crisis pedagogy, with which the authors confronted the national curriculum. Although Finland has not been among the most afflicted countries by the pandemic, the sudden flip to remote teaching created anxiety and a sense of crisis among teachers, who tried to find a balance between their own workload, students’ confusion with the new learning situation and the demands of the curriculum. The analysis concentrated on four themes: the COVID-19 crisis in meme manifestations, teaching art history, art education through making and art education as copying and repeating. The authors concluded that it is crucial to highlight the conceptualizing and contextualizing of art beside actual art-making. From this emerges an essential challenge for in-service training: critical knowledge production and discourse practices.

     

    Visual Essay

     

    Drawing as an encounter with materials in early childhood education spaces

    Kwang Dae (Mitsy) Chung, Early Childhood Pedagogy Network

     

    Some early childhood educators believe that if they provide rich materials for young children, children’s creativity and art will naturally follow and grow. However, materials themselves are not a magical provocation for young children’s artmaking. When young children and educators engage with materials, the materials may become magical and their exchanges may enable a respectful and mindful pedagogical learning space. When educators, children and materials interact with each other, ask questions, listen to each other and share their thoughts and wonderings, the space may transform into collective, collaborative and pedagogical.

     

    Articles

     

    Games in the Finnish art teachers’ curriculum

    Heikka Valja, Aalto University

     

    This article takes part in the discussion that revolves around games and gaming and presents an example on how they have been implemented to the curriculum of Finnish art teacher training. The article explores the results of a nationwide survey for art teachers concerning games and gaming and how it supported the curriculum design for pre-serving art education students. The most significant addition to the curriculum was a master’s-level course ‘Games, Gaming and Game Design’. The article presents the course in detail and how it has evolved during four semesters between 2017 and 2020. The theoretical framework for the curriculum design was built on Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics and constructionist

    ludology. The article suggests that games and gaming are an integral part of art education and best addressed in a holistic manner, not only as visual representations or tools for learning.

     

    TikTok and museum education: A visual content analysis

    Emma June Huebner, Concordia University

     

    Although TikTok has been downloaded 2.6 billion times and is widely used around the world, cultural organizations have been slow to join the trend. The few museums that use the app have had contrasting approaches to their content creation. This study employs a case study methodology to examine the use of TikTok by the Uffizi Gallery (Florence) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) through a visual content analysis of their posts. Considering theories of learning and teaching in the museum, as well as of connectivism, the central guiding questions are: how are museums using TikTok? In what ways do these short-form videos connect visitors with their collections? What are the implications for museum education? The findings from this study reveal that museums use either expository and didactic teaching practices on TikTok or performative TikTok practices, which include collaboration with youth. The study has implications for museum educators who wish to use TikTok as an educational tool.

     

    Visual Essay

     

    Socially engaged art with preservice teachers: The aesthetics of making sense

    of community-embedded experiences

    Stephanie Jones, University of Georgia

    James F. Woglom, Cal Poly Humboldt

    Dhanna Alkowni, Eboni Cobby, Haley Davis, Bryan Flores, Hosanna Pasillas and Taylar Mason, Cal Poly Humboldt

     

    In this graphica article, Stephanie Jones and James Woglom have a critical discussion and analysis of the community-based art-making pedagogical project that Woglom undertook with their undergraduate art education students, expanding on Authors’ past work in comics arts-based research. They build upon the idea of ‘ethnographica’ – or ethnographically informed graphica creation – as the primary method of meaning-making Woglom and their students engaged in. Students’ (positioned as co-researchers, and named as authors in the piece) visual-verbal

    meaning-making of their community-based work with youth is included along with some of their interpretations of their experiences as well as the two authors’ analyses. The article connects this one semester of socially engaged art teacher education to relational aesthetics, A/R/Tography and culturally responsive work with youth.

     

    Articles

     

    An Indigenous epistemological revival through an inclusive art practice teaching method

    Nombeko P. Mpako, University of South Africa

     

    This article reflects on an inclusive art practice teaching method that encourages students to embrace their Indigenous knowledge and cultural meanings as a point of departure, culminating in visual narratives. It provides an overview of a selection of African language Xhosa speech acts and visual narratives from students who have completed their qualifications using this method. Cultural meanings are constructed through language, which subsequently influences the behavioural

    world of the speakers. Analysis and interpretation of a small sample of visual narratives is presented in order to highlight the value of this inclusive teaching method. The emergent visual narratives contribute to the sustainability and future research of Indigenous culture in the context of African Indigenous knowledge systems.

     

    Land-based art intervention: Disrupting settler colonial curriculum of public parks

    Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis, The Pennsylvania State University

    Luke Arthur Meeken, The Pennsylvania State University

     

    US public parks are ideological sites where settler-colonial curriculum of territoriality is enacted through their organization and design. However, public parks and the rhetorics of nature and democracy that often frame them are rarely problematized as White settler projects occupying the colonized land. Drawing on the scholarship of decolonial, land-based education, this article critiques the narratives of US urban parks’ undergirding settler-colonial curricula and discusses a student-developed artistic intervention executed in a local public park. The ‘Lederer Park Placards Project’ is explored as both pedagogical gesture and art-based research, which engages in settler-colonial critique through site-specific installation to surface the erasure of Indigenous realities and to divert the existing settler-colonial narratives of public places. This art-in-action is discussed as a decolonial gesture intended to disrupt the White, Eurocentric, colonial curricula embedded in US public parks.

     

    Website Review

     

    Field trip for one: Self-directed learning with the #MetKids website #MetKids, The

    Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015)

    Reviewed by Sarah Harper, University of North Texas, USA

     

    Visual Response

    International Journal of Education Through Art, Special Issue: ‘Reconciliation’, Nadine

    1. Kalin, Mira Kallio-Tavin, Sheri R. Klein and Alexandra Lasczik (eds) (2022)

    Response by Stefan Robinson, University of North Texas, USA

     

    Book Review

    Critical Digital Making in Art Education, Aaron D. Knochel, Christine Liao and Ryan

    1. Patton (eds) (2020)

    Reviewed by Robert Sweeny, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 18 No. 1 (2022)

    IJETA 18.1 Table of Contents

     

    Special Issue: ‘Reconciliation’

     

    Editorial

    Sheri Klein, Guest Editor, Kent State University

     

    Articles

    Walking the story of my Indo-Mauritian indentured ancestry: An arts-based inquiry into voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation

    Nish Belford, Monash University

     

    Reconciliation is a contested term often associated with postcolonial discourses, contending with global histories of injustice, racial discrimination and dispossession that affect diverse groups (slaves, indentures or Indigenous people). Reconciliation stories mainly encounter resistance when problematized by individual experiences. As a woman of Indo-Mauritian indenture descent, I explore my ancestral stories from gendered dimensions: hailed by hardships, discrimination and patriarchal norms from colonialization and its legacies. I discuss my perceived subalternity and disempowerment in defining my positioning and identity. From an arts-based inquiry, I use bricolage to combine art.I/f/act.ology, evocative

    auto-ethnography and emotional reflexivity in framing emotion-based writing.  Intersectionality as a theoretical lens situates the influences of race, culture, ethnicity, caste, gender and identity processes within my narratives. The discussion emphasizes a voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation. My visual narratives display and are rooted in the listening and co-ownership of ancestral stories as mine, wherein I find voice and agency.

     

    Transcending gender dichotomy through art teacher education in Zimbabwe

    Dairai Darlington Dziwa, North-West University

    Louise Postma, North-West University

    Louisemarié Combrink, North-West University

     

    Zimbabwe is a patriarchal society characterized by gender dichotomy and male domination that permeates through social, educational and domestic spheres resulting in numerous challenges for art teacher education students. Expanding critical consciousness within art teacher education programmes is an imperative step towards developing art teachers who are self-aware and reflexive concerning the intersections of gender, art and education. This study investigated how engagement with visual art can provoke a heightened critical awareness about gender bias, stereotyping and equity among Zimbabwean art teacher education students. Sixteen selected art teacher education students (eight males and females) at the Great Zimbabwe University participated in the study. Participants were

    guided by researcher-constructed prompts for purposes of image making, interpretation and dialogue. Visual discourse analysis of the students’ visual narratives and discourse analysis of focus group transcriptions revealed several themes as well as evidence of critical reflection and expanded critical awareness related to gender issues. Visual and dialogic methods offer promise for critical engagement and reconciliation of tensions surrounding issues of gender amongst art teacher education candidates.

     

    Towards a pedagogy of reconciliation and transformation: A peace education through art initiative in response to 26/11

    Mousumi De, University of Redlands

     

    The 26/11 Mumbai attacks in India severely impacted the already strained Indo–Pak political relations and fuelled prejudice against the common people of Pakistan. Since the attacks, Indian people have found various expressions of collective memory and ways to commemorate the incident. While these serve as a remembrance of the attack, it also reinforces negative attitudes towards Pakistan and its people, hindering any prospects of peace and reconciliation. This article describes a peace education through art initiative implemented in a high school in Mumbai. It draws from a synergy of theoretical concepts in peace, reconciliation and conflict transformation for its curricular framework that has three inquiry processes: Examine–Envision–Envisage. This article describes the implementation and outcomes of the initiative that support the value of an integrated peace- and reconciliation-focused art education pedagogy aimed at promoting reconciliation in relation to ongoing/intractable conflicts. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of addressing negative emotions inherent in ongoing conflicts and how empathy might contribute towards reducing prejudice towards the ‘Other’.

     

    Race-based mascots: Reflecting on university–community conversations

    Jennifer Bergmark, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

    Stephanie H. Danker, Miami University

     

    Two university art educators engaged in research to explore issues of race and representation through examining the histories of race-based mascots at their two Midwestern US universities. Collaborative inquiry allowed for reflective practice, dialogue and critical listening as part of extended conversations to examine the stereotyping of Indigenous1 culture and images with students and community members. Issues of race, representation, stereotyping and systemic racism were explored with university art education students, faculty and Myaamia citizens (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma) in a workshop setting. Conversations within the workshop aimed to extend understandings about the cultural and artistic traditions of the Miami Tribe and strengthen cross-institutional and community relationships. Post-workshop analysis of the collaborators’ correspondences was analysed to reveal three themes: relationships and voice, representation and acknowledgement. Reconciliation is discussed as ongoing and mutual effort involving a continuous process of critical reflection, listening and dialogue necessary for building relationships and to learn directly from Indigenous peoples.

     

    Batik in Malaysia and Indonesia: A collaboration for reconciling issues of cultural

    heritage

    Adam Wahida, Universitas Sebelas Maret

    Muhammad Hendra Himawan, Indonesia Institute of the Arts, Surakarta

     

    Conflict claims for the cultural heritage of batik between Indonesia and Malaysia have created tensions between the people of these two countries. The Indonesian and Malaysian governments have never involved academics and arts education institutions in resolving such conflict claims, yet, these communities can play a significant role in post-conflict reconciliation efforts. This article describes a conflict reconciliation method initiated by academics, artists and art educators

    through a collaborative art project between art higher education institutions in Malaysia and Indonesia. Ways in which collaborations within and across the art and education communities may address the understanding and reconciliation of issues related to cultural heritage conflict are explored.

     

     

    The many becoming the unresolved one: Reconciling the fields of art, research

    and education through a/r/tography and collage

    Veronica Garcia-Lazo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

     

    A study in three secondary schools in Aotearoa New Zealand explored students’ critical thinking and how that was articulated in visual arts education. The research was motivated by the influence of everyday visual experiences on young people’s lives and the national curriculum’s call for encouraging critical thinking in the context of the students’ cultural milieu. This inquiry entailed multiple methods that included policy analysis, focus group interviews with teachers, interviews with students, classroom observations, photographic documentation and researcher engagement with the art of collage. A/r/tography allowed for the reconciliation of art, research and education and the exploration of liminal spaces through a relational inquiry. The collage process provided insights into how art making can be used as a relational device between researcher and participants that evoked findings in innovative ways. The findings are presented as entanglements of meanings aimed to provoke the imagination and open conversations.

     

    Book Reviews

    Avant-Garde As Method: Vkhutemas And The Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930,

    Anna Bokov (2020)

    Reviewed by Richard Hudson-Miles, Loughborough University, UK

     

    Multidisciplinary Approaches to Art and Creativity: Fostering Artistic Exploration in Formal and Informal Settings, Karen Knutson, Takeshi Okada and Kevin Crowley (eds) (2020)

    Reviewed by Mary Stokrocki, Arizona State University, USA

     

    Video Review

    ‘Art Education in the Age of COVID-19’, The Museum Of Contemporary Art (2021)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kgukEQd6Mg (YouTube)

    Reviewed by Alexandra Davenport, University of Portsmouth, UK

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 17 No. 3 (2021)

    IJETA 17.3 Table of Contents

     

    Editorial

    Re-turning education through art

    Nadine M. Kalin, Principal Editor, University of North Texas

    Mira Kallio-Tavin, Editor, Aalto University

    Sheri Klein, Editor, Kent State University

    Alexandra Lasczik, Editor, Southern Cross University

     

    Article

    Remembering Seonjeong Yi Lebrun: Mourning with narratives of care

    Hyunji Kwon, University of South Carolina

     

    It is hard to coherently narrate traumatic memories as they are intensely emotional

    and fragmented. I created this narrative inquiry in the hope of enacting care and

    performing mourning for the unexpected death of Seonjeong Yi Lebrun (1983–

    2017). Seonjeong was a Korean-born art education researcher in Canada whose

    work exemplified how artistic approaches to narrative evoke empathy and connectivity.

    Her research spanned arts-based self-study to participatory action research

    about comfort women (Korean sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army during

    the Second World War). In performing mourning for Seonjeong through examining

    her research, I endeavour to have my research possibly initiate a new form of

    arts-based collective care for her, comfort women and those suffering from other

    forms of trauma.

     

    Visual Essay

    Reconciling with others, within oneself, and the circle(s) of time

    Seija Ulkuniemi, University of Lapland

     

    This visual essay depicts my personal experiences with the San peoples of South Africa. Almost twenty years ago, I learned of a personal loss while examining their ancient rock carvings and used the San people’s beliefs about the reconciliation of death and nature to heal. In 2019, I ran a workshop for young Khoe-Sans peoples, offering them a chance to connect and find harmony within themselves. They shared their personal stories and visual creations with each other, reviving the disappearing storytelling tradition. As Indigenous peoples have often been treated as objects without respect, following the ethical rules of research was part of reconciliation. My approach throughout the workshop was to embody connectedness and care; according to the feedback, our interaction succeeded despite our cultural differences.

     

    Articles

    Bridging art viewing and making: Constructivist museum tour and workshop

    programmes

    Juyoung Yoo, Chung-Ang University

     

    The purpose of this study is to investigate how constructivist approaches are conceptualized and implemented in ‘gallery tour and studio workshop’ educational programmes at art museums, and the relationship that exists between the gallery and studio learning for children. A qualitative multi-case study was employed, and three art museums were involved. Data collection methods included programme observations, participant interviews, photos and museum documents. The findings

    of the study offer examples of educators’ teaching approaches, which reflect constructivist tenets, as well as factors that might strengthen the connection across gallery and studio learning. An inviting learning environment, consideration of students’ prior knowledge and experience, use of themes and motivating questions and facilitation of reflections, as well as educators’ collaboration all promoted well-connected tour and workshop programmes. This study offers insights and strategies to interested museum professionals and educators who aim to provide children with meaningful and well-connected art-viewing and art-making programmes.

     

    The perception of students’ pre-sketching by architecture educators

    Leyla Alipour, University of Tehran

     

    Different individuals have different perception of artworks. This study aims to find the differences between architecture educators and other interpreters in perceiving architecture students’ pre-sketching. For this purpose, the images of architecture students’ pre-sketches were interpreted by three groups. The information perceived from the students’ pre-sketching was coded and categorized as description, analysis, cognition, emotion, artist and evaluation. The results indicate that the focus of architecture educators was on formal aspects, architects tended to notice students’ architectural abilities while interpretations of educators from other disciplines emphasized the perception of meaning and emotion. The results also show the special role of educators’ perception in education through art.

     

    Visual Essay

    Working manifesto/a for rovers

    Jodi A. Patterson, Eastern Washington University

     

    This arts-based exploration offers potentiality and theory to the wider arts-based research field by expanding and naming embodied experience as it relates to mechanical means of transport. The author dubs such a practice of physically moving the body between vast and varied spaces to be a roving art practice. She offers modes of potential, a preliminary list of protocols to contextualize a rover’s manifesto/a and ways to use roving as an educational tool applicable to the field of art education.

     

    Article

    Remixing real and imaginary in art education with fully immersive virtual reality

    Martina Paatela-Nieminen, University of Helsinki

     

    This article explores digital material/ism by examining student teachers’ experiences, processes and products with fully immersive virtual reality (VR) as part of visual art education. The students created and painted a virtual world, given the name Gretan puutarha (‘Greta’s Garden’), using the Google application Tilt Brush. They also applied photogrammetry techniques to scan 3D objects from the

    real world in order to create 3D models for their VR world. Additionally, they imported 2D photographs and drawings along with applied animated effects to construct their VR world digitally, thereby remixing elements from real life and fantasy. The students were asked open-ended questions to find out how they created art virtually and the results were analysed using Burdea’s VR concepts of immersion, interaction and imagination. Digital material was created intersubjectively and intermedially while it was also remixed with real and imaginary. Various webs of meanings were created, both intertextual and rhizomatic in nature.

     

    Book Review

    Education, Arts and Sustainability: Emerging Practice for a Changing World,

    Mary Ann Hunter, Arnold Aprill, Allen Hill and Sherridan Emery (eds) (2018) Reviewed by Kudrat-E-Khuda Babu, Daffodil International University, Bangladesh

     

    Video Review

    ‘The cultural underpinnings of creativity’, Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas (2018) Reviewed by Nicholas Houghton, University for the Creative Arts, UK

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 17 No. 2 (2021)

    IJETA 17.2 Table of Contents

     

    Editorial

    Together-apart

    Nadine M. Kalin, Principal Editor, University of North Texas

    Mira Kallio-Tavin, Editor, Aalto University

    Sheri Klein, Editor, Kent State University

    Alexandra Lasczik, Editor, Southern Cross University

     

    Articles

    ‘Oohing and ahhing’: The power of thin(g)king in art education research

    Emily Jean Hood, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

    Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas

     

    In this article, we seek to explore what new materialist theory and post-intentional phenomenology bring to art education research. Materiality is contextualized politically and historically, and then applied to an emerging research methodology which attempts to centre the material world as a key participant in an art education dissertation research project. The research site, a creative reuse store, serves as both context and participant as the authors explore the powerful collective agency of materiality in processes of art making. Portions of findings from the project are presented here and a new theory of thin(g)king is discussed.

     

    ‘Immersed in Art’: Engaged learning in art and design history

    Lisa Chandler, University of the Sunshine Coast

    Alistair Ward, University of the Sunshine Coast

    Lisa Ward, University of the Sunshine Coast

     

    Established approaches to art history pedagogy typically involve a primarily passive form of instruction incorporating the viewing of works projected on screens. While such approaches can convey valuable information, they can also contribute to student disengagement and do not necessarily support deep learning. This article examines three learning initiatives incorporating an immersive teaching space to determine how these forms of technology-enhanced active learning might enhance student comprehension and engagement. The article considers how learning design incorporating the affordances of such immersive environments can provide multimodal learning experiences that stimulate student imaginations and support learning and engagement in a manner that complements rather than replaces traditional modes of instruction.

     

    Reflective visual journals as a means for promoting generalist preservice teachers’ professional identity in art education

    Victoria Pavlou, Frederick University

     

    In many countries, the subject of art in primary education is entrusted to generalist teachers rather than art specialists. This article explores ways of promoting in-depth learning in art education courses while simultaneously gaining an understanding of how preservice generalists develop their professional identities. This study focuses on the journey of five senior B.Ed. in primary education students from Frederick University in Cyprus, who were invited to engage with reflective practices through visual journaling on art, education and on art integration with social issues. The findings suggest that reflective visual journals can be used to promote generalist preservice teachers’ autonomy and self-reliance in their art making and art responding as well as in the design of art units for their future pupils. The implications of the study open up possibilities for teacher education as it recognizes the role of visual journaling in enhancing different forms of knowledge, acknowledging feelings of both tension and pleasure, promoting perceptions of self-efficacy and supporting inquiry. Overall, such efforts allow preservice teachers to transition from student to teacher identity.

     

    Visual Essay

    Art-based events for conflicted communities: Engaging and educating through art

    Maria Huhmarniemi, University of Lapland

     

    In the Arctic, environmental conflicts over land use and the exploitation of natural resources cast shadows over communities. Artists’ and art educators’ responses can play a meaningful role in resisting harmful developments. Emerging artistic and pedagogical interventions follow principles of socially and environmentally engaged art and art education. This visual essay describes a contemporary art event that opposed plans for an iron ore mine next to Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park in Finnish Lapland. An art-based action-research strategy was used to develop resources for communities in conflict. It focuses on describing the cyclical nature of art interventions. Analyses of activities show that art-based resources in environmental battles can foster cultural resilience, impact values, enhance hope and allow for campaigning that uses art to communicate environmental concerns. Further research into artistic interventions that open dialogue between parties in conflict is required.

     

     

    Articles

    The suitcase project: Historical inquiry, arts integration and the Holocaust

    Agnieszka Chalas, University of Toronto

    Michael Pitblado, The York School

     

    In this article, we ‐ a history teacher and visual art educator ‐ present a unique, arts-integrated history project that engaged grade eleven history students in creating an installation of suitcase assemblages exploring the lives of young victims of the Holocaust. While we recognize that there exist numerous strategies for teaching about the Holocaust, we assert not only that arts integration is useful in enhancing student learning and engagement in history but also that the curricular approach is ideally suited for the teaching of difficult history such as the history of the Holocaust. In addition to examples of the student artworks produced, we provide evidence of the project’s success in increasing students’ understandings of the assigned historical content as well as its success in complicating two dominant Holocaust narratives. In sharing our own experiences of using an arts-integrated approach to teaching the history of the Holocaust, we hope to inspire both history teachers who are looking for alternative ways to tackle the complex challenge of teaching difficult history as well as art teachers who are looking to integrate sound historical inquiry into their issues-based art projects.

     

    Exploring a critical research approach in fibre art studies in the United States Sirpa Kokko, University of Helsinki

     

    The purpose of the study was to reveal the central elements of combining a critical research approach with hands-on activities in fibre art studies. The article is based on ethnographic data gathered in two fibre art courses at a US university in the autumn of 2018. Intersectionality and interconnectedness, the material context and the process, emerged as the most important concepts of the critical research approach under study. These ideas were combined with hands-on activities so that the students learned both the basic skills and the broader social, cultural and material meanings related to their activities. The students appreciated the critical research approach which broadened their perspectives on fibre art. The low status of fibre art at the academy was revealed and associated with the gendered tradition. Study findings recommend the development of pedagogies that implement a critical research approach in art and craft education.

     

     

    Book Review

    A Companion to Curation, Brad Buckley And John Conomos (Eds), Dana Arnold (Series Ed.)

    Veronica Sekules, GroundWork Gallery for Art and Environment, UK

     

    Video Review

    ‘My thoughts for the call to unite’, Ken Robinson (2020)

    Reviewed by Mary Stokrocki, Arizona State University, USA

     

    Video Game Review

    Prisme 7, Bright and Game Society (2020)

    Occupy White Walls (OWW), StikPixels (2020)

    Reviewed by Li-Yan Wang, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan

     

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 17 No. 1 (2021)

    IJETA 17.1 Table of Contents

     

    Editorial

    Walking as a radical and critical art of inquiry: Embodiment, place and entanglement

    Alexandra Lasczik, Southern Cross University

    David Rousell, RMIT University

    Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Southern Cross University

     

    Visual Essays

    Subtle bodies: Corporeal and material becoming in threshold landscapes

    Michaela Pegum, RMIT University

    This visual essay charts a series of relational, immersive engagements made between myself and the landscape of the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges in South Australia as part of my practice-led Ph.D. titled ‘Subtle bodies: Corporeal and material becoming in threshold landscapes’. Within my research I consider this remote environment as a threshold between the earth and its atmosphere and engage with it as a way of exploring the lesser trodden territories of sensed experience and the ways in which knowing and being may unfold here. In this essay I will discuss these encounters with reference to Elizabeth Grosz’s thinking regarding the concepts of affect, becoming and sensation, alongside photographic images of my performative encounters with material in the landscape.

     

    Walking the forest imaginary: A breath between us

    Julie Poitras Santos, Maine College of Art

    Walking the forest imaginary: a breath between us is a site-specific audio artwork that invites the audience to walk into the forest imaginary populated by things magical and unseen. Crafted uniquely in response to Alingsås Nolhaga Park, and using cues in the landscape as guides to research and poetic inscription, the artwork consists of an approximately one-hour walk with audio listening points throughout the park. Audio is accessed digitally through QR codes posted on pre-existing pathways and listened to with individual headphones. Wandering pathways through the woods, participants listen to a hybrid essay that explores the alternate spaces and time scales of the miniature worlds of moss. Focusing on the ancient and present role of bryophytes in creating oxygen and storing carbon, and helping to keep our ecosystem in balance, the work considers this ancient exchange as a form of dialogue.

     

    Visiting, attending and receiving: Making kin with local woods

    Zuzana Vasko, Simon Fraser University

    In an endeavour to build intimacy with a section of woods as can only be done through visceral and embodied experience, an ongoing drawing project was embarked upon with the forest as co-author. In a practice of sympoesis with the earth, small drawings of selected niches in an unprotected section of established forest bordering a suburban neighbourhood were done on regular and frequent walks through changing seasons. Upon completion, each drawing was hidden or buried at the site, to be retrieved on a subsequent visit. The aim is to inhabit and bond with this particular wild place through art-based dialogue, and through finding and returning to very specific places via animistic sensing and with tacit knowledge rather than the customary reliance on human-made indexical technologies. In this regard, the trees and plants play an active and sometimes storied role as participants in the creative exchange.

     

    Articles

    Becoming-unhinged: Walking with vulnerability as a methodology of co-creating and reconnecting new forms of knowledge and possibilities

    Linda Henderson, Monash University

    Geraldine Burke, Monash University

    Sharryn Clarke, Monash University

    Helen Grimmett, Monash University

    Gloria Quinones, Monash University

    Ann Slater, Monash University

    Claudine Lam, The University of Melbourne

    This article explores the act of walking with vulnerability as a methodology of becoming-unhinged. As walking assemblage, we walk as an assemblage, becoming- unhinged through affective points of contact with the more-than-human world. We consider the act of walking-thinking as an act that forces thought to become-unhinged and, in that moment, permitting thought to come into contact with all kinds of affective points. We move through a dreaming-soulful practice of walking-thinking along coastal treks, with cows, with the moon, with vulnerability and with frames. The meeting of land/water, a full moon, a hillside cemetery, a sculpture park and the use of blindfolds and frames challenge perception-apprehension, while a series of written texts, movement, stillness and contemplative practices activate vulnerability. Our emerging texts speak back to twenty-first-century academia, challenging its normative production of knowledge through the co-creation and re-creation of text/images, producing knowledge differently and opening up possibilities.

     

    Breaking silences and revealing the disappeared: Walking-with legacies of slave-ownership, Bath (UK)

    Richard S. White, Bath Spa University

    An emergent walking arts approach is presented as an opening towards social repair. Drawing on an intra-disciplinary project, ‘sense-ing’ legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath (UK), an iteration of walking-with is discussed in the context of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Walkers on the Sweet Waters project, hosted by the author, participated in a research-creation process agitating thought and extending resonances through mark making and social media trails. The article explores strategies of curated juxtaposition and dissonance as provocations to involuntary thought and empathic response. A participatory, performative walking is outlined accessing embodied ways of knowing and the agencies of walkers and heritage. Walkers become story carriers and ‘affect aliens’, unsettling heritage accounts, breaking silences and revealing the disappeared. Reflecting on a creative-critical intervention on ‘authorized’ heritage the article presents a somatic approach to learning, heritage and social justice through walking arts.

     

    Walking-sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice

    Injeong Yoon-Ramirez, University of Arkansas

    How can walking, as a sensate experience and a recollective engagement with our memories, lead us to imagine new ways of knowing, being and sensing otherwise? This article conceptualizes walking-sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice, which offers anti-colonial critiques and activates decolonial imaginations. By combining walking and sensing together, I first highlight how our experience of walking is intrinsically intertwined with our act of sensing that is already oriented and attuned in the contextual relation to things in the world. The notion of walking-sensing is used to describe not only our physical movement and the sensibilities of our bodies, but also as recollective and communal engagements, such as connecting memories with others, (re)collecting personal and local stories, and imagining the ways of living and being otherwise. I further elucidate how walking-sensing can be a form of anti-colonial critiques and decolonial imaginations that valorize multiple knowledges and sensibilities as well as to pave a path towards a new liberatory way of being in solidarity. With pedagogical scenarios, I demonstrate in what ways walking-sensing can be utilized as a critical intervention towards decoloniality. Lastly, introduce two artists’ art-making practice and how they are linked to the concept of walking-sensing. In this way, I elucidate the inextricable relationship between art and pedagogical practice and how walking-sensing can lead to decolonial resistance.

     

    A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy

    David Haley, University of Technology

    This article takes the reader for a stroll through a programme of ecological arts-led, performance-based research. The style is more poetic than scientific, although much ecological science is embedded within the art form. Indeed, Charles Darwin was known for his regular walks, as time and space for his reflections on evolution and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was noted for the poetic form of his scientific treatises. Here also, the author breaks with academic convention to engage with walking and research as creative activities to deal with ecological issues. Of course, other artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have walked as part of their practice, and there are a growing number of artists who consider walking as practice-as-research. In this article, the focus is specifically on walking as a creative form of inquiry, through community participation within urban contexts to create a critical dialogue focused on ecology in action.

     

    Walking with and in-between: Interrogating tensions in a public garden space

    Patricia Osler, Concordia University

    An embodied becoming-with of artist, visitor and curator forms intriguing tensions at the Jardins de Métis (Reford Gardens) in Quebec, Canada. Collecting the resonant material, human, non-human and more-than-human frequencies in both a heritage setting and an international festival of landscape design, my research emerged intuitively. Frequent event-encounters coalesced into two audiowalks,

    amplifying psychogeographic tensions within the multiple narratives of the environment. A new project is unfolding in these gardens in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s Innovation Lab, incubating a design for an interactive multisensory interface. Through walking as event-experience, a layered assemblage of site images and agential intra-actions queries the multiple tensions at play.

     

    Re-storying place: The pedagogical force of walking in the work of Indigenous artist-activists Émilie Monnet and Cam

    Pohanna Pyne Feinberg, Dawson College

    Walking plays a generative and pedagogical role in the work of contemporary artists Émilie Monnet (Anishnaabe/French) and Cam (Innu/Québecois), both of whom work and live in the region known as a Tiohtià:ke to the Haudenosaunee, as Mooniyang to the Anishinaabeg, and as Montréal to many others. This article proposes that recent artistic interventions and participatory projects offered by Monnet and Cam infuse the international discourse about walking as a pedagogical force with their distinct perspectives as Indigenous women. They employ walking to reinforce their presence, to learn from place, to contest colonial narratives and exclusions conveyed by visual culture, to honour their ancestors, to indigenize collective memory by amplifying Indigenous voices and contributing to the re-storying of place, a concept inspired by Potawatomi environmental biologist Robin Kimmerer. Monnet is an interdisciplinary artist who combines theatre, performance, image and sound art as a performer, creator and director. She is also the founding director of Onishka, a multimedia Indigenous arts organization. Cam is a street artist and the lead coordinator of Unceded Voices, a street art convergence for artists who are Indigenous women, women of colour, queer, twospirit and gender non-conforming. She is also currently the national coordinator of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. With a shared awareness that the dynamics that comprise place are intrinsically relational and dialogical, the work of Cam and Monnet intervenes in the felt and seen world to reinforce their sense of belonging to this region. Walking is integral to their respective research, creation and collaboration that enables their work to contest dominant colonial narratives while honouring the contributions of those who have been disavowed.

     

    Manifesto-ação, Paulínia, Brazil: Activism in walking as a dancing action

    Laís Cardoso da Rosa, ÉDHÉA

    Ana Maria Rodriguez Costas, UNICAMP

    We have been investigating practices of walking as a dancing action since 2017, and experiencing its political and pedagogical potential. In this sense, walking, besides being a strategy for artistic creation, is also a construction of embodied knowledge and incorporated citizenship. In Brazil in 2020, with a presidency that threatens art, culture, education and democracy, occupying the streets and walking through them have never been so necessary. Thus, we present in this article, based on the practices of walking as a dancing action we have been investigating, a Manifesto-ação that proposes local actions for discovering ways to keep going on the street in Brazil today.

     

    Book Reviews

    Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum, Paul Duncum (2020)

    Ya’ara Gil-Glazer, Tel-Hai Academic College

     

    Joseph Beuys and the Artistic Education: Theory and Practice of an Artistic Art Education, Carl-Peter Buschkühle (2020)

    Raphael Vella, University of Malta

     

    Re-imagining the Art School: Paragogy and Artistic Learning, Neil Mullholland (2019)

    Christine Pybus, CIT Crawford College of Art and Design

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 16 No. 3 (2020)

    IJETA 16.3 Table of Contents

     

    Editorial

    The (quaran)timeliness of art educational inquiry

    Nadine M. Kalin, University of North Texas

    Mira Kallio-Tavin, Aalto University

    Sheri Klein, Kent State University

    Alexandra Lasczik, Southern Cross University

     

    Articles

    Creative practice for sustainability: A new materialist perspective on artivist production of eco-sensitive knowledges

    Dorota Golańska, University of Lodz

    Anna Katarzyna Kronenberg, Independent Researcher

    Situated within a new materialist paradigm, this article looks at instances of educational nature-creative artivism for sustainability. Connecting art and activism, artivism mobilizes creative means to embrace political or social intervention. Underlining the importance of practices, and employing the concept of creative practice, we point out that a detailed inspection of the processes involved in artistic production sheds a different light on the nature of all knowledge-generating practices, letting us engage more thoroughly with the ‘how-question’ of producing knowledge. Focusing on two geoartistic/geopoetic educational initiatives, we argue that the eco-sensitive creation of artivists may serve as an example of what forms the entanglements of art and activism could take in the context of educational projects aimed at mobilizing thorough reflections of audiences. This may encourage the development of a more resilient environment based on horizontal relations of different forms of matter.

     

     

    Creativity through mindfulness: The Arts and Wellbeing in Education (AWE) professional learning programme

    Alex Southern, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

    This article uses findings from a case study of an arts/education professional learning programme in Wales to construct a definition of creativity that reflects on and contributes to debates around the concept, and its value within education. The programme Arts and Wellbeing in Education (AWE) focused on supporting school teachers’ well-being through creative practice. The research comprised a participatory methodology that sought to explore the circulating discourse around the key concepts of creativity and well-being in order to identify how the team leading the programme conceptualized the value of creativity, and how this was enacted. The findings point to a notion of creativity that is an inclusive, carnival experience that may improve well-being through mindful approaches to creative practice.

     

    Experiencing research early: Undergraduate students’ art practice research

    Gabriela Durán-Barraza, Universidad autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and Node Center for

    Curatorial Studies Berlin

    The purpose of the present study is to show how undergraduate art students developed a three-semester research project using art practice research as methodology during the years 2011‐12. They answered individual research questions through their artistic practices, presenting their results within an art exhibition and academic document. The research data shared in this article comprise observations of their research development, artistic diaries, art exhibitions, written research documents and post-project interviews. Findings indicate that such research experience allowed students to generate new knowledge through artistic practice, which often cannot be foreseen as it involves incontrollable material and people that cannot be accessed through other disciplines. It also gave them trans-cognitive research skills helping them to better understand themselves as artists and to develop complex works difficult to create otherwise.

     

    Building school community through cross-grade collaborations in art

    Kristin Vanderlip Taylor, California State University

    This qualitative study examines multiple collaborative art experiences across ages and classrooms during two years at a suburban public school in one of the largest school districts in the United States. Students in two middle-school elective art courses engaged in contemporary art education projects to strengthen visual and verbal communication skills as they partnered with younger peers in primary grades, including the following activities: collaborative earthworks, toy designs and mixed-up animal sculptures. These multi-age socially-constructive art experiences provided students with opportunities to build community across campus while interacting with each other and the artwork co-created. Observations and noted responses via reflection from students indicated positive impact on both communication and collaboration through bidirectional teaching and learning, with students in each age group requesting more opportunities for cross-grade collaborative experiences.

     

    Visual Essay

    ‘Beanz Meanz Professional Learning’: Beginning a Pedagogical Reflective Sketchbook

    Emese Hall, University of Exeter

    I was attempting to write a traditional text-based article defining what I have come to term a ‘Pedagogical Reflective Sketchbook’. The aim was to consider what insights might be gained from existing research on teachers’ use of reflective sketchbooks ‐ and similarly named books ‐ for their professional learning, leading to my definition of a Pedagogical Reflective Sketchbook. However, I told myself (aloud) ‘I can’t say what I want to say in words’. Although not a totally surprising revelation, it was a call to action. I, therefore, began to develop my own visual musings centred on the analogy of being like a Michelin-starred chef serving baked beans on toast ‐ a pedagogical frustration in my current academic role. In order to better understand a Pedagogical Reflective Sketchbook, it made perfect sense to begin one, in keeping with the spirit of my research intentions. This visual essay explains more…

     

    Articles

    Arts in working with youth on sensitive topics: A qualitative systematic review

    Marian Tumanyan, University of Oulu

    Tuija Huuki, University of Oulu

    This study examines existing research on the use of arts-based methods in approaching issues sensitive for youth and children. We conducted a qualitative, systematic review of twenty academic publications on this topic from 1997 to 2017. Our results show the use of arts-based methods to (1) recognize and make visible previously invisible experiences, acts, voices and histories; (2) nurture change and transformation in the lives of the youth; and (3) allow exploring the more-than-human, more-than-present and less-than-conscious aspects in the lives of youth and children ‐aspects that traditional study methods might not readily access. Our findings offer teachers, researchers, practitioners, psychologists and social workers greater awareness of the use of arts-based methods in matters young people find sensitive. This review allows education professionals to achieve a broader view of methods emerging from the arts in addressing the social and psychological issues that young human beings might face.

     

     

    Of the Akan people: Colour and design education in Ghana

    Patrique deGraft-Yankson, University of Education, Winneba

    This article digests some of the general ideas that constitute the concept of colour among the Akan people of Ghana and how their proper understanding and desirable consideration will enhance effective visual communication in the Ghanaian visual arts curriculum. The investigation, which involved a number of conversations with knowledgeable personalities in the teaching and speaking of the Akan language, sought to bring out the perceptions, beliefs and functions of colour among the people. The outcome of the study pointed to how colour resides deeply within the traditional lives of the Akan people, not only as aesthetical experience but also as an ‘object’ of cultural and spiritual signification. The study therefore recommends a proper understanding of and conscious respect to the perceptions and meanings of colour among contemporary Akan designers and design educators to improve the design experience of teachers, learners and practitioners.

     

     

    Transforming images: A collaborative art exercise to debunk biases

    Hanna Salonen, Amsterdam University of the Arts

    Olav van den Brekel, Amsterdam University of the Arts

    In the Netherlands, art academies offering teacher training courses in visual arts and design pay little attention to diverse learners, such as pupils with learning disabilities, in their curricula. To form a picture of the existing perceptions of students concerning persons with intellectual and/or psychological disabilities, this study was set up to map the views of a group of first-year teacher training students of visual arts and design at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. The focus of the study was to see whether student perceptions changed after an active encounter with persons with intellectual and/or psychological disabilities ‐ in this case, a group of visiting artists with learning disabilities. The motivation for this study was influenced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. As this mandate was adopted in the Netherlands in 2017, we have been intrigued by the consequences it would have for current educational settings and teacher training courses focusing on the subjects of art and design.

     

     

    Exploring the relationship between making and teaching art

    Elizabeth Garber, University of Arizona

    Khaffi Beckles, University of Arizona

    Sangmin Lee, University of Arizona

    Anjana Madan, University of Arizona

    Gustav Meuschke, University of Arizona

    Harrison Orr, University of Arizona

    The central questions of this study, ‘how does making influence art teaching?’ and ‘how does teaching art influence making?’, were explored through interviews and maker journals. Findings indicate that making inspires teaching in providing inspiration, interest and confidence to teach as well as increased self-acceptance and happiness. Participants who indicated affects of teaching on making cited learning new skills, materials and styles, and that teaching stimulated reflection and encouraged them to make art that is relatable to others. Our conclusions suggest that the roles of maker and teacher are porous, intertwined and complex. Implications for teacher education suggest the importance of exploring and nurturing the interconnections between making and teaching in a reflective, supportive environment.

     

    Book Reviews

    Letting Art Teach: Art Education ‘After’ Joseph Beuys, Gert Biesta (2017)

    Rebecca Heaton, Nanyang Technological University

     

    Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art and Design Education, Lee Campbell (2020) (ed.)

    Richard Hudson-Miles, Loughborough University

     

    Teaching and Learning in Art Education: Cultivating Students’ Potential from Pre-K through High School, D. Sickler-Voigth (2020)

    Victoria Pavlou, Frederick University

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 16 No. 2 (2020)

    ETA 16.2 Table of Contents

     

    Editorial

    ‘Thinking through ways of art education’

    Nadine M. Kalin, Mira Kallio-Tavin, Sheri Klein, Alexandra Lasczik

     

    Articles

    ‘A call for dissensus in art education!’

    Lisbet Skregelid

     

    This article argues for the relevance of the term dissensus by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière in an art educational context in particular and an educational context in general. This argument is based on research referred to in this article, where the author made use of dissensus to analyse how encounters with contemporary art contribute to movements in youngsters’ ways of relating to artworks and the environment that surrounds them, as well as changes in the ways of relating to themselves and others – what here is called events of subjectivation. As dissensus is seen as a premise for subjectivation, the author argues for initiating dissensus by introducing students to both art and educational practices that contrast the norm and disrupt the expected. The article also discusses why dissensus as an educational strategy and an aesthetic turn in education seems to be urgent in a contemporary educational climate.

     

    ‘Co-designing for inclusion in international/interdisciplinary teams’

    Ruth Mateus-Berr, Stephan Trimmel, Renata Dezso

     

    Educating for the future requires collaboration among professionals and people with impairments. This article discusses the knowledge-sharing project Design for Care, made up of interdisciplinary and international teams and based around dominant models of ability and (dis)ability studies. Design thinking served as a structured methodology throughout the workshop, which teaches skills such as team building, empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing that are essential as both analogue and digital means. In this case study, university students cooperated with each other to learn from children with severe impairments and their caregivers to increase the shared competence of embodied knowledge, which can then be applied to specific professional challenges. Secondary school design, industrial and social design university students are all relatively young when they begin their education, and educators need to engage them carefully with topics that might not mirror their own needs or expectations.

     

    Visual Essay

    ‘Chasing pedagogy: Searching for a new school portrait, or can this be a school if it doesn’t look like one?’

    Joanna Fursman

     

    Possible School was a research project undertaken with students studying art in a UK secondary school. Used as a research tool, student-initiated practice explored what an image of school might be and how, through those images, school might be constituted differently. In this project, the pre-existent, fixed meaning of the school portrait extends the concept of imaging beyond the production of compliant students who will conform to the normalized reproduction of themselves as school subjects. The image of school and reflection on what it means to be a student become purposeful and powerful modes of exploration, where ‐ through art practice ‐ school might critically show itself to itself.

     

    Articles

    ‘The passage of a painting: The learning process of students creating art for people with dementia’

    Alison Shields, Alison Phinney

     

    Making Art for Making Place, a joint education and research project, engaged post-secondary fine arts students in the creation of paintings for residents of a transitional care facility. The purpose of the project was to explore how improving the living environment through art could benefit the residents with dementia while considering the impact this had on the students themselves. This article draws from participant observations and follow-up interviews to examine the learning experiences of students who created paintings for the facility. Further, it explores the impact on their learning through interactions with nurses and expert researchers who joined the class to participate in group discussions and share their expertise working with people living with dementia. The research revealed that the project fostered positive community building; engaged students in discussions and reflections about how art affects people; prompted consideration of experiences of the elderly ‐ particularly those with dementia; and expanded understandings of the roles of art in the society.

     

    ‘The Way of the Artist Educator paradigm: Fusing artistic studio practice and teaching pedagogy’

    Christopher Strickland

     

    The purpose of this autoethnographic study is to examine the experiences of visual arts educators who identify themselves as Artist Educators. In particular, this article investigates how these Artist Educators perceive the fusion of their artistic studio practice with their teaching pedagogy, and how the perception defines their identity and impacts their creative and classroom practices. This study involved a focus group of six individuals, including the researcher. All the participants were practising artists, currently employed or recently retired K-12 visual arts educators certified in the states of Maine or New Hampshire, and members of the Kittery Art Association. This study used a combination of interviews and an arts-based method for data collection. All the data were analyzed and resulted in seven findings that culminated in the Way of the Artist Educator ‐ an alternative paradigm for a quality and holistic twenty-first-century visual arts education. This article presents the paradigm, discusses the study’s implications and offers suggestions for future research.

     

    ‘The unknown city: Visual arts-based educational research on the living city experiences of university students’

    Rafaèle Genet-Verney, Ricardo Marín-Viadel, Antonio Fernández-Morillas

     

    Through an Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) methodology, we explore the urban perceptions of fourth-year university students from the School of Education at the University of Granada (Spain). ABER methodologies provide a subtle, representative and sensitive approach to the urban experience. In this study, we surveyed 130 students, asking them to draw and cut out a city map of Granada. This was done in order to reveal the known boundaries of the city and to identify the parts yet to be discovered by the students. With these answers as collected data, an ABER analysis was carried out through the production of visual media. Assessing findings quantitatively and visually allowed for the further investigation of students’ knowledge of the city. This inquiry questions the role of the graphic map in research and the boundaries between its technical and artistic values. These findings validate the use of ABER instruments to investigate the city and enhance understanding of the way students live the urban life.

     

    Visual Essay

    ‘Open School as embodied learning’

    Lars Emmerik Damgaard Knudsen, Anne Marie Øbro Skaarup

     

    Open School is a collaboration between community schools and organizations introduced in Denmark as part of the school reforms of 2014. Through a qualitative research project contemplating Open School as a pedagogical phenomenon, we discovered that practitioners in and around schools perceived this programme very differently. The authors engaged in this study from an aesthetical perspective through mobilizing arts-based research modes. Across the different interpretations of Open School, students’ embodied learning was a common feature as they actively used their bodies while visiting a beach, bunker, theatre, museum and gallery. In this visual article, we present the artwork generated during an investigation of embodied learning in the Open School programme. It consists of drawings, photos and collages gathered in six separate frames, each accompanied with a short lyrical text to provoke readers’ perceptions.

     

    Articles

    ‘Entangled photographers: Agents and actants in preschoolers’ photography talk’

    Mari-Jatta Rissanen

     

    Photographs taken by young children have engendered a growing amount of research across diverse academic disciplines. Photographs have been used as visual data for analysing for example children’s social relations and well-being. However, only a few studies have addressed the photographic practices of young children as means for them to explore, imagine and coexist with the surrounding world. In this article, I introduce a case study that draws on research from art education and sociology of childhood. The data were gathered in a photography workshop in a Finnish early childhood education and care centre, where fourteen preschoolers discussed their photographs inspired by contemporary Finnish art photography. In order to expose diverse human and material actors and their interactions in preschoolers’ photography talk, I applied Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory. Thus, preschoolers’ photography is seen as a practice of visual meaning-making wherein agency is distributed among several actors.

     

     

     

     

    Book Reviews

     

    Art, Culture, and Pedagogy: Revisiting the Work of F. Graeme Chalmers, Dustin Garnet and Anita Sinner (eds) (2019)

    Reviewed by Jill Smith

     

    Art as Unlearning: Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy, John Baldacchino (2019)

    Reviewed by Raphael Vella

  • IJETA
    Vol. 16 No. 1 (2020)

    Special issue: Disability, Arts and Education

    Guest editor: Mira Kallio-Tavin

    ETA 16.1 Table of contents

     

    Editorial

     

    3–11

    Disability studies as a site of knowledge in art education

    Mira Kallio-Tavin

    Articles

    13–27

    Towards a vital pedagogy: Learning from anti-ableist practice in art education

    Claire Penketh

     

    Art education has the potential to promote inclusive education for all children and young people. However, the pervasive discourse of special education, with an emphasis on individual deficit, support and remediation, can dominate our thinking about the relationship between disability and art education. This article reports on an attempt to resist the limitations of such discourses by introducing anti-ableist, crip theory to art educators (n=48). Visual and textual storyboards enabled practitioners to present, reflect and revise projects from a committed anti-ableist position. Modified projects reflected an awareness of the benefits of multi-sensory approaches, the advantages of interdependency and a greater resonance with contemporary arts practice. Acknowledging the challenges of taking theory to practice, the article suggests that anti-ableist theory can promote a vital pedagogy in art education. It concludes that crip theory can provoke practice-based resistance to deficit-based models of disability.

     

    29–41

    Ordinary Extraordinary Activism: Student-led filmmaking in disability studies

    Chelsea Temple Jones and Kim Collins

     

    In this article, we, as disability studies educators in Toronto, Canada, reflect on our interpretations of a student group’s call to ‘people’ disability culture. This request tasked us with mapping disability culture in Canada, and representing it through

    the arts-based approach of new disability documentary. We produced five student-directed films, Ordinary Extraordinary Activism, that bridge theory with lived experience by profiling activists whose lives involve participating in disability

    culture. Here, we describe how our work supported and transcended the affirmative model by drawing on intersectionality and Disability Justice. We critically consider the aesthetic and representational tensions of producing films under crip time. Through this writing, we reflect on the three-year process of filmmaking as a gesture of online pedagogy and analyse three out of five films.

     

    43–61

    Engaging, validating, imagining: A comic-based approach to (non)participation and empowerment

    Marta Madrid-Manrique

     

    This article engages with art education and disability justice through a story narrated using comics. Lorena’s Story is a short graphic narrative that explores the complexity of taking responsibility for (non)participation during a participatory animation workshop for children and young people with disabilities. The story inspires a reflective process that questions the model of empowerment present in participatory video literature, validates the diverse ways of being in the world with disabilities and inspires a different notion of empowerment. Within arts-based educational research methods, the comic story is a site of knowledge that aims to provide a sense of integrity, sincerity and authenticity.

    Este artículo se compromete a establecer una conversación entre el área de educación

    artística y el reclamo de justicia social de los estudios de discapacidad a través del arte del cómic. La historia de Lorena es una narrativa breve que expresa la complejidad de tomar responsabilidad de la (no)participación durante un taller participativo de animación para niños, niñas y jóvenes con discapacidad. La historia inspira un proceso reflexivo que cuestiona el modelo de empoderamiento presente en la literatura de video participativo, valida diversas formas de ser en el mundo con discapacidad, e inspira una nueva noción de empoderamiento. Dentro de los métodos de investigación educativa basada en las artes, la historia del cómic es un espacio de conocimiento que se propone generar integridad, sinceridad y autenticidad.

     

    63–82

    Rippling excesses: A/r/tography becoming dis/a/r/tography

    Leslie G. Roman, rena del pieve gobbi, Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry and Persimmon Blackbridge

     

    How do disability arts (dis/arts) and culture rupture and transform conventional artistic and a/r/tographic practices? We show how disability arts and culture involves a multiplicity of voices unfolding, recursing, rippling and reflexively performing

    public pedagogy to make the Wingspan retreat of artists and scholars. We revisit both Hofstadter’s formalistic and ahistorical conception of recursion and Irwin’s a/r/tography to ask how artistic practices and genres reflexively transform. Our research foregrounds disability collectivity without forsaking individuality, fragilities, strengths, differences of disability that require accommodation and communication beyond the binaries of ability/disability, and, purported ‘normalcy’ and ‘irregularity’. This article artistically and intellectually plays both with the unfolding of a/r/tography as recursive processes often in tension and contention with discourses of ‘ability and ‘normalcy’ that so bind who counts as valued human beings (or not) and whose semiotic excesses matter. Recursive transformations may become larger sociocultural movements of disability politics and collectives with history, agency and polyvocality. To respect such differences and yet exceed them in the span of wings is the provisional and mighty task of the disability arts, culture and public pedagogical movement.

     

    83–99

    Autism and outsiderism: The art of George Widener

    Alice Wexler

     

    Until recently, Outsider Art has escaped the examination that has been given other colonialist labels, such as Orientalism and Primitivism. Contemporary artists, such as George Widener, who slip in between mainstream and Outsider artworlds, pose lingering questions about this category. As an autistic artist, Widener also upends the misrepresentations about the spectrum in both the artworld and art education. I suggest that although Widener does not serve as a representative of the autistic or Outsider Art communities, he does serve as an example of entrenched notions of art and disability in these worlds. In this article, I ask how labels might be discarded so that we can enjoy artists who tell us about the neuro-diverse interior of individuals. Removed from outwardly imposed categories, we might re-imagine art in society and art in schools.

     

    101–114

    Using arts-based research to understand the sociocultural facets of having invisible disabilities in a normative society

    Alexandra Allen

     

    Disability studies is centred around the idea that disability is a social construction. Within the field of disability studies, however, many people with non-apparent disabilities are still underrepresented when it comes to the investigation of how social factors influence the formation of their own disability identity. Throughout this study, I use arts-based research to explore moments of critical disability awareness that highlight instances in which sociocultural factors have influenced my disability identity. By examining certain facets of critical disability studies that address issues of ableism, I am able to emphasize the ways in which critical autobiography can contribute to the discourse of having invisible disabilities within a normative society.

     

    115–128

    Splashes of light: Parents of children with dyslexia explore experiences through visual arts

    Jennifer Watt

     

    This article examines the critical disability praxis grounding a research study that explored the lived experiences of parents of children with dyslexia through in-depth interviews and arts-based focus group. The participants engaged in visual arts practices to create provoking images of the issues facing themselves or their families. This multimodal experience became an opportunity for the participants to raise awareness of the needs of families with learning disabilities. This article focuses on two parent artists who created visual pieces that shared a thematic focus on darkness and light. Both pieces contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges and difficulties that these parent-artists encountered, but also gave them the opportunity to voice the more affirmative and empowering aspects of their experiences.

     

    129–142

    Social interaction development in inclusive art rooms

    Kelly M. Gross

     

    The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of inclusive postmodern visual arts education for students with emotional disabilities (ED) in the area of social interaction development. This research focuses on the ability of students to build

    art skills and change social interaction skills through constructivist pedagogical approaches. Mixed-methods case studies were implemented over a period of two semesters with three students, three teachers and two high schools in the United States. Pedagogical approaches that emphasized student interaction and personal choice allowed students to effectively interact with peers and led to student engagement. The findings from this study indicate that over time the students in visual arts developed fluency and skills in artmaking, which led to confidence in their work and better peer relationships.

     

    Book Reviews

    143–149

     

    Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary School, Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler (eds) (2019)

    Katerina Ruedi Ray

     

    Inclusion and Intersectionality in Visual Arts Education, Kate Hatton (ed.) (2019)

    Ray Martin

     

    Kulturelle Bildung Durch Künstlerinnnen Und Künstler In Der Schule, Frank Jebe (2019)

    Folkert Haanstra

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 15 No. 3 (2019)

    ETA 15.3 Table of contents

     

    Editorial

     

    261–63

    Rita L. Irwin, Nadine Kalin and Anita Sinner

     

    Articles

     

    265–280

    ‘Rethinking the roles of the art educator as participatory artist, researcher and teacher (P)ART:A South African perspective’

    Merna Meyer and Lesley Wood

     

    As an art teacher educator in South Africa, I am concerned about three issues: (1) the low status of art as school subject, (2) the restriction of art as a subject for the talented few, and (3) the isolation of art from the lives and social realities of learners. These concerns prompted me to embark on a critical study of my own art didactical practices in teaching professional development to pre-service art teachers. I draw on qualitative data in the form of observations, visuals and reflective notes to present my living theory and positional stance about how such concerns can be addressed to enable students to become transformative, interdisciplinary leaders within schools through embodying the roles of participatory artists, researchers and teachers. The knowledge generated by my self-reflective practitioner inquiry contributes to framing professional development in art education and the vital role that art teachers could play to improve the status of art education as art becomes more recognized as a catalyst for transforming how people think and act in the world.

     

    281–295

    ‘Experiencing a space: Applying experiential methods to support the learning of art and design’

    Jaana Kärnä-Behm

     

    The purpose of this study is to promote the experiential learning (EL) method in the pedagogics of art and design in higher education. This article is based on a case study consisting of two pedagogical projects in interior design courses, the probing project and the multisensory space project, carried out between 2014 and 2016 with trainee teachers. Using the data from these projects I analyse using the qualitative content analysis method how and with what implications EL supports learning of

    art and design in higher education. The results show that EL was found to be inspiring and self-expressive, and was an unusual and motivating way to learn interior design. In a teacher education context EL gave students ideas about collaborative and EL-based methods of learning that could be applied to their own future teaching projects.

     

    Visual Essay

     

    297–308

    Relational connections through the space of learning: Exploring youths’ experiences of filmmaking with comics

    Julian Lawrence, Ching-Chiu Lin and Isin Can

     

    Youth filmmaking is considered as a relational practice through analysis of a case study that took place in an informal learning setting. Comics as a research form allows us to investigate and portray Sally’s story through a biographical style sequential narrative case study as we visualize her experience through various encounters with the space of learning. We identify characteristics of informal learning spaces that encourage youth to create meanings from filmmaking as media arts practice. This visual essay provides a contextual and unique outlook into Sally’s struggle and joy of learning, thus allowing teachers and educators to ponder the role of relationality in youth arts engagement.

     

     

    Article

     

    309–326

    ‘“Why did the photographer choose only dark-skinned kids?”: Young students’ reactions to Otherness in photographs’

    Ya’ara Gil-Glazer

     

    This article presents a case study of 2nd-grade Israeli students’ reactions to Otherness in photographs. The students participated in PhotoLingo, a unique intervention programme designed to promote thinking and language skills through a series of photo-based tasks. In the particular class, most of the students’ parents were Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union whose native language was not Hebrew, with average/below average socio-economic status. The study shows the students’ significant improvement in the use of thinking and language skills. Moreover, it highlights the ways in which the programme promoted the students’ social skills and enabled many of them to profoundly express well-considered ideas about Otherness, including reflections on their own sense of Otherness. These findings indicate the potential of employing photographs and photo-elicitation in stimulating discussions on cultural and social identities, differences and sense of belonging among children, and in enhancing their social awareness and sense of empathy.

     

    Visual Essay

     

    327–333

    ‘Using art to provoke: Interpreting Tammam Azzam’

    Amber Merucci

     

    This visual essay explores how art can become a classroom tool to discover, challenge and nurture discussions around identity and politics. How might students have a visceral engagement with concepts such as war, famine and political persecution when they may have never experienced these? What is the relationship between identity, war and politics? How might art provoke discussions on topical, provocative and controversial concepts? The above questions will be addressed through an exploration of Syrian artist Tammam Azzam’s artwork, which captures  personal experiences of, and sentiments on, war accompanied by questions that can assist in  provoking uncomfortable, authentic and supportive classroom dialogue.

     

    Article

     

    335–356

    ‘Engaging digital makers through interactive virtual art makerspaces: Possibilities and challenges in art education’

    Lilly Lu

     

    Recent maker movements have integrated many applications of digital technologies. However, the digital makerspace in virtual environments has not yet been fully addressed. Outside of schools, the sandbox type of Virtual World such as Minecraft and Opensim, is the popular platform for digital makers to experiment, share/exhibit and collaborate on creative ideas and outcomes with art, design and tech skills. In this article, I advocate how virtual environments can serve as additional digital/ virtual makerspaces to engage digital-generation makers by presenting the creative work of several groups of secondary and postsecondary students as critical digital makers in formal and informal school settings through my grant projects1 over ten years. I address the possibilities and challenges and make recommendations for implementing virtual art makerspaces for future contemporary art education.

     

    Visual Essay

     

    357–368

    ‘Curating with Ecologies of Girlhood’

    Brooke Anne Hofsess, Jasmine Ulmer, Jennie Carlisle and Shauna Caldwell

     

    In this visual essay we revisit a summer immersion, Ecologies of Girlhood. An array of women curators, storytellers, musicians, performers, artists, ecologists, scientists and scholars shared their practices in an intergenerational and interdisciplinary format with a group of girls between the ages of 7and 10. The immersion unfolded through a series of walking provocations sparked by local elements – indigenous plants, stories, poetry, ballads, sheroes, rivers, streetscapes and art. Exploring playful modes of curating, the girls gathered some of these moments and objects together, as last day overflowed into an exhibition with pop-up lectures, performances, and opportunities for making, learning and teaching. For us, curating with embraces our alongsideness with, rather than our acquisition of, what is ecologically threaded through girlhood, and offers a way of creatively placing and performing ourselves within the contributions of women in Appalachia, with the land and with one another.

     

    Article

     

    369–385

    ‘Creative reuse: The impact artmaking has on raising environmental consciousness’

    Sue Girak, Geoffrey W. Lummis and Jackie Johnson

     

    Education for Sustainability (EfS) seeks to initiate ways of preserving our planet beyond this current generation. Visual arts teachers can facilitate the students’ imagination to cultivate sustainable attitudes and behaviours. This research investigates whether 12 year olds would question their ecological footprint if they creatively reuse discarded materials in their artmaking. Engaging in activities with a sustainability focus, they recognized the power that aesthetic transformation has on discarded materials, triggering shifts in their attitudes and making connections between their actions and their impact on the ecosphere. This research has implications for teaching EfS, in that the power of aesthetic transformation through creative reuse has the capacity to invite reflection to motivate children to make environmentally sustainable choices.

     

    Visual Essay

     

    387–406

    ‘Youth connecting: Mental health and gardens’

    Kerry Renwick, Kathy Romes and Vanessa Lam

     

    Gardening has been associated with mental health and a sense of well-being. This article presents visual and written accounts generated by young people as they engaged in reflection through creative practice. The study was facilitated over a twelve month period that included the research team working secondary school aged youth engaged in growing plants, developing their skills in gardening and photography, and participated in two public art exhibitions of their work. The study used photovoice as a way to enable young people to ‘speak’ about their experiences of gardening whilst reflecting on aspects of their mental health – their well-being, resiliency, inclusion and a sense of belonging.

     

    Article

     

    407–423

    ‘The importance of the Goethe triangle in art education’

    Jurij Selan, Ursa Lesar and Ursula Podobnik

     

    When teaching about colour, including colour systems is an essential complement to engaging students through practical experience. This can be done using various colour models, each of which has explicatory strengths and limitations. An essential aspect of teaching and learning colour is the understanding of the historical contexts from which the knowledge of colour has emerged. In this article, we analyse one of the historically most puzzling and didactically significant models: the Goethe triangle. In art education, the historical aspect of the Goethe triangle is often mistakenly

    attributed or even ignored, which leads to its incorrect use in art education. We examine the historical perplexity of the Goethe triangle, the issues of colour that this model illustrates exceptionally well (tertiary colours and colour chords) and, referring to the textbooks for colour education in Slovenian primary schools, demonstrate the proper and improper art educational use of the Goethe triangle.

     

     

    Book Reviews

     

    425–431

     

    Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization and Capitalism, Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory Denicola (eds) (2016)

    Rachel Mason

     

    Crits, A Student Manual, Terry Barrett (2019)

    Bernadette Blair

     

    Handbook of Arts Education and Special Education: Policy, Research, and Practices, Jean

    Crockett and Sharon Malley (eds) (2018)

    Gill Nah

     

    What’s next? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art, Linda Weintraub (2019)

    Edwina fitzPatrick

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 15 No. 2 (2019)

    ETA 15.2 Table of contents

     

    Editorial

    129–131

    Rita L. Irwin, Nadine Kalin and Anita Sinner

     

    Articles

    133–47 ‘Modernism and reforms in contemporary Ghanian art education’

    Edwin K. Bodjawah, Samuel Nortey and Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu

     

    This study addresses the issues of art, art education and globalization and its implications for reforms in art education in Ghana. It examines the hold colonial education has had over art and its education in Ghana. In Ghana, there is scepticism among artists and art educators who appear to be at ease with western traditional formats and media, with relics of colonial arts education epitomized by ‘hand and eye’ training by rote. The study contextualizes art education and incorporates historical, regional, and global perspectives to dissect the intersections between Ghanaian art education and other contexts. Discussions revealed the need to design a curriculum that affords students and teachers a better understanding of the colonial education system, its objectives and implications, highlighting the need to embrace and utilize a wide range of media, formats and criticality of content which ought to penetrate teaching, learning and making art at all levels.

     

    149–64 ‘School-stakeholder-partnership enhancement strategies in the implementation of arts in Botswana basic education’

    Magdeline Chilalu Mannathoko

     

    School-stakeholder partnership is an effective approach in curriculum development and implementation as it promotes children’s academic success. Thus, this study examined the extent to which stakeholders participated in the promotion of the arts in two phases of Basic Education. The study investigated school-stakeholder partnership schemes that schools could adopt to nurture the arts status. Qualitative case study was embraced whereby eight teachers, two education officers (EOs), six arts experts and six entrepreneurs were interviewed. The study further examined the education policies to diagnose its status in promoting school-stakeholder partnership programmes. The study revealed that school-stakeholder partnership scheme is essential to effective schooling. The findings also indicated limited practice in school-stakeholder partnerships. As a result, the status of the subjects remains low as it is not effectively implemented due to teachers’ limited skills in the arts. The study recommends intensifying the levels of stakeholders’ participation in children’s academic work to facilitate improvements in arts education.

     

    165–81 ‘Drawing out the soul: Contemporary arts integration’

    Kristi Oliver, Maureen P. Hall, Jane Dalton, Libby Falk Jones, Vajra Watson, Catherine Hoyser and Nicholas Santavicca

     

    Arts integration, viewed holistically, values the arts as a conduit for the development of K-16 students into whole selves – bodies, minds and souls. Building on arguments for the importance of the arts in education made by Maxine Greene, John Dewey and others, this article puts the arts at the centre of learning, as a means of drawing out and restoring the soul to humanize education. We provide examples for ways arts integration is modelled and applied across English and education, art education, and English as a second language (ESL); our work is interdisciplinary and intersectional. This transformational work reveals possibilities for educating active members of a democratic society through the development of imagination, creativity and expression. Integrating a variety of arts, including visual art, photography, storytelling and poetry-writing, among others, can make these developments visible. We see this arts integration work as drawing out the soul.

     

    183–200 ‘Utilizing contemporary art forms in the primary after-school: An artist-teacher-researcher perspective’

    Nadezda Blagoeva

    This article discusses the application of the integrative approach to teaching art to primary-school students in after-school activities from the teacher’s perspective. The described case study is based on the theoretical assumption that contemporary art forms are integrative in their nature and are therefore a suitable tool for knowledge integration because they have potential to make the relations between different objects and phenomena more visible. The research questions, addressed in the article, are related to the role of the artist-teacher-researcher in the teaching-learning process in the visual arts classroom and the pedagogical outcomes of applying artistic action research to teaching visual arts through contemporary art forms. An action research was conducted by the artist-teacher-researcher in an international primary after-school environment, and semiotic analysis of the collected verbal and visual data was performed to demonstrate how conceptualization of artistic ideas leads to knowledge construction.

     

    201–15 ‘Youth on the edge of society and their participation in community art projects’

    Anne Mette W Nielsen and Niels Ulrik Sørensen

     

    A growing number of research studies emphasize that art projects make a difference for youth on the edge of society in relation to social inclusion, increased well-being and stronger relations to formal education/employability. However, while these studies present inspiring cases and convincingly point to the significance of involving young people in art practices, they often seem less focused on analysing the conditions constituting a positive difference. Based on a recent study, this article introduces six core elements present in young people’s accounts about how art can work across art forms and projects. The approach thus proposes a shift from a focus on validating the positive effects of art projects to a discussion of the defining practices, when youth on the edge of society engage in community art projects.

     

    217–34 ‘Creative convergent culture: Practice to profession’

    Terre Layng Rosner

     

    Two aims stem from the neopragmatist perspective employed in this research. The first is identifying and defining a creative convergent culture embedded in contemporary professions blossoming from visual communication technological improvements. The second is the challenges faced by creative educators trying to keep pace with this culture populated by technologically, organically educated students and incorporating both into their curricular and higher education structures. By collecting and interpreting data gleaned from creative professional interviews and a nationally (United States) distributed, post-secondary, creative educator survey, I was able to unravel the ideologies in disparate but intimately related academic fields, such as graphic design and mass communication. I found that the meta-disciplinary space of media arts (MA) encompasses student learning to navigate and produce informed aesthetics. Consequently, graduates who enter the creative professions are most successful if they are able to research problems, competently write and ethically design.

     

    235–42 ‘In the flow of art making: Seniors improve their well-being’

    Lucy Mugambi and Ching-Chiu Lin

     

    This visual essay documents activities conducted during a workshop in an independent living facility in Vancouver, British Columbia. The workshop provided seniors with an opportunity to create sock monkeys as an avenue to engage with various materials in space and time. We illuminate the impact that the visual art making activity had among seniors in this retirement centre. We observe that completion is not an end of learning, instead it is a state of continuing change that invites the seniors to explore possibilities.

     

    243–48 ‘Understanding art as experience through painting’

     

    John Dewey’s ([1934] 2005) Art as Experience, and Maxine Greene’s (2001), Variations on a Blue Guitar, are seminal texts of art education. I experienced my own comprehension of these classics through reading as well as my own art-making process. Working through tension and resistance, and arriving at a synthesis with my own ideas, I gained a depth of understanding at which I could not have arrived without also experiencing and learning through the process of painting. This visual essay provides a glimpse into the act of art-making as an emergent and integral part of the learning process to inform how art education students may reach a fulfilling conclusion to integrating foundational texts with their work as art educators in order to open a world of possibilities for their students.

     

    Book Reviews

    249–55

    Feminism and Queer in Art Education, Anniina Suominen and Tiina Pusa (eds) (2018)

    Lampela Laurel

     

    Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art, Martin Patrick (2018)

    Marek Wasilewski

     

    Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Susan Orr and Alison Shreeve (2019)

    Nicholas Houghton

     

     

  • International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 15 No. 1 (2019)

    ETA 15.1 Table of contents

     

    Editorial

    3–14 ‘The Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy: Looking for the bigger picture’

    Andrea Kárpáti and Diederik Schönau

     

    Articles

    15–26 ‘Metamorphosis of visual literacy: From ‘reading images’ to a critical visual education’

    Luis Errázuriz

     

    In this review some ideas about the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy (CEFR-VL) are critically discussed from a South American perspective. First of all it is observed that the relationship to the visible world should also include nature and ecological issues. As to the concept of ‘visual literacy’, its linguistic and economic overtones are criticized from the point of view of visual education, as well as for its sociological implications. Finally the notion of competency and sub-competencies are discussed. The origin of ‘competency’ in an economic and technocratic model of curriculum runs the risk that in visual education the non-measurable might get lost. The CEFR-VL also runs the risk of becoming a rigid, prescriptive format, thus leaving little space for other views. It is hoped for that the professionals in the domain will transform the CEFR-VL into a valuable tool capable of offering multiple ways of seeing. Thus the concept of ‘visual literacy’ will give space to the notion of ‘visual education’. This would be a most welcome metamorphosis of the domain.

     

    27–33 ‘The CEFR-VL and its suitability to art education in Nigeria – a review’

    Sewanu Peter Gandonu

     

    Research has shown that pictures are easier to recognize and process than words; art as a subject is taught using both words and images. The introduction of the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy (CEFR-VL) is developed around the concept of ‘competencies’, which is currently used in all school subjects, art included. It is a timely initiative and a necessity for other regions. But does the depth of this framework in content and context make it applicable to other regions outside Europe, given that the framework was developed using European curricula as a starting point and that the acronym of the framework clearly denotes its source? Its suitability and workability to curricula outside Europe − particularly Nigeria − therefore becomes an issue to discuss. This review aims to highlight the concept of 'visual literacy' and the need to embrace it in the teaching and learning of art; to discuss the structure and content of the CEFR-VL; and to confer its workability in the context of art teaching in an African country, in this case Nigeria.

     

     

    35–50 ‘The enduring politics of Art education: The Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy – Prototype’

    Alexandra Lasczik

     

    This article is a discussion that replies to a generous call from European colleagues to evaluate and respond from an Australian perspective, to a new Art1 education framework in the area of visual literacy. This call also asks whether such a framework is relevant to Art education in the Australian context. The initial impression of the framework from an Australian perspective is that it is a useful if not complex attempt to generate a common language and understandings in the domain of visual education across and through the multifarious linguistic and cultural entities that comprise the European continent. This is an ambitious undertaking and a courageous one, given the complexities of the domain of Art education, and one that is embedded in the on-going politics of contemporary education generally and contemporary Art education specifically. The structure of this essay will be to first explain and contextualize the framework as I have viewed it so that the reader is oriented to the discussion. This is followed by a dialogue on its relevance initially and philosophically to Art Education as a domain more generally, and then specifically towards Art education in the Australian context. Finally, I offer some humble comments upon possible further developmental elements of the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy (CEFR-VL).

     

     

    51–61 ‘A review of the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy – Prototype (CEFR-VL)’

    Fiona Blaikie

     

    In the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy (CEFR-VL) the researchers present competencies for teaching, learning and assessing art, conceptualized as visual literacy, offering constructive possibilities for modifications and implementation in Europe and potentially globally. The CEFR-VL is comparable with other international approaches to framing curriculum and assessment approaches, including the General Certificate in Secondary Education in England, International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement, the National Standards created by the National Art Education Association in the United States, and design and craft focused practices in Europe. Given multiple incarnations of art, design and craft making worldwide, articulating what visual literacy means, along with re-shaping and revising the framework in an ongoing way, offers a helpful infrastructure for use by the global community of art educators, creators, students and scholars who are committed to the visual and to visual sensitivity, and to situated meanings and interpretations of visual and material cultures of production and consumption.

     

     

    63–74 ‘A discussion of the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy and the American National Arts Standards’

    1. Robert Sabol

     

    Identifying agreed-upon content and competencies necessary for learning in the arts has been an ongoing challenge. With publication of the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy by the European Network of Visual Literacy and publication of the American National Arts Standards by the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, two models for achieving visual literacy and learning in the arts were established. This article summarizes essential components of both models and then describes similarities and differences between the two models. The article concludes with a discussion of key factors in assessment of visual literacy and learning in the arts.

     

     

     75–83 ‘Observations about the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy’ Marie Fulková

     

    Identifying agreed-upon content and competencies necessary for learning in the arts has been an ongoing challenge. With publication of the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy by the European Network of Visual Literacy and publication of the American National Arts Standards by the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, two models for achieving visual literacy and learning in the arts were established. This article summarizes essential components of both models and then describes similarities and differences between the two models. The article concludes with a discussion of key factors in assessment of visual literacy and learning in the arts.

     

     

     85–94 ‘Acquiring visual competencies with situation-based assignments’

    Franz Billmayer

     

    This article reacts to the current debate on the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy. From the position of theory and practice of Czech art education, this article comments on several aspects of the framework as a curricular document, and presents its potential interpretations and application in the context of ongoing changes to the Educational Framework, Art and Culture Domain in the Czech Republic. The commentary deals with the issue of international and Czech terminology, shift in contents, the structural model, cognitivist approaches in art education, the concept of an image and visuality, competency, and presents partial findings of recent research into the occurrence of the concept of visual literacy in school curriculums in the Czech Republic.

     

     

     95–100 ‘Renaming the framework: Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Competency’

    Diederik Schönau and Andrea Kárpáti

     

    This article presents a situation-based, user-oriented methodology and tool for the development of assignments aimed at the enhancement of visual competency. Art educators are invited to identify relevant situations in life that today’s learners are likely to be faced with now or in the future and use them as a basis to define competencies that the learners will need in order to act appropriately. This approach to competency models appears to be effective, as it is the task of education to prepare learners to deal with situations through acquiring competencies. Components and possible uses of the ‘situation wheel’, the tool for the design of authentic assignments, may facilitate the interpretation of the Common European Framework for Visual Competency (CEFR-VC) for everyday teaching praxis.

     

     

    Visual Essays

     101–104 ‘Using images for commanding, requesting and begging’

    Franz Billmayer

     

    In visual communication, images may be used to command, request or beg. The examples of non-smoking signs, shown in this essay, indicate how these different emphases work in practice. The manner of a visual utterance depends on the motives and formal qualities. The examples are ideas for constructing assignments in art education to foster visual literacy.

     

    105–114 ‘Information vs enigma – exploring students’ understanding of artistic and  conventional visual communication’

    Lucia Leben

     

    This visual essay discusses how visual communication strategies in the context of art differ from visual communication strategies in everyday media. A quantitative visual content analysis of 23 art exhibition leaflets and 47 leaflets advertising everyday life events showed that readability is a significantly more important feature of conventional visual communication, whereas artistic visual communication tends to emphasize aesthetics and a sense of enigma. 322 students between the ages of 10 and 18 years participated in an online-survey designed to investigate their preconceptions about art and to measure their competencies in discriminating and naming characteristics for artistic communication strategies in opposition to conventional communication strategies with an emphasis on pictures. The students’ awareness of aesthetic communication strategies increased after completing the task of comparing and categorizing leaflets from artistic and other contexts.

     

     

     

    Book Reviews

     115–117 Cadre Européen Commun de Référence pour la Visual Literacy – Prototype, Common

    European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy – Prototype, Gemeinsamer Europäischer Referenzrahmen für Visual Literacy – Prototyp,  Ernst Wagner and Diederik Schönau (eds) (2016)

     

    117–120 Visual Proficiency: A Perspective on Art Education, Kunibert Bering and Rolf Niehoff (2015)

     

    120–123 Toward a More Visual Literacy: Shifting the Paradigm with Digital Tools and Young Adult

    Literature,  Jennifer S. Dail, Shelbie Witte and Steven T. Bickmore (eds) (2018)

  • Image of art studio table

    International Journal of Education Through Art
    Vol. 14 No. 3 (2018)

    EDITORIAL

    Rita L. Irwin, Nadine M. Kalin and Anita Sinner

    1. 271–73

     

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Process and experience: Theory and practice considered from an art-researcher/educator’s perspective

    Michael Croft

    1. 275–92

     

    The article discusses three projects of artwork. The first two projects are the author’s own and that of a 2015–16 fourth-year BFA advisee student concerning the question of relationship between visual/material process and one’s sentient experience. From a researcher/educator’s point of view, the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead is considered in relation to the student’s work and aspects of the metapsychological theory of Lacan form the basis of consideration of the author’s work. Whitehead’s theory has a generative role in the article. Such theory provides articulation of the process of feeling and is cited in relation to an art-educational methodology for conducting projects. The artwork of a 2017 advisee student is then discussed in illustration of a point concerning time in the Lacanian context, as well as providing another example of the methodology in practice. The author explains his own artwork in support of an idea that links it with each of the students’ concerns, where the process preferences the developmental ambiguity of practice-based research. The article may be of relevance to art and design educators and their students working at the intersection of theory and practice.

     

    Curating as a dialogue-based strategy in art education

    Raphael Vella

    1. 293–303

     

    Contemporary artists are increasingly engaging in curatorial work and strategies while curators interpret the exhibition as an artistic medium in its own right. The teaching of art in schools and art education programmes in universities, however, does not often integrate curating as an activity or field of study within more conventional studio classes or methodologies for teaching and learning art. After briefly outlining a history of key artist-curators, this article suggests that curating – particularly

    its collaborative, social qualities – can enrich art pedagogies and curricula, and proposes four curatorial processes that could positively expand the remit of art education. These processes are understood as integral aspects of art-making and focus on the development of a pedagogy of dialogue, creating dialogues between different artworks and objects, dialogues between curatorial positions, dialogues between works of art and various publics, and finally, facilitating the etymological notion of ‘care’ within the art class.

     

    The Title I narrative: Connecting cultural and critical awareness through the arts

    Aimee Herring and Tracey Hunter-Doniger

    1. 305–17

     

    This article discusses a case study that investigated preservice generalist teachers in a visual and performing arts methods class. It was revealed that three themes reoccurred throughout this course that centred on children of low socio-economic status. These themes included reaching the Title I students, connecting through cultural awareness and critical awareness through the arts. The significance and implications of these themes demonstrate there is a need for art education methods courses to explicitly address these issues and provide avenues for preservice generalists to enhance the learning of their future students.

     

    Reflective sketchbook journals for art education students in Thailand

    Khanobbhorn Sangvanich and Sumalee Chinokul

    1. 319–37

     

    This study examines the use of a reflective sketchbook journal (RSJ). The research focuses on developing self-learning habits by using journals for academic observation and applying theory to practice. Data were collected in mixed-methods from 12 third-year undergraduate art education students in Thailand. Results found that students were effective in observation, comparison and analysis of philosophies of different schools – from art activities, to the physical layout and scheduling of those places visited. The sketchbook aided reflective thinking and utilized many art techniques, highlighting the relationships between content, application of theories, diagramming and mind mapping. Approximately 75 per cent of the experimental group described the content and applied theories in text format and sketches. In addition, students reflected that jotting down content with personal words enhanced their ability for remembering, understanding and applying knowledge. However, some students believed that the RSJ is an important and useful tool that they intended to use again in other disciplines.

     

    Reconsidering the purposes of art education: Insights from a 2014 questionnaire in Chile

    Luis Hernán Errázuriz, Guillermo Marini and Isidora Urrutia

    1. 339–52

     

    The main objective of this article is to describe and analyse the importance that elementary teachers attribute to diverse purposes of art education based on an investigation carried out during 2014, in the Los Lagos Region, located in southern Chile. First, the article illustrates some considerations of the aims of art education. Then, it presents the methodology used in the investigation. Next, two tables

    are discussed: one on the importance that teachers assign to purposes according to the school’s administrative dependence (public, subsidized and private) and the other related to the importance that teachers attribute to purposes by zone, province and type of art teacher. Finally, the article concludes by identifying some findings that may be significant for teachers, school authorities and teacher education institutions.

     

    A new tool for developmental assessment based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy – an international usability study

    Talita Groenendijk, Folkert Haanstra and Andrea Kárpáti

    1. 352–78

     

    What competences in visual literacy should students and European citizens in general master to be able to participate in contemporary society? This central question was addressed by the European Network of Visual Literacy (ENViL). This international community of experts developed a structure of sixteen subcompetences: the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy. Based on this framework, we developed a tool for self-assessment in secondary education: the visual rubrics. This tool was tested in several countries. The current article describes the evaluation of the criteria included in the tool and students’ comprehension of the tool as a self-assessment system. The consequences for improved rubrics are discussed.

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

     

    Studio conversations

    Alison Shields

    1. 379–84

     

    In 2014, I embarked on a cross-Canada journey, visiting artists in their studios. Through interviews with artists and photograph documentation of the studios, I sought to understand the creative processes that occur within these spaces through art making. This visual essay draws from metaphors used by artists to describe a studio alongside photographs that I took to reveal my visual exploration of the space and my visual analysis and interpretation of the metaphors. Through the use of these metaphors alongside the photographs, I propose that a studio is more than a room, but rather a way of thinking. Furthermore, I reflect on how we might embrace these metaphors to imagine ways of fostering a creative educational space.

     

    The alfombras: Creative acts of cultural memory in art education

    Heidi C. Powell

    1. 385–92

     

    Having lived in Guatemala in the late 1980s and then revisiting La Antigua, Guatemala, several times over the past few years, I have come to recognize the strength of art-making as a material form of cultural memory in study abroad programming. La Antigua (The Ancient) is home to one of the most amazing, yet temporary displays of artistic craftsmanship in Central America, the alfombras of Semana Santa (Carpets of Holy Week) (Figure 1). I believe that situating oneself in creative

    community settings in other countries embodies Taylor’s (2002) notion of vital acts of transfer, where action and engagement transmits social knowledge, historical and cultural memory, and a sense of identity. This builds cultural resonance through ‘arts-based memory pedagogy’ (Powell 2017: 29), where participants find common ground in a new culture through unfamiliar acts or ways of art-making, bridging historical knowledge and contemporary practice while learning in art education. In

    this essay, I ask how can participating in immersive experiences as acts of cultural memory in other countries develop cultural resonance enhancing spiritual, cultural and community dialogues in art education?

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Relate North: Culture, Community and Communication, Timo Jokela and Glen Coutts (eds) (2017)

    Herminia Din

    1. 393–95

     

    Life at the End of Life: Finding Words Beyond Words, Marcia Brennan (2017)

    Mary Stokrocki

    1. 395–97

     

    Who Runs the Artworld: Money, Power and Ethics, Brad Buckley and John Conomos (eds) (2017)

    Dean Kenning

    1. 397–99

     

     

  • Vol. 14 No. 2 (2018)

    EDITORIAL

    Anita Sinner, Rita L. Irwin and Nadine M. Kalin

    pp. 141–43

     

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Young children’s experiences with contemporary art

    David Bell, Helen Bell, Lyn Collins and Alicia Spencer

    pp. 145–59

     

    This ethnographic study describes how an in-depth preschool learning pathway developed around children’s investigations into a contemporary artist. It found that learning with Yayoi Kusama’s art favoured habits of exploration, reflection, revisitation and development of ideas, and enriched children’s visual awareness, inclusive art learning conversations and their learning in mathematics, literacy and visual art. It argues that sustained learning pathways, scaffolded media investigations, first-hand engagements with real artworks and well-informed teachers can enhance curiosities, independent inventive dispositions and confident art experiences in the early years.

     

     

    Paradox of ‘pictorial turn’: Reconsidering the interaction between drawing and linguistic activity

    Kazuhiro Ishizaki and Wenchun Wang

    pp. 161–77

     

    A paradox of ‘pictorial turn’ seems to be occurring, as we are struggling to cope with the gap between the wealth of visual images and our ability to handle the experience relevantly. This study aims to investigate the relationship between drawing and linguistic activities in a process of appreciating artworks, and to discuss the significance of developing one’s abilities. A longitudinal study was conducted to integrate

    drawing, narrative writing and short essays for four years starting in the fourth grade. There is a significant correlation among those activities, and the correlation increases as the grade advances. The interaction has facilitated the students’ development, and provided the means to be familiar with imagery recollection and observation. Most importantly, a well-functioned interaction gives them opportunities to generate flexible thinking and metaphoric cognition. In preadolescence, when drawing activity slows and linguistic activity intensifies, facilitating the interaction is significant to tackle the issue of updated competencies.

     

    An analysis of creative effect on interdisciplinary practices in art education

    Hyungsook Kim

    pp. 179–96

     

    The conventional belief that arts education is individual-based and pure no longer holds any meaning. An interdisciplinary approach in this field is becoming more widespread. The consilience between the arts, humanities and social sciences, the arts and the natural sciences, and the arts and art education is recognized as enabling more creativity and thinking skills that are more integrated. Thus, art education has emerged as a core pillar in producing future talents. This study emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary practices for ensuring the creativity enhancement of the learner through art education, which aims to produce creative talents. Therefore, we developed and deployed interdisciplinary practices designed for sixth graders from August 2013 to January 2014. We assessed the learner’s creativity before and after

    using Language A and figures from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) in order to verify its effect on the correlation among five lower creativity factors. The results of the research questions showed a significant effect of interdisciplinary practices on the development of learners’ creativity. Figure A of the TTCT Type A language consisted of five lower factors of creativity: fluency, originality, abstractness

    of the title, delicacy and premature closure. The five resistance causes to these factors demonstrated a significant difference. Finally, this study maintained that the interdisciplinary practice of an art-based curriculum could promote students’ capacity by fostering creativity and providing the basis for an assessment method in contemporary art education.

     

    Why am I here? A self-study of an international art education student lost in transition

    Seonjeong Yi

    pp. 197–210

     

    This article is an arts-based inquiry into the often overlooked stories of international graduate students (IGSs) in art education. In this case, I draw on my experiences as a Korean graduate student in Canada, rendered through visuals and text. As part of my ongoing reflective process, I approached this project through life writing and drawing as a means to articulate my understandings of the moments within my first

    year in the programme. The questions that guided my research include the following: What kind of academic adaptation issues do IGSs experience? Does a personal story provide useful insight into the phenomena of the academic adaptation process? And how do visual narratives as arts-based educational research (ABER) provide a rendering of the experience of an IGS? With this intent, this article examines diverse ways that help to broaden and deepen the discourses of international students in educational studies.

     

    Experiencing and understanding the arts as a compulsory final examination subject in the Netherlands: Purpose, problems, revision and effects

    Diederik Schonau

    pp. 211–19

     

    The Netherlands is probably the only country in the world where all students in secondary education have to take a compulsory final exam in experiencing and understanding of the arts. This exam, named Cultural and Artistic Education (CKV), concentrates on the active experience and appreciation of live professional performances, presentations and public presence of the arts. After its introduction, in 1999, this exam subject faced some serious problems and was almost removed from the exam system. Thanks to a strong lobby of art teachers, art institutions and art organizations, the subject was saved from annihilation, but only on the condition the examination programme was completely revised and made acceptable to the national Parliament and Ministry. This article informs about the goals of this subject exam (CKV) and the ways these goals should or could be met, the history of its introduction, the difficulties arising after its implementation, the way these difficulties have been addressed by the Ministry and community of arts teachers, and the new examination programme that has become effective as of August 2017. The article also gives information about research done on the impact of CKV on student learning and on the participation of former students in cultural activities after they left school.

     

    Virgin in the art classroom: Finnish pre-service teachers reconfiguring devotional images

    Asta Kuusinen

    pp. 221–37

     

    The purpose of this article is to present art education projects at the University of Eastern Finland that have applied phenomenon-based approach to learning. Phenomenon-based pedagogy (learning by topics) serves as the founding principle for the current national core curriculum for basic education in Finland.1 With two

    Virgin Mary images as a source of inspiration, the art projects aimed at encouraging Finnish pre-service teachers to engage with and critically reflect upon the ways that different religious cultures encode their values and belief systems through the images they idolize. The article suggests that pre-service teachers, while generally open-minded and interested in knowing more about other cultures, simultaneously tend

    to reaffirm conventional national narratives and values through their artworks and essays. The topic is controversial but should not be excluded from art education since in increasingly multicultural societies like Finland, teachers need a better understanding of religious visual practices and their diverse meanings. The art projects show an example of how phenomenon-based art education can respond to this need

    by enriching students’ learning experiences across cultural differences and disciplinary borders.

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

     

    Image ecologies: Infrastructures of visual art education in Sweden and Estonia

    Ingrid Forsler

    pp. 239–46

     

    This essay is a visual interpretation of the media ecologies of visual art education in Sweden and Estonia. As the title of the article suggests, an ecology of visual art education means infrastructures for accessing, producing, showing and sharing images. The study is empirically informed by social network analysis conducted in online communities and by interviews with teachers who are active in those communities.

    Graphs of activity and connectedness in online communities are included in a media ecology model, based on the teacher interviews. The model visually relates online collaboration with material technologies,

    such as classroom computers or cameras, and different forms of governance, such as curricula.

    The essay attempts to contribute to the existing literature regarding the relation between technologies and educational practice by combining digital methods with media ecology and infrastructure theory, and methodologically by using visual methods for interpretation.

     

    In the context of public pedagogy: Transit

    Nurhayat Gunes

    pp. 247–56

     

    I came to Vancouver, Canada as a visiting Ph.D. student to study a/r/tography at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The multinational and multicultural nature of the city of Vancouver became an unexpected learning resource during my stay. I soon became consumed by my own everyday learning and in time, I began to understand the power of public pedagogy, or in other words, those informal learning

    opportunities outside institutional forms of learning. In this visual essay, I examine the concept of transit as one dimension of public pedagogy. This concept emerged from photographs and anecdotes taken during my everyday use of public transit. I used a/r/tography as a practice-based art education research methodology to guide my work. Transit became a bodied and embodied form of living inquiry as I investigated the very nature of public transit as public pedagogy.

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Drawing as Language: Celebrating the Work of Bob Steele, Marni J. Binder and Sylvia Kind (eds) (2017)

    Vanessa Barnett

    pp. 257–59


    Künstlerische Bildung: Theorie und Praxis einer künstlerischen Kunstpädagogik, Carl-Peter Buschkühle (2017)

    Diederik Schönau

    pp. 260–64


    Arts Education and Curriculum Studies: The Contributions of Rita L. Irwin, Mindy R. Carter

    and Valerie Triggs (eds) (2018)

    Jill Smith

    pp. 264–66

  • Vol. 14 No. 1 (2018)

    EDITORIAL

     

    Speculative Realism(s) objects/matter/entanglements of art and design education

    Adetty Pérez de Miles and Nadine M. Kalin

    pp. 3-12

     

     

    ARTICLE

     

    Frottage as inquiry

    Maya Pindyck

    pp. 13-25

     

    This article explores the pedagogical and methodological implications of the artsbased practice of frottage: a process of ‘finding’ images by making, and then erasing, an uneven ground. What could this arts practice mean for both research and classroom teaching? The author offers frottage as a mode of inquiry that resists closure, destabilizes solid understandings and treats matter as dynamic energy. Exploring the educational resonances of this practice, the author rubs against her article’s academic language with both written erasures made from the paper itself and visual erasures created by the author from disparate surfaces, times and spaces.

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAY

     

    Towards an immanent read: Being with wool as text

    Daniel T. Barney, Roni Jo Draper, Rachel E. Blakely, Leea L. Bryant, Natalie R. Bryso, Brianne E. Bueno, Alexander H. Chopelas, Philip L. Conte, Eliza F. Crofts, HannahC. Cummings, Rachel M. DeLeeuw, Kandree M. Eldredge, Moira A. Facer, Camille H. Forsyth, Kallie A. Hancock, MorganP. Harris, Jacob C. Hatch, Caitlin G. Kingi, Hannah Landeen, Caroline P. McCann, Chloe J. McGrath, Nichole M. Mendez, Madison M. Money, Cayla R. Murdoch, Claire A. Murdoch, Hailey S. Packer, Julia L. Petersen, Ryan M. Romanovitch, Micah M. Sanders, Sydney A. Sheffield, Mikaela R. Sircable, Steven G. Stallings, Savannah Steele, Sarah B. Stewart, Madeline A. Taylor, Rocio Vasquez and Whitney K. Webster

    pp. 27-34

     

    Two faculty and 35 students in a beginning art theory course at Brigham Young

    University engage with speculative realism(s), new materialism and object oriented

    ontology literature as they wash, spin and knit sheep wool in relation to Coffen’s

    notion of an immanent read.

     

     

    ARTICLE

     

    An object-oriented curriculum theory for STEAM: Boundary shifters, materiality and per(form)ing 3D thinking

    Aaron D. Knochel

    pp. 35-48

     

    How do we conceptualize transdisciplinary curriculum development and what might be the curriculum theory that is driving it? In the following I pursue the development of an object-oriented curriculum theory that assembles material agencies that form praxis in curriculum development. I am particularly interested in the potential of a science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) curriculum that allows arts educators and their disciplinary counterparts an opening to think curriculum anew. I focus on various graphics software from a range of STEAM practices by following their material agency as boundary shifters so that we might come to know the accumulations, translations and mediators doing things important to studio and laboratory practice. In building an object-oriented curriculum theory, I offer three theorems: looking for the immutable image, gathering the materiality of data-bodies and per(form)ing three-dimensional thinking.

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAY

     

    Blueprinting a poetics of materiality

    Brooke A. Hofsess

    pp. 49-58

     

    How might positioning artistic practice as reflective limit the production of knowledge in art education by positioning theory ahead of practice, language over

    material, who above what? And, what might be done instead? Blueprinting theories

    with preservice art teachers illuminates such questions and explores ‘what is possible to see and say’ differently in art teacher preparation. Emboldened by contemporary materialisms, this visual essay exposes the poetic tangle where preservice teachers may have already pencilled in and sketched out some tentative ways of knowing/being/doing art education. The vibrant intra-activity of cyanotype photography attempts to eclipse this insistent hold on artmaking as reflective practice – just long enough that something different might be seen, said, felt, imagined in art teacher preparation.

     

     

    ARTICLE

     

    Círculo de Investigación Artística: New materialist pedagogies of resistance

    Mariana Pérez Bobadilla

    pp. 58-78

     

    In response to artistic training that is overly technical, the Circle of Artistic Research

    (C.A.R.) was organized to rearticulate the relationship of theory to art production. Their work helps understand how art education can extend the arguments of new materialism by creating alternative research formats that restore the relevance

    to the material. This article argues that the strategies in practice as research

    that the C.A.R. adopts emphasize materiality without neglecting content in a mattermeaning entanglement, with a collective and rhizomatic organization, and producing situated knowledge. The interpretative method is framed by the new materialisms of the school of Rosi Braidotti promoting critique and creativity as a form of resistance

     

    En respuesta a una formación excesivamente técnica para el arte, el Circulo

    de investigación artística se organizó para rearticular la teoría a la producción.

    Como un ejemplo de cómo la educación artística extiende los argumentos

    del nuevo materialismo para crear formatos de investigación alternativos

    que devuelvan la relevancia a lo material, este artículo propone que la estrategia

    de practica artística como investigación que el Círculo de investigación

    artística adopta enfatiza la materialidad sin desatender el contenido. Manifestando la continuidad entre materia y sentido, a través de una organización

    rizomatica y produciendo conocimiento situado. El método interpretativo parte del

    nuevo materialismo de la escuela de Rosi Braidotti promoviendo la crítica y la

    creatividad como formas de resistencia.

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAY

     

    Paper presentation: Reconfiguring objects, reconfiguring meanings

    Wade Tillett

    pp. 79-90

     

    This project takes up the intersection of medium and content as a place where they

    can radically reconfigure one another. The entire process is a sort of unlearning;

    the habitual use of paper is disrupted. Physicality and meaning merge and emerge.

    Readers’ doings interact and transform both the meaning and background – the

    content (meaning) that traditionally would be simply re-presented via sheets of paper (background). Troubling just a small, habitual action leads to remarkably different modes of knowing and being. Action, object, meaning, reader and author (re)form tentative self-altering assemblages. These assemblages spiral out in new directions, moving beyond the confines of authorial intent. (Re)new(ed) configurations of self, meaning and object spring forth, opening themselves to different vectors. In order to explore these possibilities, I ask that you print out this article double-sided and cut/ fold/etc. as instructed.

     

     

    ARTICLE

     

    Becoming a work of art: Collaboration, materiality and posthumanism in visual arts education

    David Rousell and Fiona Fell

    pp. 91-110

     

    Collaboration has become a core aspect of teaching, learning and research in university art departments, especially as contemporary artists have increasingly turned to collective and socially engaged studio practices. Despite this, hylomorphic approaches to arts education continue to position matter as a passive substance to be shaped by the artist(s) in service of linguistic discourse. In this article, we ask how a new materialist approach to collaboration might disrupt humanist ontologies of visual arts education in the university. We first draw on posthumanist writings to re-compose collaboration in ways that are responsive to the specificity of material entanglements as they are enacted within an ecology of studio practices. From there we work diagrammatically across a collaborative ‘data event’ of art in the making, drawing on a year-long participatory study with a cohort of third-year art students. In the final section, we develop propositions for collaboration as a transversal practice of ‘becoming a work of art’.

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAY

     

    Ontology ofthe Pee-Cock Gen2 3-in-1

    Kevin Jenkins

    pp. 111-16

     

    Between the tensions of Jane Bennett’s human-nonhuman heterogeneous assemblage and Ian Bogost’s alienness of things to each other and humans, the author questions the agency of a prosthesis by speculating on its daily experiences and its thing-power (Bennett) on the user. As a visual essay in the form of shaped prose, the thingness of textual components becomes evident as their proximity and isolation across the surface of the page or at page breaks forces the reader to move back and forth between content and form. Thus, we may also consider how words are both manipulated in the construction of assemblages and have the power to shape ideas and aesthetic ideals that necessitate the existence of some objects, including prostheses

     

     

    ARTICLE

     

    Burning cotton: Art education and the unemptied dustbin of history

    Albert Stabler

    pp. 117-29

     

    Developed by Graham Harman, the philosophical approach known as ‘objectoriented ontology’ examines reality on the basis of objects. Harman has referenced an image of burning cotton, which he uses to illustrate the point that, as objects, fire and cotton interact without changing the essential nature of either object. In keeping with Harman’s speculative and poetic approach, I invoke as an example the incidences of cotton being burned during the American Civil War, undertaken first by the Confederacy and later by Union soldiers, including freed slaves; the slaves followed the model of Haitian revolutionaries who famously burned sugarcane fields. Using Harman’s ideas about objects, and drawing on one of his major influences, Bruno Latour, I relate the image of burning cotton to other acts of destruction, including repeated attempts made by African Americans to overcome the legacy of being reduced to the status of objects and repeated attempts by whites to sustain this legacy. I link this history to my decade-long tenure as a full-time art teacher on the southeast side of Chicago, and discuss education in an apartheid school system as a conflicted and asymmetrical transaction mediated by objects with distinct boundaries and roles. In closing, I argue for a consideration of objects by art teachers thinking about their students’ historical context, and an examination of their own role in the community as teachers.

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Arts: Enabling Playful Experiences, Mona Sakr (2017)

    Kathy Browning

    pp. 131-32

     

    Art and Technology: The Practice and Influence of Art and Technology in Education, Luisa Menano and Patricia Fidalgo (eds) (2017)

    Andrea Kárpáti

    pp. 133-34

     

    Teaching Painting: How can Painting be Taught in Art Schools?, Ian Hartshorne, Donal Moloney and Magnus Quaife (eds) (2016)

    Ava Serjouie-Scholz

    pp. 135-36

  • Vol. 13 No. 3 (2017)

    EDITORIAL

    Rita L. Irwin, Nadine Kalin and Anita Sinner

    pp. 281–83

     

     

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Effective approaches to heritage education: Raising awareness through fine art practice

    Robert Potočnik

    pp. 285–94

     

    By learning about the problems of heritage preservation (conservation and protection of cultural heritage) and by creating fine art products with interesting solutions based on well-known facts from their surroundings, students build and strengthen their critical attitude towards problems of heritage preservation. The purpose of this research was to study whether it would be possible to include the contents of heritage preservation along with the contents of the current curriculum in regular fine art classes in primary schools. Research has shown that the results of teaching with the help of various teaching methods, teaching media, fine art materials and with different ways of fine art expression (fine art motives) were positive. Students came up with interesting solutions when carrying out their fine art assignments and they also displayed greater ability of critical judgement and evaluation of heritage care. To date, there has been no research in Slovenia on the possibilities of raising awareness of the importance of heritage preservation within fine art classes.

     

    'You feel like you're an artist. Like Leonardo da Vinci': Capturing young children’s voices and attitudes towards visual arts

    Michelle Tan and Robyn Gibson

    pp. 295–315

     

    Early childhood research is focusing increasingly on issues of acknowledging and respecting the ‘voices’ of young children. Much of the focus in arts education research, however, has explored adult attitudes, resulting in what seems the invisibility of young children’s opinions. Conducted in the context of early childhood education in Australia, the study, following a phenomenological approach, sought to understand the place of visual arts in the lives of four young children aged five to six years in a combined Kindergarten/Year One classroom located in Sydney. A range of childsensitive research tools were adapted from the ‘Mosaic approach’ to explore how children understand and conceive their early experiences of visual arts learning. In acknowledging the views of children, possibilities for improving arts pedagogy were considered as new questions emerged. The study confirmed the need to acknowledge and validate children’s rich and perceptive attitudes through meaningful experiences and valued conversations.

     

    Enhancing children’s art appreciation and critical thinking through a visual literacy-based art intervention programme

    Kyoung Jin Kim, Su-Jeong Wee, Min-Kyung Han, Ji-Hyang Sohn and Carolyn Walker Hitchens

    pp. 317–32

     

    Implementing an art-appreciation programme enabled a group of 5- and 6-year-old children to explore artists and their artworks and to understand artistic/aesthetic elements through a systematic sequence investigation. This study examines the impact of a sixteen-week art programme based on a visual literacy theory focusing on children’s art appreciation and critical thinking in Korea. Using mixed methods, data were collected through measurement of children’s appreciation and critical thinking ability, interviews with teacher and class observations. Quantitative analysis demonstrated significant effects of the art intervention programme on children’s abilities to appreciate art and artists and think critically about them. Three qualitative themes emerged: (1) deepening understanding of art, (2) experimenting with art, and (3) expressing themselves through art. Suggestions and implications for curriculum and research are provided.

     

    Teachers adopting artists’ pedagogies: Is it really that simple?

    Mark Selkrig

    pp. 333–47.

     

    Bringing artists into learning sites such as schools has resulted in diverse educational benefits for students. As a consequence a gaze has turned to the pedagogies artists employ, to consider how their strategies might inform the practice of ‘mainstream’ school teachers. With this scrutiny of artists’ pedagogies, the voices of artists involved in this type of work and how they describe what they do has received limited attention. Drawing on data from a research project in Australia, which explored the learning for artists who work in educational settings, I consider the teaching approaches these artists described along with ‘effective pedagogy’ espoused in educational discourse. While acknowledging the good work artists claim they do in educational settings, rather than viewing artist pedagogies as better or competing with teachers’ pedagogies, they are or can be complementary. Both art teachers and artists play important roles in school art programmes.

     

    Self-history project in visual arts education

    Necla Coşkun

    pp. 349–67.

     

    The present study aimed to determine how students realized the process of creating a ‘self-history project’ in the frame of the artworks created by the participant students, who, throughout the project, made use of their own life experiences, researched cultural values, enquired into historical events and utilized interdisciplinary relations. Artography, an art-based research method, was used for the purposes of the study during the years 2012–13. The research data are comprised of the artistic works of four students at the painting studio, semi-structured interviews that the author conducted as a researcher/teacher and the author’s observations. The study’s findings indicate that the students were positively impressed by the student-centred self-history approach.

     

    Bu çalıs¸mada ‘öznel tarih projesi’ kapsamında ögˇ rencilerin kendi yas¸am deneyimlerinden yararlanarak, kültürel degˇ erleri aras¸tırarak, tarihsel olayları sorgulayarak ve disiplinlerarası ilis¸kileri kullanarak olus¸turdukları çalıs¸malar çerçevesinde sürecin nasıl yapılandırıldıgˇ ını ortaya koymak amaçlanmıs¸tır. 2012–13 yılları arasında gerçekles¸tirilen çalıs¸manın amaçlarına uygun olarak, sanat temelli aras¸tırma

    yöntemlerinden Artography yöntemi kullanılmıs¸tır. Aras¸tırmanın verilerini resim anasanat atölye dersindeki dört ögˇ rencinin sanatsal uygulamaları, aynı zamanda aras¸tırmacı ve ögˇ retmen olan yazar tarafından bu ögˇ rencilerle gerçekles¸tirilen yarı yapılandırılmıs¸ g.rüs¸meler ve gözlemler olus¸turmaktadır. Aras¸tırmanın bulguları

     

    Next Art Education: Eight theses future art educators should think about

    Torsten Meyer

    pp. 369–84.

     

    The next art is the art of the Next Society. Sociologist and cultural theorist Dirk Baecker pinpoints the term Next Society to the society based on the computer as the leading media technology. Baecker develops his argument on the assumption that nothing influences societal structures and cultural forms as significantly as the respective dominating media technology. As a result in the long run, the introduction of the computer will impact society as dramatically as the introduction of language, writing and printing press. Next Art Education is the attempt to tie in with this assumption by looking for adequate considerations in the field of art education.

     

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

     

    Building communities of practice: Pre-service teachers as content architects

    Sara Scott Shields and Cindy Jesup

    pp. 385–94.

     

    In this visual essay we map a pedagogical exploration from conception to realization. Informed by scholarship in collaborative learning and inspired by the work of contemporary artist, Annalise Rees, we asked pre-service educators to visualize their instructional strengths and weaknesses through the construction of buildings. We asked our students to act as educational content architects, tasked with building a structure physically and conceptually reliant on collaboration and connection. This visual essay first explores collaborative learning in pre-service education through the lens of communities of practice. Next, the essay introduces the parameters of the assignment, before closing with an overview of student outcomes.

     

    Art teacher training: A photo essay

    José María Mesías-Lema

    pp. 395–404.

     

    This photo essay is part of a performance entitled ‘The Topsy-Turvey Classroom’. It involves students participating in a Master’s programme for visual arts teachers and was staged by surprise on their first day of class. These photographs help the spectator to relive and interpret the experiences that these students had when the door opened on our peculiar ‘Art Basement’. We can see their unexpected reactions, preconceived expectations turned upside down, expressions of uncertainty, unpredictable movements, a performance build-up and their creative interventions. The interconnection between the text and the photographs presents the practical application of teaching strategies involving an art-based educational research for the teacher’s professional development.

     

    Este fotoensayo pertenece a la performance ‘El aula patas arriba’ desarrollada en el 2011. Su puesta en escena involucraba, por sorpresa, a los estudiantes del máster de formación del profesorado de artes visuales en su primer día de clase. Las fotografías aproximan al lector a revivir e interpretar las reacciones

    inesperadas, el quiebre de rutinas de un aula, el transcurso de la acción artística y las intervenciones creativas que un grupo de estudiantes han experimentado cuando se ha abierto la puerta de nuestro particular ‘Sótano del arte’. La interconexión entre fragmentos de texto y fotografías muestra la aplicación

    práctica de estrategias docentes y artísticas de investigación educativa basada en las artes para el desarrollo profesional de los docentes.

     

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Helen Kemp Frye’s Writings on Art, Robert D. Denham (ed.) (2017)
    Harold Pearse

    pp. 405–408


    Conversations on Finnish Art Education, Mira Kallio-Tavin and Jouko Pullinen (eds) (2015)
    Aaron D. Knochel

    pp. 408–410.


    Mere and Easy: Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy, Jorge Lucero (ed.) (2016)

    Christina Hanawalt

    pp. 410–412.

  • Vol. 13 No. 2 (2017)

    EDITORIAL

    Rita L. Irwin, Nadine Kalin and Anita Sinner

    Pages: 143–45

     

     

    ARTICLES

     

    The implementation of object-centred learning through the visual arts: Engaging students in creative, problem-based learning

    Anthony Parton, Douglas Newton and Lynn Newton

    Pages: 147–62

     

    Abstract: Many museums now allow more opportunities for students to interact with their artefacts, often in store. At the same time, digital technologies now make it easier for those students to access information about those artefacts, interpret it, and construct and communicate their story in imaginative ways. The potential for learning about and through is evident. This article describes how this potential was realized in a collaboration between an Oriental museum and undergraduates studying a visual arts module at the University of Durham, UK. It describes some guiding educational principles, the students’ interaction with art objects, their research process and logs, and the presentation of their understandings in podcasts. Their responses achieved the aims of high levels of motivation, the construction of understandings (and their limits), imaginative communication, heightened information technology skills, and personal satisfaction. That this approach could be usefully applied elsewhere is indicated, along with some limitations.

     

    A diptych of dilemma: Becoming an artist and a teacher

    Abbey MacDonald

    Pages: 163–77

     

    Abstract: This article examines factors identified as influencing teachers’ capacity to maintain arts practice upon beginning teaching. In exploring the storied experiences of three artists and teachers, a discussion unfolds to examine the ways that artist and teaching practices interact, and the implications this interaction has upon the beginning teachers’ transition into professional practice. A hybridized methodology has been adopted, where methods integral to autoethnography, narrative inquiry and

    a/r/tography are drawn together to generate a series of intricately layered stories of becoming artists and teachers. From these storied insights, the factors that emerged as critical to becoming are the beginning teachers’ perceptions and management of time, and their capacity to appropriately prioritize art and teaching practices over each other. The implications of these factors indicate a need for beginning teachers to better understand and acclimatize to the demands of becoming a teacher before

    attempting to resume high levels of artistic output.

     

    The relevance of art-oriented processes in the formation of architects and engineers

    Anton Grech

    Pages: 179–92

     

    Abstract: The University of Malta recently introduced a one-year Diploma Course in Design Foundation Studies with an art-oriented, artist-led, practice-based programme as a preparatory and integral part of the degree courses in Architecture and Civil/Structural Engineering. The article explains the rationale behind the introduction of this new course and its methodology. It analyses why perception, coupled with basic drawing skills, are important for students of architecture and engineering. It shows how the translation of the drawing representing the concept into a three-dimensional model relates to their future work. The Sculpturehouse exercise serves as an example illustrating the relation between sculpture and architecture/engineering and the relevance of a haptic experience. Observations made by the author and other members of the academic staff of the Faculty for the Built Environment as well as communications from students who have attended the course lead to conclusions that are sustained by the results of a questionnaire.

     

    Recycling solid waste materials to develop instructional resources for art education

    Rita Yeboah, Eric Appau Asanté and Nana Afia Opoku-Asare

    Pages: 193–215

     

    Abstract: The purpose of this research was to explore waste materials and turn them into appropriate instructional resources for teaching art lessons in Ghana. This was necessary because primary, junior and senior high school art teachers in Ghana mostly teach their lessons without using instructional resources because of non-provision of instructional resources by the government. The study adopted the exploratory and descriptive research methods to carry out the study. Paper, fabric and plastic waste

    materials were selected and worked with. The research found that waste materials can be recycled to create appropriate and useful instructional resources that are very practical for teaching and learning of art lessons. This research projects to art teachers that they can freely turn collected waste materials into very useful instructional resources which they can use to teach effective lessons to help their students understand what they taught well and easily.

     

    Social engagements through art activities for two children with autism spectrum disorders

    Gabrielled T. Lee, Wan-Chi Chou and Hua Feng

    Pages: 217–33

     

    Abstract: This is a case study report focusing on qualitative improvements in social and emotional communications of two children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who participated in a behavioural art programme. This study took place in a classroom located in an autism research centre affiliated with a university in the central area of Taiwan. Two 6-year-old boys with autism were referred to this programme because of their poor social skills and frequent emotional outbursts both at home and in school. The art programme, consisting of opportunities to increase social communication

    skills with a behaviour-analytic instructional methodology, was implemented once a week for a total of seventeen sessions. Qualitative improvements in social and emotional communications were analysed from the participant’s artwork, their statements about their work, and parents’ and teachers’ reports regarding the children’s social interactions. Results indicated that this behaviourally oriented art

    programme helped to facilitate both the children’s expression of their own emotions as well as social interactions with each other during the art sessions. Improvement in social communication skills also became apparent at home and school.

     

    Readings of the contemporary in art education: Simultaneity and ambivalence in video art

    Analice Dutra Pillar

    Pages: 235–47

     

    Abstract: The article discusses how the simultaneity of actions and languages and ambivalence in ways of being and acting, present in everyday experiences, are written into audio-visual productions of contemporary art. The video art Para Dentro and the reading of this work by a group of children were analysed using discursive semiotics, as related to the effects of meaning in audio-visual texts of contemporary art, and the processes of appropriation and redefinition of images and sounds, during art education on the reading of images. Analysis of this video art highlights its articulation, through overlays, of the various languages that constitute the audio-visual text and the presentation of images and sounds ambiguously, creating effects of ambivalence. What most disturbed the children during their reading were the visual and sound ambivalences. The results indicate the need to reflect, in school, on contemporary audio-visual narratives, seeking to understand the present moment.

     

    Resumo: O artigo discute como a simultaneidade de ações e linguagens e a ambivalência nos modos de ser e agir, presentes em experiências cotidianas, inscrevem-se em produções audiovisuais da arte contemporânea. A videoarte Para Dentro e a leitura desta criação por um grupo de crianças foram analisadas com base nos estudos da semiótica discursiva, relativos aos efeitos de sentido em textos audiovisuais; da arte contemporânea, acerca dos processos de apropriação e ressignificação de imagens e sons; e do ensino da arte sobre leitura de imagens. A análise da videoarte ressalta a

    articulação, através de superposições, das várias linguagens que constituem o texto audiovisual e a apresentação de imagens e sons de forma ambígua, criando efeitos de ambivalência. Nas leituras das crianças o que mais lhes inquietou foram as ambivalências visuais e sonoras. Os resultados apontam a necessidade de refletirmos, na escola, sobre narrativas audiovisuais contemporâneas, buscando entender o momento atual.

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

     

    Educational space: Photo-based educational research

    Jaime Mena-de Torres and Joaquín Roldán

    Pages: 249–59

     

    Abstract: Artistic photographers have been engaging with educational contexts since the early twentieth century. According to Spirn and Sullivan (2005), visual creation offers a tool for reasoning which, if based on aesthetical concepts, allows us to discover new information and patterns for research into educational contexts. In this visual essay, organized by pairs of images, we propose a photographic

    research project based on key visual elements obtained from studying several artistic photographers. Each pair is structured by comparisons, through which the enquiry and its argumentation is established. The visual essay examines how artistic photography can provide visual clues to explore an educational space.

     

    Internship terrains: Psychogeographically mapping place

    Joy G. Bertling

    Pages: 261–69

     

    Abstract: Art teacher candidates, recently beginning their internships/student teaching experiences, engaged in a form of arts-based educational research (ABER) to examine their larger teaching contexts – the communities surrounding their placement schools – through a performance-based, map-based approach. Much like the Situationists’ psychogeographies of the 1950s and 1960s, where artist geographers wandered the urban landscapes in attempts to construct interpretive readings of well-known European cities, interns began by playfully ‘drifting’ through the geographic environments

    of their school zones. Through the act of drifting, interns conducted enquiries into their own sense of place. ‘Maps’ of place embodied these explorations and discoveries. Such explorations of place are vital as educators seek to construct rich understandings of their students’ lived worlds and to provide appropriate, relevant learning experiences. This visual essay explores the value and possibilities of one

    ABER approach for teacher education.

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Sloppy Craft, Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, Elaine Cheasly Paterson and Susan Surette (eds) (2015)

    Veronika Horlik

    Pages: 271–73

     

    The Routledge International Handbook of the Arts and Education, Mike Fleming, Liora Bresler and John O’Toole (eds) (2015)

    Nicos Souleles

    Pages: 273–75

     

    Against Value in the Arts and Education, Sam Ladkin, Robert McKay and Emile Bojesen (eds) (2016)

    Renée Turner

    Pages: 275–76

  • Vol. 13 No. 1 (2017)

    EDITORIAL

    Rita L. Irwin

    Pages: 3–5

     

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Children make observational films – exploring a participatory visual method for art education

    Nigel Meager

    Pages: 7–22

     

    Abstract: In a well-established domain of social anthropology, observational filmmakers employ digital video cameras and audio-visual editing as a research method to investigate human experience. They embrace qualities such as the material, sensory, aesthetic and ineffable. To review this visual method for art education, this article presents film extracts from the Childhood and Modernity project led by anthropologist David MacDougall. Indian children, 10–12 years of age, shot digital video material to create new knowledge about the circumstances of their lives. This keeps qualities that are difficult or impossible to put into words at the foreground of the research. The article also discusses how MacDougall prepared children to use a video camera for observational filmmaking by teaching specific skills that facilitate close observation and analysis through audio-visual means. In this way,

    MacDougall’s methodology and methods present a challenge and an opportunity for both art education research and classroom teaching.

     

    Sustaining Huaco making in Perú: A decolonizing study with a native knowledge bearer

    Amanda Alexander

    Pages: 23–41

     

    Abstract: This article investigates the extensive knowledge and experience of a traditional Peruvian huaco maker named Lorenzo Cabrera Abanto. Huaco is a pre-Columbian pottery form that western museums and literature identify as a portrait jar or vessel. Lorenzo is discussed as a living repository of ancient heritage and Andean art making for those unfamiliar with its expressions. Due to globalization

    and changing dynamics in Peruvian culture and economy, huaco making as an expression of Peruvian heritage is threatened. Examining huaco making and history through a decolonizing lens, Lorenzo’s life and work as a native knowledge bearer is considered in light of globalization, the demands of the capitalist markets, theoretical premises of critical pedagogues, and concerns of an art educator. Confronting cultural interactions and shifting global paradigms, the arts education field can productively draw on critical art pedagogy that is informed by diverse discourses and reveres Native wisdom and knowledge of living art forms such as those sustained by Lorenzo.

     

    The changing face of students in New Zealand: Are visual arts teachers keeping pace?

    Jill Smith

    Pages: 43–59

     

    Abstract: The changing face of students in secondary schools in New Zealand is evident from the population statistics in the 2013 national census. The greatest numbers of young people under 20 years now come from ethnically diverse groups. In contrast, visual arts teachers remain predominantly European New Zealand. This article reports on research conducted in 2015 that investigated how secondary school visual arts teachers are responding to the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity

    of their students. It focuses on one key finding – that 16–18-year-old students who study visual arts at years 12 and 13 are being empowered by their predominantly European New Zealand teachers to express their individual identities using three pedagogical approaches. The stories of the students, articulated through the voices of their visual arts teachers, are visualized in examples of their artworks. The data illustrates how these teachers are keeping pace, albeit in differing ways.

     

    Comparing, contrasting and synergizing Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and Aesthetic Education strategies in practice

    Christina Chin

    Pages: 61–75

     

    Abstract: This article details understandings from a pilot study based on interviews with student teachers experienced in the implementation of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and Aesthetic Education strategies. I aim to share the perspectives of these practitioners regarding some of the major similarities and differences between VTS and the Aesthetic Education strategy, and to highlight what they experienced as the primary challenges and benefits to implementing each strategy. Based on their experiences, it appears that VTS and Aesthetic Education can be integrated as complementary and synergistic strategies. Equipped with this information, I anticipate that K-12 educators, and educators of pre-service art teachers, will be able to make sounder choices and suggestions regarding the use of

    these strategies.

     

    The Museum of Innocence: Five concepts for challenging the status quo in art education

    Ismail Ozgur Soganci

    Pages: 77–93

     

    Abstract: In 2012, novelist Orhan Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature, created a museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Awarded ‘European Museum of the Year’ by the Council of Europe in 2014, Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence represents a personal, local and small-scale model for museums. Crafted first as a novel of fiction and later as a real-life museum, the interplay of the novel–museum

    duo unfolds a love story through a collection of objects. The article, investigating Pamuk’s curatorial lenses in arranging the museum collection, elaborates on five concepts extracted from this unconventional museum: Proximity to everyday objects, suggestiveness, polyphony, enquiry through the arts, and emphasis on the individual. By examining these key concepts in relation to and within the

    museum context, the article encourages discussion to challenge the status quo in approaching artworks and provides insight towards relevant practice for art educators who have close proximity to current art practices in art museums and similar institutions.

     

    Dancing in the gallery: Opening children’s eyes and mobilizing their response to art, reflections on a DART project

    Barb Snook and Carol Brown

    Pages: 95–110

     

    Abstract: Well into the twenty-first-century performing and visual arts education and practice

    are at a critical juncture. While the demands on arts practitioners (including teachers, performers and artists) have become increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative, training and education in arts within mainstream education in Aotearoa, New Zealand, remain tied to discrete disciplinary categories. Students study music, dance, visual arts and drama and specialize in one or more of these as they progress, but where do we see them learning about these arts forms in combination and dialogue? The Dance and Art (DART) project aims to create an interdisciplinary and intergenerational model of peer-to-peer learning that is collaborative, situated and culturally relevant.

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

     

    Moments of (aha!) walking and encounter: Fluid intersections with place

    Geraldine Burke, Alexandra Lasczik Cutcher, Corinna Peterken and Miriam Potts

    Pages: 111–12

     

    In contemporary art, research and art education, the concepts of walking and mapping in singular and collaborative encounters with place are established as a generative learning, creative and research event. In this iteration of walking and encounter, four arts academics sought to extend and engage the practice of itinerant drift, collaboratively and discretely, mapping manifestations and then responding

    with an artful riposte in relation to educational practice. Using the provocation of playfulness, the methodology was inspired by the concept of the dérive and stimulated by Dada, Surrealist and Fluxus legacies. This visual essay portrays the assemblage of walking and encounter at the Peninsula campus site at Monash University through visual poetics, which aims to arouse continuing dialogue

    around place, learning, encounter, chance and disruption.

     

    ‘Humorous financial crisis cartoons’: A visual essay of an elementary school art project

    Martha Christopoulou

    Pages: 123–30

     

    This visual essay reports on the first part of an eight-week resilience art programme at a public primary school in Athens, Greece. The students were asked to create humorous cartoons as a response to the financial crisis. Humour as coping mechanism can defuse tension and anxiety and may lead to more positive re-appraisals of the financial crisis and as such contribute to developing children’s resilience.

     

    Αυτό το οπτικό δοκίμιο αναφέρεται στο πρώτο μέρος ενός προγράμματος ψυχικής ανθεκτικότητας και εικαστικής αγωγής το οποίο διήρκεσε οκτώ εβδομάδες και έλαβε χώρα σε ένα δημόσιο δημοτικό σχολείο στην Αθήνα. Οι μαθητές δημιούργησαν χιουμοριστικά καρτούν ανταποκρινόμενοι στο ζήτημα της οικονομικής κρίσης. Το χιούμορ ως μηχανισμός αντιμετώπισης καταστάσεων μπορεί να απαλύνει εντάσεις και άγχη, να οδηγήσει σε μια

    πιο θετική αντιμετώπιση της οικονομικής κρίσης και ως εκ τούτου να συμβάλει στην ανάπτυξη της ψυχικής ανθεκτικότητας.

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Art, Education and Gender: The Shaping of Female Ambition, Gill Hopper (2015)

    Elizabeth Garber

    Pages: 131–33

     

    Culturally Sensitive Art Education in a Global World: A Handbook for Teachers, Marjorie Cohee Manifold, Steve Willis and Enid Zimmerman (eds) (2016)

    Anabela Moura

    Pages: 133–35

     

    Developing Visual Arts Education in the United States: Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Normalization of Creativity, Mary Stankiewicz (2016)

    Mary Stokrocki

    Pages: 135–37

  • Vol. 12 No. 3 (2016)

    EDITORIAL

    Glen Coutts

    Pages: 239–240

     

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Art as research: Defending the significance of art practice in high school

    Maria Letsiou

    Pages: 241–255

     

    Abstract: Recent reconsideration of education policies in Greece to include experiential learning in the high school curriculum signals a positive transformation of education. It is obvious that art as a school subject can benefit from this reconsideration. I hypothesize that experiential learning can be a proper context in which to teach art through the concept of art as research. To support this thesis, I draw on my involvement as art teacher in two experiential research courses during the 2014–2015 academic year. The first course is being taught in two eighth-grade, junior-high classes and the second in a tenth-grade, senior-high class. Given that the two courses are not yet completed, I will herein describe some of my decisions so far in constructing students’ research journeys.

     

    Η πρόσφατη αναθεώρηση της εκπαιδευτικής πολιτικής στην Ελλάδα σχετικά με την διεύρυνση του διδακτικού προγράμματος με μαθήματα εμπειρικής ερευνητικής μάθησης στο Γυμνάσιο και στο Γενικό Λύκειο σηματοδοτεί την θετική αλλαγή της εκπαίδευσης. Είναι φανερό ότι η σημασία της θέσης του μαθήματος της τέχνης στα σχολεία μπορεί να βελτιωθεί από αυτή την αναθεώρηση. Τοποθετώ μια υπόθεση ότι η ερευνητική μάθηση μπορεί να είναι το κατάλληλο πλαίσιο για την πραγματοποίηση μιας διδασκαλίας με επίκεντρο την έννοια της τέχνης ως έρευνα. Βασίζομαι στην εμπειρία μου διδάσκοντας δύο προγράμματα ερευνητικής μάθησης κατά την διάρκεια του ακαδημαϊκού έτους 2014–2015. Παίρνοντας υπόψη ότι τα δύο προγράμματα δεν έχουν τελειώσει ακόμα, θα περιγράψω κάποιες από τις αποφάσεις μου στην διαμόρφωση του ερευνητικού ταξιδιού των μαθητών. Το πρώτο πρόγραμμα απευθύνεται σε δύο τάξεις μαθητών Γυμνασίου και το δεύτερο σε μία τάξη μαθητών Γενικού Λυκείου. Σε αυτό το άρθρο περιγράφω κάποιες από τις δυνατότητες που μας παρέχει στην διδασκαλία η έννοια της τέχνης ως έρευνα.

     

     

    A developing research-oriented pedagogy for undergraduate teaching in art and design

    Tara Michelle Winters

    Pages: 257–270

     

    Abstract: Art and design continues to negotiate its activity as academic research. It has had to build arguments for how its procedures constitute a disciplinary specific form of enquiry and communicate how its activities constitute something important in the world – an alternative means of thinking and generating knowledge. It has had to do this while not losing sight of its fundamental nature and purpose as art and design. This article surveys the ways in which practice-based research is achieving this, connecting key aspects of these efforts to a developing research-oriented pedagogy for undergraduate teaching and learning. I suggest that the development of a research culture has reinvigorated the undergraduate curriculum, advancing our pedagogical content knowledge. In this respect I outline a number of strategies of importance in assisting students to build more sophisticated conceptions of artistic research.

     

     

    Drawing on philosophy – an investigation of theory in praxis

    Alex Ashton

    Pages: 271–289

     

    Abstract: The article addresses the question: what is the relationship between perceptual experience and its interpretation through drawing? It is proposed that drawing, as knowledge and experience, is a particular way of coming to know the world that is explicated within personal practice. The research examines how drawing, through its expression of the concrete and the imaginary, provides interconnected ways of orientating knowledge that contribute to a multifaceted understanding of the ‘lived experience’. The practice of drawing is utilised as a research methodology in order to consider visualisations that are both descriptive and interpretive.

    The study draws on philosophy, in particular the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to consider the complexities and interconnections of mind, object and body that are experienced through drawing. By being immersed in the visible, the concrete, through the body, the visible is not appropriated, but is instead revealed by the act of ‘looking’.

     

     

    Challenging journeys: Contemporary Korean artist and some possible implications for education through art

    Kyong-Mi Paek

    Pages: 291–309

     

    Abstract: The growing social need for a creative workforce in Korea has prompted teach-ers to look to the arts for innovative classroom practices. While a growing body of integrated curriculum studies acknowledges art and artists as valuable sources for alternative ways of knowing, a lack of comprehensive information on what shapes the practices of today’s artists limits ongoing discussion. This article aims to extend teachers’ current thinking on the potential role of art in educational innovation by exploring the growth of creative individuals in the art world, examining the diverse paths to artistic growth of three promising contemporary Korean artists. Within-case analysis provides insights into how these artists have navigated their individ-ual paths while interacting with their surroundings, and contextual analysis of their major transitions highlights the value of risk-taking in promoting creative educa-tional practice through art.

     

    [Glen: the Korean typography won’t convert into Word when copy and pasting]

     

     

    Creating and exploring a desert ecology site on the OpenSim world with middle-school students

    Mary Stokrocki

    Pages: 311–326

     

    Abstract: Using participant observation methods, I explored middle-school students’ visual literacy introduction to the OpenSim Virtual World, which was hosted by the University of British Columbia. Using their school name theme of the Sonoran Desert, they drew and uploaded their favourite desert creatures and plants on square easel forms/prims, built some dome-structured caves as an installation site, and added pop-up notecards about animal symbolic meanings, as a kind of visual/ verbal literacy. Besides overcoming initial technical problems and experiment-ing with the Build/Design tools, they contacted biology information sites, to learn about desert conditions, animal plight (poaching/predator/prey/pesticide problems), plant acclimatization, and differing opinions about intervention. When students are guided and given appropriate digital art tools, they can create new worlds and explore ecological problems.

     

     

    ‘Skateboarding is like dancing’: Masculinity as a performative visual culture in art education

    Annika Amelie Hellman

    Pages: 327–344

     

    Abstract: This article analyses the construction of skateboard masculinity as a performative visual culture, related to the conditions for masculine subject positions in upper secondary school visual art and media education. The empirical material comes from visual ethnographic research in classroom and discourse analysis of one pupil’s skateboarding video and an interview with the same pupil. The results show that the masculinity performed in both the visual art classroom and in pupil’s skate video is complex and moves between homosocial expressions and intimacy, risk-taking and visual culture enacted as being cool and an outsider. The analysis implies a linkage to a neo-liberal ideal in which the values of play and pleasure as a crucial aspect of counterculture are connected to entrepreneurial individualism, consumer creativity and market trends.

     

     

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Exploring Studio Materials: Teaching Creative Art Making to Children, Mary Hafeli (2015)

    Peter Gregory

    Pages: 345–347

     

    At the Heart of Art and Earth: An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education, Jan Van Boeckel (2013)

    Wioletta Anna Piaścik

    Pages: 347–349

     

    Akademie X Lessons in Art + Life, Rebecca Morrill (ed.) (2015)

    Marek Wasilewski

    Pages: 349–350

  • Vol. 12 No. 2 (2016)

    EDITORIAL

    Glen Coutts

    Pages: 135–136

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Beyond museum walls: Visual narrative through images and history

    Valeria Peixoto de Alencar

    Pages: 137–151

     

    Abstract: This article presents the analysis of visual narratives produced by 13–14-year-old students after visiting a historical exhibition at Museu Paulista of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Our goal was to understand which memories and reflections remained latent after the educational visit. In order to do so, we proceeded with a follow-up activity at the school the students attend. The discussion we propose concerning the relationship between image and history was mainly introduced by Burke, whereas Hooper-Greenhill focused on the images in a history museum context. Furthermore, we analyse to what extent a display designed 90 years ago can impact the production of these students. In addition, there was considerable effort by the museum educators to help them develop critical interpreting skills. The idea of ‘real learning’ of Atkinson also contributed to my considerations on the students’ work.

     

     

    Learning bodies and engaging with art: Staging aesthetic experiences in museum education

    Helen Illeris

    Pages: 153–165

     

    Abstract: How can we stimulate encounters between students and artworks that are both sensuous, meaningful and transformational? How can we involve students’ bodies in aesthetic experiences in art museums? Inspired by Richard Shusterman the article focuses on three dimensions of the aesthetic experience: the phenomenological, the semantic and the transformational. Together with Judith Butler’s concepts of performativity and performance, these notions are used to discuss the role of ‘the learning body’ in three case studies carried out in art museums over a ten-year period. The study sheds light on how the concept of aesthetic experience can be used for understanding the pedagogical value of encounters between young people and contemporary art. Another aim is to show how the body as locus for aesthetic experiences can challenge traditional understandings of the learning body and to discuss how to develop performative forms of art education that actively involves students’ bodies.

     

     

    Patterns of awareness – preschool teachers’ integration of arts and mathematics

    Eva Ahlskog-Björkman and Camilla Björklund

    Pages: 167–180

     

    Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate how preschool teachers reason about art in thematic work where art and mathematics are integrated. Specific research questions were: how do teachers reason about learning goals in thematic work and what meaning do art and aesthetics contribute to children’s learning? Data for analysis were collected from a digitally distributed questionnaire that was answered by 27 participants from Finland and Sweden. Participants were selected from preschool teacher networks and from municipalities’ official websites of preschool staff. The method for analysis was explorative and inductive, as we condensed meaning from the written answers. A meta-analysis revealed that art and aesthetics appear mainly as a means for children’s learning of other knowledge areas or as experiences bearing their own values. In contrast, the analysis also revealed that integration of art and mathematics may contribute to the learning of both knowledge contents, for deeper and conceptual learning.

     

     

    Knowing me knowing you: Enhancing emotional literacy through visual arts

    Margaret Nixon

    Pages: 181­­­–193

     

    Abstract: This article presents Enhancing Emotional Literacy through Visual Arts (ELVA) an

    innovative approach, developed by The Dax Centre, incorporating visual arts and mental health for primary school students. ELVA, beginning as a five-year project, and funded though a philanthropic grant, is the result of the collaborative efforts of a multidisciplinary advisory group of teachers, child psychotherapists, psychiatrists and art therapists, is lead by a project manager and overseen by the Director of the Dax Centre. Through an examination of ELVA’s theoretical frame and its unique

    experientially based teacher professional learning component, this article will high-light the contribution ELVA offers to existing well-being and visual arts approaches in schools. It will also present the findings of an independent evaluation of the initial pilot phase of ELVA.

     

     

    The landscape of websites for art education and a portrait of their designers

    Tingting Windy Wang

    Pages: 195­–210

     

    Abstract: The increasing visit numbers for art teaching and learning-related websites indicated that websites have become an indispensible resource and information provider for art learners and teachers. In this study, I sought answers to questions such as what websites were art learners and teachers using? What technologies were used by these websites? Who built these websites? Why did they build these websites? What expectations did these website builders have for their audiences? I shared over 70 art teaching and learning-related websites, and had 33 of them evaluated by 57 research participants using a seven-part coding scheme. On the basis of the evaluation survey results, I interviewed four website builders/owners. The top-rated websites were shared and discussed, focusing on website builders’ motivations, over-all purposes, their expectations towards the websites, as well as their technological applications in their websites.

     

     

    Mobilities, aesthetics and civic engagement: Getting at-risk youth to look at their communities

    David Pariser, Juan Carlos Castro and Martin Lalonde

    Pages: 211–225

     

    Abstract: This article describes a mobile media art curriculum for engaging at-risk students with their schooling and with civic engagement. The pilot study was conducted with at-risk youth who were seeking their high school diplomas. The curriculum encouraged participants to use mobile media in school and outside. Students examined aspects of their neighbourhoods and sometimes explored themes suggested by the workshop leader. Data consisted of participants’ images, their posts and interview responses. We noted that civic engagement grew out of participants’ initial interest in, and concern for, the formal, technical and aesthetic aspects of their images. Our participants recognized that, if an image is well made, it will be that much more effective in communicating its civic message. In this article, we will consider the primacy of the aesthetic as a promising principle for developing curricula that reorient at-risk youth.

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

     

    Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honouring Presence, Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel and Carl Leggo (eds) (2015)

    Marni J. Binder

    Pages: 227–229

     

    Art Education in Germany, George Peez (ed.) (2015)

    Harold Pearse

    Pages: 229–231

     

    Doctoral Writing in Creative and Performing Arts, Louise Ravelli, Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield (eds) (2014)

    Julia Lockheart

    Pages: 231–233

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Volume 12 Number 1

    Vol. 12 No. 1 (2016)

    NOTE- only the abstracts are available on this site. InSEA members may access the full contents at the members area of www.insea.org.


    EDITORIAL

    Author: Glen Coutts

    Pages 3–5

     

    ARTICLES

     

    The cemetery as a site for aesthetic enquiry in Art Education

    Author: Ricard Huerta

    Pages: 7–20

     

    Abstract
    This article aims to introduce an innovative element to teacher training in Art Education. Grounded in romantic, ‘kitsch’ and even ‘gore’ archetypes in literature, painting and cinema, both gravestones and cemeteries have become a central part of our collective imagination in western culture. These visual artefacts can therefore play an important role in helping us to understand the often complex relationships between images and writing. The enduring power of gravestone texts, which are commonly inscribed in marble, offers the potential to address issues that have not previously been explored in teacher training education. We hope to promote the acknowledgement of cemeteries as spaces of reflection and historical memory, both of which are key areas in the pedagogical analysis of modern visual cultures. Employing an Arts Based Education methodology, this study uses photographs taken by its author as core sources of information and analysis, in the manner of a photoessay or visual essay.

     

    Engaging trainee teachers with crafts and cultural heritage

    Authors: Sirpa Kokko and Patrick Dillon

    Pages: 21–37

     

    Abstract
    This article concerns perspectives on, and formative experiences of, crafts and cultural heritage reported by twenty exchange students from seven countries who studied Cultural Heritage and Craft Education in an International Study Programme at a University in Finland. The research is reported in a cultural ecological framework. Data were collected through individual and group activities concerned with students’ understandings of key terms, memories evoked by undertaking craft activities, values held about crafts and cultural heritage, and accounts of craft education. Results show that engaging in craft practices evokes strong associations with people, places, artefacts, activities, feelings and sensations. Crafts are valued particularly for the way they connect with culture and the possibilities they offer for self-expression. Cultural heritage is associated with crafts but relationships between the two are not taught in schools. The significance of the research concerns the case made for connecting crafts and cultural heritage in a broader conceptualization of arts education.

     

    Museum family programmes as a model to develop democratic education: A pedagogy inspired by the principles of Cha-no-yu

    Author: Miyuki Otaka

    Pages: 39–56

     

    Abstract
    In response to the lack of studies on art-museum family programmes despite their popularity, I have been developing pedagogy based on the four principles of the art of tea in Japan, cha-no-yu – harmony, respect, purity and tranquility – and conducting museum family programmes as an educator and researcher. Museum family programmes should provide art-appreciation and art-creation components including individual, family and group activities in a gentle, respectful and reflective atmosphere so that participants can construct their art experiences by utilizing multiple senses. The goals of family programmes are to provide meaningful and enjoyable art experiences that enable participants to learn about art, others and themselves interpersonally and personally and to enhance democratic education through dialogues within the family by emphasizing the transfer of learning from participants’ experiences in the programmes to those in their daily lives. This pedagogical model can promote education within the family and any form of democratic education.

     

    Studying artworks and their digital copies: Valuing the artist’s aura

    Authors: Debora Shaw and Jennifer Wagelie

    Pages: 57–69

     

    Abstract
    Digital images extend access to works of art but little is known about of the benefits and limitations of digital copies for instruction. Students in a Museum Studies class viewed either the digital copy or original of two works of art. Regardless of format, the participants formed similar general impressions of the works, although appreciation of the objects’ size was difficult with the digital images. Students had difficulty assessing materials and media with both original works and copies. The participants had similar insights and also encountered problems, regardless of whether the work of art was two- or three-dimensional. In describing the advantages of original works, the students also noted the power of the original’s aura. Perceived strengths of the digital images included the ability to do research away from the museum (saving travel and time) and to manipulate the images.

     

    Towards grey matter – by bridge or tunnel?

    Author: Marc Goodwin

    Pages: 71–87

     

    Abstract
    The emergent status of practice-based research within the arts is surprising, given the long tradition of research and reflective practice as the working methodology of artists. Stranger still is the scepticism towards its application in arts education. This article will address those problems via the impasse indicated by current literature on the topic of entrepreneurial learning. As one way out of that dead-end, a case study is presented which applies the practice-based learning of a doctoral thesis to the learning environment of an interdisciplinary course in architectural photography.

     

    Challenging a tendency to finish before starting: A processed-based visual/ material methodology

    Author: Michael Croft

    Pages: 89–107

     

    Abstract
    Students tend to over-conceptualize their interests/intentions at the starting point of any given or self-set project, foreclosing the movement and process of their thinking through projects’ time frames. The article introduces the author’s self-developed visual/material thinking methodology, and proposes a means of addressing a difficulty that educator-readers working in undergraduate contexts may themselves have experienced. The context of the article, a project with Thai university students, is presented as image and text inserts. The questions raised by the methodology are therefore presented as a parallel narrative of students’ responsive material. The article is written in tandem with the unfolding of a student group’s project. As the author moves to a track of the methodology that foregrounds movement, the presentational material shifts to the work of one student who critiques the methodology’s end-point in conceptualization, but supports the alternative track: the idea of Development as a more philosophical way forward.

     

     

    Becoming the middle sea: Portraits of the Mediterranean in art education

    Author: Raphael Vella

    Pages: 109–122

     

    Abstract
    This article examines the pedagogical, political and artistic implications of drawing an intercultural ‘portrait’ of the Mediterranean in various educational and cultural settings located in different countries in the region. Based on an educational project (‘Dessine-moi la Méditerranée’) carried out in several Mediterranean countries, in which children of different ages studied and redefined their own environments and cultures within a Mediterranean context, the article argues for an artistic pedagogy that incorporates local knowledge in the curriculum and simultaneously encourages participatory and collaborative experiences that promote relational understandings of identity. It argues against restrictive or essentialist interpretations of identity by highlighting the sense of ‘becoming’ inherent in the enigmatic, double exposure portraits and the medium of drawing employed by children during the international project.

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

    Youth, Arts and Education: Reassembling Subjectivity through Affect, Anna Hickey-Moody (2014)

    Reviewer: Carl-Peter Buschkühle

    Pages: 123–126

     

    Art, Anthropology and the Gift, Roger Sansi (2015)

    Reviewer: Teresa Eca

    Pages: 126–128

     

    The Routledge International Handbook of the Arts and Education, Mike Fleming, Liora Bresler and John O ’Toole (eds) (2015)

    Reviewer: Folkert Haanstra

    Pages: 128–129

  • Vol. 11 No. 3 (2015)

    GUEST EDITORIAL

    Authors:  Stuart MacDonald OBE and Julian Malins

    Pages 339-342

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Bringing practice closer to research – seeking integrity, sincerity and authenticity

    Authors:  Franziska Schroeder

    Pages: 343–354

     

    Abstract
    This article tackles the abundance of inconsistent terminologies that surround the discourse on practice and research. The text builds on recent debates on creative practice and education, sparked through the EU-funded project SHARE. I argue that a shift in contemporary continental philosophy in the 1970s, which nudged the body into a more central position, allowed for creative practice and with it ‘embodied knowing’ to slowly push open the doors of the academies. I will show that practice today is already well embedded in some UK institutions, and I put forward that rather than thinking of an apologetic Practice as …, Performance as …, we should refer more resolutely to what I here term ‘Practice Research’. I demystify notions of validation of creative practice by re-emphasizing the artistic qualities of ‘integrity, sincerity and authenticity’, borrowed from the 2013 BBC Reith lecturer and artist/potter Grayson Perry.

     

     

    Becoming through a/r/tography, autobiography and stories in motion

    Authors: Natalie LeBlanc, Sara Florence Davidson, Jee Yeon Ryu and Rita L. Irwin

    Pages: 355–374

     

    Abstract
    The authors present stories in motion, reminding all those interested in practicebased research of the importance of a/r/tography as becoming-intensity, becoming-event and becoming-movement. Embracing a métissage approach, this article provides an example of art educators co-labouring in order to understand their need for materializing, theorizing and practising their ideas, and, in doing so, realize that being committed to emergence offers ways for becoming artist, researcher and teacher as ways of living one’s art practice as research.

     

    The politics and the poetics of knowledge in higher arts education

    Authors:  Helena Cabeleira

    Pages: 375–389

     

    Abstract
    This article aims to contribute to the analysis and problematization of a discourse that took shape in international universities (over the last two decades) around terminologies, methodologies and conceptions of academic research and writing in the creative fields of art and design. This discourse has been particularly visible in the past decade, in consequence of the Bologna Process and the formation of a European Higher Arts Education Area. Framed by this discourse emerged the figure of the artist-researcher as writer conducing his or her doctoral studies, and inventing theoretical and empirical strategies through which art and design practices articulate with research-writing practices, and the conditions under which these practices are communicated and disseminated in the public sphere as knowledge (texts and images). A literature review and a European overview on how articulations between text-making and art-making are being theorized and materialized in publications, conferences and curricular programmes will be provided.

     

    Teaching and learning for sustainability: An Icelandic practice-based research

    Authors:  Ásthildur Jónsdóttir

    Pages: 391–406

     

    Abstract
    We live in critical times, where moving towards the goal of sustainability requires fundamental changes in human attitudes and activity. These challenges call for all of us to rethink our value framework and incorporate new approaches to what we consider a good life. Educators need to strive to create change and work towards a sustainable future through education for sustainability (EFS). This article reports on a project in which the author worked with a group of pre-service art teachers in the Iceland Academy of the arts (IAA) to explore how they can use an artistic approach to learn about EFS, identifying and discovering ethical challenges in contemporary life. This is part of a larger study, which looks at the potential of art in EFS. Using a participatory research method these students analysed which concept they wanted to focus on once they became practising art teachers. The findings indicate connections between action and reflection through an artistic approach.

     

    Fostering design collaboration: Novel ICT tools to support contemporary design pedagogy

    Authors: Fiona Maciver and Julian Malins

    Pages: 407–419

     

    Abstract
    Professional design practice is in a period of flux and transformation. Technology is rendering the design process increasingly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural, and design studios are increasingly dependant on information and communication technology (ICT). There is a need to reflect these changes in design education, and to train students in the new skills required for industry. This article examines how ICT may be incorporated into design education to enable more collaborative, modern and interactive learning processes to be introduced to better prepare students for professional careers. In addressing this topic, the article examines emerging research that seeks to integrate developments in ICT systems into the higher education design curriculum. The article suggests how such platforms can be adapted to meet the needs of students and tutors, whilst meeting the contemporary requirements of the creative industries. The authors conclude that ICT offers a means of enhancing and complementing existing modes of design pedagogy.

     

    Design students foreseeing the unforeseeable: Practice-based empathic research methods

    Authors:  Deana McDonagh

    Pages: 421–431

     

    Abstract
    Designing for the future needs of people requires designers to develop an extensive research skill set and user-centred mindset. As our global community faces the unprecedented ageing tsunami, designers of tomorrow need to be prepared as effective design(er) researchers. Designers cannot rely upon a lengthy history of research methods to help shape our curricula, such as other more established disciplines, and this is both a challenge and an opportunity. As we prepare our students for positions and jobs that may not yet exist, we also have to prepare them for professional expectations that are still emerging. This article discusses a number of practice-based research methods and tools that are helping to contribute to the design student’s skill set whilst also shaping their mindset in terms of ageing, disability and emotional needs of users. In addition, practice-based research is shaping the way we teach, learn and connect with others beyond the classroom.

     

    Art-based action research - participatory art for the north

    Authors: Timo Jokela, Mirja Hiltunen and Elina Härkönen

    Pages: 433–448

     

    Abstract
    The article will introduce the art-based action research method and the practices and knowledge gained in the fields of art and design education, taking into account contemporary art’s situational, contextual and communal nature. The method is collaboratively created and developed by a small group of artists, educators and researchers with the participation of the students in the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland to guide the next generation of art and design education scholars. The method, as part of art education and applied visual arts Master’s and Doctoral theses, takes into account the university’s northern circumstances and special features. The article discusses the relevance of the engaging participatory art parallel to developing the art-based research method in visual art education. The article also seeks to introduce a new perspective to the discussion about research in art universities.

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

     

    Findings, windings and entwinings: Cartographies of collaborative walking and encounter

    Authors:  Alexandra Cutcher, David Rousell and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie

    Pages: 449–458

     

    Abstract
    In the continuing ‘Not Ourselves’ practice-based project, we are attempting to unravel the harmonics of the collaborative voice in educational research, in which the singular voice of the ‘author’ also gives voice to multiple others. We approached this project as an enquiry into the process of ‘collaboration in the making’ and as an emergent practice. Each of the authors of the article has a different professional background: one an environmental educator; another an arts educator; and the third a contemporary artist. We explored walking together|apart to yield outcomes that were not tied to traditional notions of collaboration. The maps we created as we walked speak to collaborations that are rutted, insecure and ambiguous through irregular cooperations. This visual essay is structured into three sections where we collectively and individually explore concepts we refer to as ‘findings, windings and entwinings’.

     

    cathARTic: A journey into arts-based educational research

    Authors:  Elizabeth Ashworth

    Pages: 459–466

     

    Abstract
    During my graduate studies, I was encouraged by professors to do traditional forms of enquiry instead of exploring Arts-based Educational Research (ABER). As well, I found most people outside academia had heard the term ‘doctorate’ but few understood it. After completing my doctoral studies at the University of Glasgow, I created cathARTic (2012) as a way to explore ABER and share the personal and professional layers of that academic journey. It is a mixed-media work consisting of 216 scrapbook pages that may be displayed as a tapestry or in a series of binders. It is organized chronologically and built from my printed dissertation, research notes, journal entries, photographs and ephemera collected during my doctoral studies. This visual essay includes images of the work’s creation and related text, in an effort to show how I used Barone and Eisner’s seven features of ABER as a conceptual and logistical framework.

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

    Art as Research: Opportunities and Challenges, Shaun McNiff (ed) (2013)

    Author: Barbara Bolt

    Pages: 467–470

     

    Arts-based Research: A Critique and a Proposal, jan jagodzinski and Jason Wallin (2013)

    Authors: Fakhriya Al-Yahiayi

    Pages: 470–474

     

  • Vol. 11 No. 2 (2015)

    EDITORIAL

    Authors:  Glen Coutts

    Pages 181-182

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Employing mindfulness via art in education

    Authors:  Jodi Patterson

    Pages: 185-192

     

    Abstract
    Visual art is often misunderstood and under-applied in a venue where it has the potential to help humans the most: the general elementary classroom. Teacher training programmes that mandate an art class can help propel art’s offering by exposing future teachers to the increasing role mindfulness via art can play in school regarding cognitive, social and emotional well-being. This article cites ways and means to incorporate mindful art experiences into the classroom to help enhance both teaching and learning.

     

    A cross-cultural collaboration exploring art literacy, creativity and social transformation in China

    Authors: Jonathan Silverman and Yi Xiaoming 

    Pages: 193-212

     

    Abstract
    Two art educators, from the United States and China, reflect on their collaboration to plan, implement and assess a cross-cultural experience. They developed a ten-day residency for art education students at Nanjing Normal University in China. The pedagogy presented emphasized the interplay between skill development and personal expression, product and process, and social-directed knowledge and social transformation. Through analysing student critiques, reflective discussions and survey responses the authors framed five categories critical for planning cross-cultural exchanges and broadening the scope of art education: Sensing others’ cultural orientation, Building community, Scaffolding art literacy, Minding the gap between technique and creativity, and Reflecting on identity and visual culture. In a global society, culturally responsive art educators benefit when collaborating to help their students gain new perspectives on cultural assumptions, analyse common concepts such as aesthetics, visual literacy and critique, and reflect on the interdependence of teaching, creating art and social responsibility.

     

    Altermodern art education: Theory and practice

    Authors:  Marike Hoekstra and Talita Groenendijk 

    Pages: 213-228

     

    Abstract
    Art education in schools today needs to include the development of its direct relation to contemporary art, global developments and the lives of young people. Notions on contemporary art, migration and globalization, put forward by Nicolas Bourriaud in The Radicant and the Tate Triennial, are connected with relevant developments in art education. Key parameters following from theory are intercultural, process-oriented and student-based. The empirical study consists of a design research program to investigate the possibilities of Altermodern Art Education, having six trained art teachers implement the central design parameters in eight-week projects with 14 to 17 year olds.

     

    An artist-in-residence: Teaching with a sense of urgency

    Authors:  Tracey Hunter-Doniger

    Pages: 229-243

     

    Abstract
    This case study demonstrates the value of a ‘sense of urgency’ within the context of artist-in-residence programmes in K-12 public schools. Although the notion of a sense of urgency is often referred to within the context of business, this study reveals ways that this concept can be applied to an educational situation as well. In this article, a case study is presented in which an artist-in-residence created an environment where students in an Advanced Placement sculpture class set goals maintained constant vigilance, took risks and learnt to evaluate their own skills. This article indicates that using a sense of urgency as a pedagogical style can bring an additional learning benefit to students.

     

    Creating art-based approaches in working life development: The shift from success to significance

    Authors: Mirja Hiltunen and  Pälvi Rantala 

    Pages: 245-260

     

    Abstract
    The aim of this article is to analyse and identify the structure of activities occurring during a series of art workshops conducted in one particular work-based community, with a view to exploring links between modern working life and the fields of art and art education. The researchers took part in the workshops as participant observers. The research showed that art-oriented activities can make different organizational cultures more visible and open to further development. Participants can apply the experience gained in art workshops to their own work practice, using it to strengthen group coherence, to express ideas better and to become more emotionally engaged in their jobs. It can foster mental strength and faith in a personal way of working, and encourage people to try things that they have not tried before.

     

    Photography, critical pedagogy and ‘Difficult Knowledge’

    Authors:  Ya’ara Gil-Glazer 

    Pages: 261-276

     

    Abstract
    This article reports on a study of students’ reactions, perceptions and attitudes towards photographs that convey difficult knowledge to which they were exposed in an academic course. Difficult knowledge in this context refers to photographs that address disturbing topics such as violence, suffering and pain, extreme sexuality and gender identity. Research results indicate that while most of the students’ initial responses to such photographs displayed both attraction and repulsion, the photographs were also perceived as having great potential for promoting critical educational discourse. In addition, the results reveal that the sensitive use of photographs containing difficult knowledge is highly significant for an effective discussion in educational contexts.

     

    Zema and Peter Haworth: A double-jointed biography from the history of art education

    Authors:  Dustin Garnet 

    Pages: 277-297

     

    Abstract
    In this double-jointed biography, the author narrates the tandem tale of two parallel lives that directly contributed to the art community in Toronto, Canada, for generations. Each of these two great Canadians dedicated over 30 years to the instruction of visual art education at Central Technical School (CTS) and their lasting legacy has produced some of Canada’s most celebrated artists. Zema (Bobs) Haworth and Peter Haworth immigrated to Canada from England in the early 1920s and developed into successful artists, advocates, educators and socialites whose lives were inextricably intertwined with the larger institutional history of the Art Department at CTS. Tracing Zema’s and Peter’s lives through archival research, published memoirs and interviews, photos, and other personal documents, the author explores how this couple embodied the ideal of the artist-teacher and contributed to the visual arts at both the local and national levels.

     

    The occupation of art museum educator in the time of Occupy Museums

    Authors:  Nadine M. Kalin

    Pages: 299-309

     

    Abstract
    This article considers the occupation of art museum educator in the time of Occupy Museums (OM). I maintain these two different forms of occupations – the job of educator as occupation within art museums and OM as an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests as occupation – are both related and at odds with one another in the context of the art museum under neo-liberal managerialism. The working lives of art museum educators are morphing into occupations within art institutions that employ populist veiling tactics as cover for labour abuse in fulfilling their missions. OM reveals contradictions inherent to a museum system working hard to normalize such economic injustices, with a particular focus on the workers associated with these institutions. Current trends in art museum education and features of OM are analysed through neo-liberalist and horizontalist ideologies, bringing to light similar anti-hierarchical motivations, aiming for dissimilar ends. The article closes with a call for a return to modified forms of verticality in institutions based on cultures of mutual support instead of capitalism alone.

     

    Images used in visual arts education textbooks for secondary education: A study in Spain

    Authors:  Idoia Marcellan Baraze and  Ainhoa Gómez Pintado and  Ilargi Olaiz

    Pages: 311-326

     

    Abstract
    In this article we report on a study of images in visual arts education textbooks in the Basque Country (Spain). Studying textbooks is important because they are used extensively in Spanish schools. Our initial theory is that student’ lives are rich in images, mainly from media culture, but their textbooks, in contrast, offer more traditional images of art. Our analysis of images in the textbooks identified very different types of artistic images to the media ones. We saw a different use of them; ‘art’ is given a higher priority and is defined by aesthetic and hegemonic historical criteria. We could see a different treatment between artistic images and media culture, which seemed to imply a hierarchical relationship between the two. What seemed to us to be missing were links that might allow students to make meaningful connections between art and media culture images and the students’ life experience.

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

    From Child Art to Visual Language of Youth: New Models and Tools for Assessment of Learning and Creation in Art Education, Andrea  Karpati and  Emil Gaul (eds) (2013)

    Author: Fiona Blaikie

    Pages: 327-330

     

    Explorations in Virtual Worlds: New Digital Multi-Media Literacy Investigations for Art Education, Mary  Stokrocki (ed.)

    Authors: Andrea Karpati

    Pages: 330-332

     

    Ecologies of Invention, Andy dong, John Conomos and Brad Buckley (eds) (2013)

    Author: King-chung Siu

    Pages 332-334

  • Vol. 11 No. 1 (2015)

    EDITORIAL

    Authors:  Glen Coutts

    Pages 3–5

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Crafting the collective sense: A descriptive case study on recreational textile craft-making in Finnish adult education

    Authors: Anna Kouhia

    Pages: 7–20

     

    Abstract
    The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the collective aspects of craft-making in the field of adult education, and to discuss the collaborative elements behind the increasing popularity of leisure time craft-making. Exploring this emerging affinity further, this descriptive case study uses auto-ethnographic methods to examine the process of co-producing the collective sense in a group of hobby craft ­practitioners. Data consist of a researcher’s reflective field diary and in-depth interviews of nine course participants, which in the analysis unfold the experiences of becoming a member of a community of hobbyist craft-makers. There were four themes that emerged in the study: mutual agency, social interaction, active participation and shared responsibility. As the list suggests, a collective sense does not simply grow through increasing participation, but is also fuelled by many pedagogical and social factors. Therefore, craft-making is seen as a much broader phenomenon than a mere material transformation.

     

    Altered viewscapes: Raising awareness through creative practice in the urban cultural heritage of Istanbul

    Authors: Ilgm Veryeri Alaca And  Lucienne Thys-Şenocak 

    Pages: 21–41

     

    Abstract
    Once the capital of the Byzantines and the Ottomans, and now the commercial and cultural hub of Turkey, Istanbul is a city that struggles with the legacy of its past and the demands of the present. The Altered Viewscapes of Istanbul, an art project carried out by university undergraduates,  was developed to cultivate awareness of the urban cultural heritage of Istanbul. The project enabled students to evaluate their relationships to selected cultural heritage sites of the city and asked them to consider how this heritage could foster creative forms of civic participation. The students were asked to reflect on the aesthetic experience of viewing the historic peninsula of Istanbul and particularly, Eminönü, one of the city’s oldest districts. Students drew connections between the creative process and active spectatorship of the viewscape while considering how social, political and economic factors shape public space and the urban environment.

     

    Culdesac Island workshops: Creative capacities in a virtual learning environment

    Authors:  David Serra Navarro And  Joan Vallès Villanueva

    Pages: 43–58

     

    Abstract
    This work encompasses some reflections developed in the Culdesac Island project: a virtual lab put together through intergenerational creative workshops. The use of Second Life has allowed multiple pathways, the interaction of simulations and the creation of a social space where knowledge flows and is shared, plus the possibility of generating collaborative work. These simulation environments allow ‘real’ learning and spaces to share and develop artistic experiences. The aim is to show the educational potential of the virtual environment from the transference of real experience conveyed by the figure of the ‘avatar-performer’, thus establishing a relational framework between the ‘body-object’ and cooperative processes in an intangible space. In this social lab, real cultural actions are reproduced and/or revised in a mimetic way as the interactive principle between participants of different ages and profiles. Furthermore, it adds new values to network production based on real and virtual experience.

     

    Older adult responses to art curriculum and self-directed learning

    Authors:  Angela M. La Porte

    Pages: 59–74

    Abstract
    The objective of this participant observation was to better understand how older adults respond to diverse art education curricula and self-directed learning. The study involved teaching a weekly two-hour art class of eight to ten adults at a low-income residential facility over a four-month period. Findings suggested that curricula should encompass the broad range of student backgrounds, levels of art expertise, and life experiences. Older adult participants were largely self-directed to varying degrees, depending on their art knowledge, media expertise, and confidence in the subject area. The instructor best served the older adult learner as a facilitator or resource for learning. It was important to build on what students wanted to learn and to introduce artists and styles that broadened their perspectives and inspired art-making. Not all students responded to planned curriculum, but themes with an enduring idea such as healing or ritual evoked stories and inspired meaningful art.

     

    A critical analysis on five Korean art educators’ perceptions of pedagogic values of ‘Traditional’ painting

    Authors:  Ok-Hee Jeong

    Pages: 75–89

     

    Abstract
    This article critically analyses the views of five Korean art educators on traditional art practice that assume the enduring value of a particular style of Korean ‘traditional’ painting. The outcome of the data analysis shows how a particular style of Korean painting is recognized by them as ‘traditional’, while other styles such as folk painting are rejected as non-valuable from a complex historical legacy of art practice. This shows the cultural reproduction of the educational discourses and practices of tradition that are retained through an idealized memory historically rooted as part of structurally generated class ‘cultures’, as central to the constitution of social solidarity and to the creation of a collective identity, and have constantly reproduced a particular culture.

     

    Threshold concepts in art education: Negotiating the ambiguity in pre-service teacher identity formation

    Authors:  Lorrie Blair And  Sebastien Fitch

    Pages: 91–102

     

    Abstract
    The dual nature of being simultaneously an artist and a teacher has long been recognized as a source of stress for novice and mid-career art educators. The article describes findings from a qualitative study into first-year art education students’ experiences of studio-based art courses. Data comprising interviews with six instructors and focus-group interviews with a total of twelve students revealed the extent to which the above problem takes root early on before prospective teachers have entered the classroom, and indicates a pressing need for pre-service art teacher training to address this issue. We suggest the inherent dichotomy at the heart of art education can be understood as a problematic liminal space, which students experience both on a personal as well as an institutional level, and we explore how Threshold Concept theory might serve as a key to help students fuse their conflicting identities into a coherent sense of self.

     

    Embodied subjectivity: The impact of reflexive engagement with personal narrative upon the values of trainee primary art teachers

    Authors:  Hannah Hames

    Pages: 103–116

     

    Abstract
    This research explores the relationship between reflexive engagement with personal narrative, and the refinement and development of value systems amongst trainee primary art teachers. Work generated during a critical studies module was gathered and analysed chronologically to isolate and interpret any moments of reflexivity associated with the use of personal narrative. This was compared with the conclusions drawn by students in their final essays to identify whether such reflexive activity had supported the articulation of subject specific values. The study revealed that reflexive activity can significantly broaden students’ understanding of the value of art and design, however, most students are unable to connect their newly refined values with any proposed actions for change. The report concludes by highlighting the difficulties associated with the swift ‘interpellation’ of student teachers in primary settings, recommending that values-led practice in art and design is supported in a practical, skills-based way by training providers.

     

    The educational role of performing and visual arts in Asante traditional politics

    Authors:  Nana Ama Pokuaa Arthur And  Eric Appau Asante And  Nana Afia Opoku-Asare

    Pages: 117–135

     

    Abstract
    Although various forms of art are prominent in the Asante culture, the performing and visual arts make a particularly vibrant and far-reaching contribution. This study has used a qualitative research approach, relying mainly on observations and interviews, to focus on the role of the performing and visual arts in Asante traditional politics. The results show that the arts offer more than just entertainment and communication – they also play a motivational and educational role that encourages the Asante culture to continue to evolve. It is important that traditional rulers in Asante should help preserve and promote their visual and performing art forms to ensure that the arts continue to play instrumental roles in their traditional leadership.

     

    Visual art curricula, art teacher goals, and instructional time: Findings from an international survey

    Authors:  Melody K. Milbrandt And  Ryan Shin And  Teresa Torres de Eça And  Kevin Hsieh

    Pages: 137–156

     

    Abstract
    This article highlights selected responses from participants in twelve nations to an international survey of art educators posted on the International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) website from January to April 2013. Several themes emerging from this study are: 1) a shift in curricular emphasis from the creation of artworks to the goal of engaging students in creative and critical thinking; 2) problem-solving and design viewed as distinct areas of focus within the art curriculum 3) educational policies shifting some responsibilities from the states to the national level as assessments that promote international comparisons gain influence 4) in curricular groupings of art disciplines, there may be greater opportunities for student growth and teacher collaboration but also questions of time and resources to address and 5) art educators in this study are influenced by standards but are also influenced by the priorities of the educational context in which they teach.

     

    VISUAL ESSAY

    F.I.S.E Small Gallery, Community art project in Hungary

    Authors:  Neil Wolstenholme And  Kinga Ráthonyi

    Pages: 157–168

     

    Abstract
    Over the past seventeen years the authors have been working together, creating and promoting community art projects. The main objective of these works has always been to shape the users visual environment, with maximum involvement of the local community. Participation in the projects has allowed people to share creative thoughts, production, ideas, and communicate. These have taken place on site in a communal environment which respects and appreciates the individual. People are free to work/talk/look or just be there. The following visual essay documents a recently completed project.

     

    BOOK REVIEWS

    Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education, Judy Chicago (2014)

    Author:  Hilary Robinson

    Pages: 169–171

     

    The Creative Turn: Towards a new Aesthetic Imaginary, Anne Harris (2014)

    Authors: Robyn Gibson and Josephine Fleming

    Pages: 171–173

     

    Teaching Asian Art: Content, Context, and Pedagogy, Sheng Kuan Chung (ed.) (2012)

    Author: Li Yan Wang

    Pages 173–176

  • Vol. 10 No. 3 (2014)

    Editorial

    Glen Coutts

    pp. 265-267

     

    As we may publish: Digital scholarship and the future(s) of art education

    Aaron D. Knochel and Ryan M. Patton

    pp. 269-285

    Abstract:

    Qualities of digital scholarship for the arts and humanities are outlined as an ecology of research and pedagogy, expanding the scholarly journal by advancing the possibilities of online publishing. While moving away from paper-based scholarship is the first step, new models of digital scholarship that are multimodal and interactive allow for real-time effects, reflexive research, reconsider intellectual openness through a radical sense of accessibility, and broadly (re)define the textual body in research to one that is transdisciplinary. In this article, we elaborate on the current trends and opportunities in digital scholarship presented by online publications as an extension of research modalities, augmenting what art education research publications look like, presenting new and rich contexts for scholarship. We explore limitations and benefits found in the current state of academic publishing by asking how scholarship can be transformed in a technological ecology.

     

     

    Practice-based research as an approach for seeing, re-seeing and creating artworks

    Fakhriya Khalfan Al-YahYai

    pp. 287-302

    Abstract:

    There is growing interest in developing an agenda for carrying out new ways of conducting research in art and art education based on looking, seeing, thinking, creating and rethinking from an artistic perspective, that is, establishing a new vision for and revision of visual research in art education. The overall aim of this article is to provide insight into an artistic investigation and re-examination of the researcher’s culture and textile traditions. Doing so provides aesthetic insight through a close examination of fabric qualities and structures. Thinking and seeing are used as pedagogical elements in the process of practice-based research. This method of enquiry offers a rich example of how we can participate in the everyday world with heightened sensitivity and discover the beauty of seeing what many take for granted and thus learn to see differently through systematic enquiry.

     

    (Mis)Information highways: A critique of online resources for multicultural art education

    Joni Boyd Acuff

    pp. 303-316

    Abstract:

    This article calls to attention hegemonic online resources for multicultural art education. The author suggests that art educators carefully critique multicultural art lesson plans published online, as the Internet is increasingly a primary resource teachers use to make pedagogical and curricular decisions. The author demonstrates how some multicultural art education resources offered online contribute to an ‘us–other’ dichotomy, and contradict with the current progressive critical multicultural art education scholarship being published by contemporary art education scholars. The author asserts three contentions of support that illustrate how these online curricular resources maintain ‘liberal’ multiculturalism, exoticize cultural groups, produce surface knowledge about difference and fail to question power. This article concludes with a call to action in which art educators are encouraged to explicitly acknowledge, discuss and work with students and peers to build counter-curriculum that work against these damaging online multicultural art education resources.

     

    Integrating Taiwanese culture into design pedagogy

    Hsiu Ching Laura Hsieh

    pp. 317-329

    Abstract:

    Many Taiwanese students enthusiastically accept the consumption cultures of Japan and the United States, but neglect the value of their own culture. Thus, as a design educator, it is necessary to guide the students reflecting on and identifying with their own culture. This pedagogical study adopted qualitative methods and collected and analysed data from interviews, observation on the creation process and related documents. The purposes of this research were: to explore the related research and theories and integrate them as a model of Incorporating Culture into Design Creation; to explore the advantages and challenges of applying the new model to pedagogical practice; and to reflect on the application of the new model to teaching. According to the findings, it is feasible to apply this model to the design pedagogy. The contribution of this study was to encourage the students to recognize the characteristics of their own culture and facilitate their capabilities of incorporating culture into the design creation.

     

    Empathy and aesthetic experience in the art museum

    Alice Arnold,  Susan Meggs, Martin Greer

    pp. 331-347

    Abstract:

    The purpose of this study was to explore how students’ aesthetic understanding and ability to empathize were impacted by multiple learning experiences in the environment of an art museum. As part of a semester-long class in elementary art methods, education majors experienced a docent-led tour of the local art museum, featuring the work of fibre artist Deidre Scherer. The tour was followed by a series of learning events centred on the exhibit and the study of end-of-life care, the theme of Scherer’s work. Students then answered structured questionnaires prompting them to process the learning events with intentional reflection. A qualitative method of enquiry sought to uncover the lived experiences of the students enrolled in the class. Through these encounters, students developed empathy and understanding as well as the ability to describe the meanings of the art in terms of their own life scenarios.

     

    The paradox of ‘teaching’ transformation in fine art studio practice: Assessment in the South African context

    Dina Zoe Belluigi

    pp. 349-362

    Abstract:

    Underpinned by an awareness that education systems inherently maintain the status quo, this article explores a paradox at the heart of fine art studio teaching, learning and assessment in the postcolonial context of South Africa. The content of most current curricula evidences a concern with power, and the politics and problematics of representation. As such, encouragement of student engagement around and negotiation of notions of transformation, critical dialogue and identity is espoused. However, in the article it is argued that current approaches to assessment often unquestioningly replicate inherited systems, and in so doing, unwittingly reproduce systems of cultural capital that may be non-transformatory and non-pluralistic. Thus, because of the way assessment is practiced, that which is taught may be radically different from that which is experienced and thereby learnt in the studio.

     

    Children’s drawings from China and the United States and conceptions of female beauty

    Tingting Windy Wang

    pp. 363-379

    Abstract:

    Children’s perceptions of female beauty, as evidenced by their drawings, are the focus of this study. The extent to which universal domains, culture and media-projected ideas of female beauty might impact children’s drawings is considered. Two groups of six- to nine-year-old children’s drawings and verbally expressed ideas of female beauty in two culturally different but comparatively similar rural settings in the United States and China participated in this study. Findings confirm that the art activities of children are affected by universal domains, but even more strongly by cultures. Children develop distinct imagery of elements and categories that represent female beauty based on their interactions with cultural values, observations of their environments and imaginations. Media is found to play a lesser role than culture in their depictions, although the more susceptible to cultural changes the local community is, the more likely media is to affect children’s notions of beauty.

     

    Role-playing games in arts, research and educationJason Matthew Coxpp. 381-395Abstract:Games are increasingly being used as tools to broaden pedagogical options in schools and create interdisciplinary linkages. This article pays particular attention to role-playing games (RPGs), and the applications they have for arts education. RPGs can be used in art classrooms and in arts-based research and as an exciting and useful form of collaborative art-making, interpersonal discourse and reflection. This article is divided into sections describing the games and the manner in which it has been applied to arts education. Interspersed within the article are reflections from the author’s experience in a game that examines the politics of oppression called the The Tribunal, which resulted in introspection on both personal and societal issues. The article concludes that RPGs can help make both personal and communal meaning of experiences and foster the development of empathy.

     

    Student visual identities: exactitudes and significant details

    Xabier Molinet and Ricardo Marín-Viadel

    pp. 397-406

     

    Abstract:

    The educational institutions – the university schools in this case – have been described as reproducers of the social order and professional values and practices, according to Giroux and Simon concept of educational context. In this visual essay we propose an enquiry on the relationships between the students’ professional identities and the educational contexts through a visual discourse. The aesthetic relations in the visual essay, due to both the photographic searching process and the layout design, are fundamental to establish interpretative and metaphorical comparisons that enrich the verbal descriptions and interpretations commonly used.

    Las instituciones educativas –en este caso las facultades universitarias– ha sido descritras como agentes reproductores del orden social y de los valores y prácticas profesionales, de acuerdo al concepto de contexto educativo de Giroux y Simon. En este ensayo visual proponemos indagar la relación entre la identidad profesional de los estudiantes y sus contextos educativos por medio de un discurso visual. Las relaciones estéticas en el ensayo visual, debidas tanto al proceso de búsqueda fotográfica como al diseño de maquetación, son fundamentales para establecer comparaciones interpretativas y metafóricas que enriquecen las descripciones e interpretaciones verbales que se emplean habitualmente.

     

    Mongo: Refuse or resource? Residual narrations, an opportunity for the development of critical thinking and creative capacity

    Augusto Zubiaga and Lourdes Cilleruelo

    pp. 407-419

    Abstract:

    In ‘mongo, refuse or resource?’ we investigate the opportunities offered by the utilization of waste/retrieved products as a teaching resource for the development of critical thinking and creative capacity. Focussing on this uncertain and fluctuating transactional sphere allows us to access new dimensions when we undertake an intellectual dynamic of our sociocultural surroundings and when we accept and understand our values and how they can fluctuate. Entering the mongo dimension entails a shift of perspective when we attempt to tell ourselves stories in a creative way, because it allows us to speculate directly about the value of our objects, which leads us ineluctably to a constant rereading of our own identity, starting from that which we strive to conserve, as well as what we would like to dispose of – at least until others show that they would like to possess it.

     

    Book Reviews

    Rachel Mason, Brad Bucley and Nicholas Houghton

    pp. 421-427

    Design + Craft: The Brazilian Path, Jadélia Borges (2011) Sao Paulo: Editora Terceiro Nome, 240 pp. ISBN: 9788578160845, p/bk, R$80

    On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, James Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum (eds) (2013) London: Black Dog Publishing, 160 pp. ISBN: 9781908966292, p/bk, £16.95

    What do Artists Know?, James Elkins (ed.) (2012) University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 228 pp. ISBN: 9780271054247, h/bk, $74.95

  • 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

     

     

     

  • Vol. 10 No. 1 (2014)

    IJEtA 10.3

     

     

    Editorial

    Glen Coutts

    pp. 3-5

     

    Kindergarten and school as a learning environment for art

    Saila Nevanen, Antti Juvonen and Heikki Ruismäki

    Abstract

    This article focuses on kindergartens and schools as art educational environments. They were explored from three points of view: the physical environment, the social environment and the pedagogical environment created by the thinking and activities of teachers and artists. A multidimensional evaluation is used to analyse the data. (Interviews of artists and teachers (n=18), final reports (n=9), follow-up material from an art project in Helsinki beginning in 2000.) The project targeted children in kindergarten (3–6 years old) and in the first grades in school (7-9 years old) and included visual art, environmental art, literary art, drama, circus and architectural elements. School, kindergarten and the immediate surroundings offered an opportunity for a diversified cooperative achievement. The children proved to be skilful and significant members of society in carrying out their art projects.

    pp. 7-22.

     

     

    Beginning with concept: Deconstructing the complexity of ‘culture’ through art in design education

    Tasoulla Hadjiyanni

    Abstract

    The notion of ‘culture’ has long been recognized as an inherent component of both art and design education. What remains uncharted territory are ways by which educators can assess a student’s understanding of the complexity behind the production of ‘culture’. Contextualizing current pedagogical approaches within anthropological and interdisciplinary theoretical paradigms sheds light on the limitations of present undertakings. Static and stereotypical interpretations of ‘culture’ fail to account for the complex, multi-dimensional, hybrid, dynamic, intertwining, and ever-changing facets of ‘culture’ that characterize border crossings and modernization processes. This paper posits that concepts, an artistic synthesis of knowledge, can be the medium through which students can unravel the myth of ‘culture’ and expose its dynamic and changing nature, the tensions and contradictions involved, as well as the multiple ways of belonging. Marking the beginning of the design process, concepts that speak of ‘culture’ can propel a new era in infusing designs with social justice.

    pp. 23-39.

     

     

    Education through digital art about art

    Anders Marner and Hans Örtegren

    Abstract

    Four schools’ environments have been selected where paraphrases in art is a common denominator as a choice during secondary school. In this study, comparisons are made between digitally produced paraphrases, hand made paraphrases and blended production. The purpose is to shed some light on how the attitudes towards appropriations can be related to different media-specific tools. Theories about quotations in art are used to commenting on student´s work when paraphrasing by means of digital and/or manual techniques. The concluding remarks are that digital paraphrases of theme dominates, using quite simple juxtapositions, but still with interesting implications. Different ways of working with pictures digitally exposes multimodal ways for pupils to appropriating picture-making for their own purposes.

    pp. 41-54.

     

     

    Socially engaged art practice and character education: Understanding others through visual art

    Kim Hyungsook

    Abstract

    This article examines to what extent socially engaged art practice encourages students by promoting creativity, a sense of citizen responsibility, critical thinking, reflection, an interest in social justice, and consideration of people living in the local community, and ultimately contributing significantly to character education. In community-based art education, which enables the building of character, learners overcome the limitations of knowledge-oriented education to understand others, thus adding more meaning to their lives and helping them cultivate democratic citizenship so that they may serve society. This article discusses a key feature of socially engaged art practice through a case study by focusing on the service learning of an alternative school for North Korean adolescent refugees. The theoretical roots of socially engaged art practice and service learning for developing democratic citizenship are examined. The case of art education at alternative schools for North Korean adolescent refugees is discussed through the lens of community-based art education. North Korean adolescent refugees and South Korean graduate school students taught and were taught through reciprocal participation in service learning.

    pp. 55-69.

     

     

    John Dewey and Henry Schaefer-Simmern: The wholeness of artistic activity

    Sally Armstrong Gradle

    Abstract

    How can art as experience or education build a more humanized world? What are the benefits of an artful education that extend beyond the art itself? This work examines how two scholars of education and proponents of the arts have responded through their writing. The title of this article derives from John Dewey’s foreword to the book The Unfolding of Artistic Activity ([1948] 1961), which is a unique collection of case studies on artistic growth written by art educator Henry Schaefer-Simmern. In this text, as in John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), there is an underlying implication that creative activity which is supported by the individual’s life experiences leads to wholeness of the person, and, by extension, contributes to a revitalized society. This article is a further exploration of these exemplars’ thinking on the topics of art and education. The intention is to highlight their consonance and consider ways that their theories broaden the meaning of art, experience and education.

    pp. 71-84.

     

     

    Finding a space for art

    Michael John Jarvis

    Abstract

    The article addresses a key issue raised by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) with regard to the working spaces within schools where children can develop their art, craft and design skills and knowledge. In this comparative study the researcher interviewed two artists and four early years/primary teachers to try and establish the importance of the working space in developing effective practice, either as an artist or teacher of art. The interviews were recorded and field notes taken en situ. It became clear that the existence of a successful space for artworking was dependent upon other factors, for example, the practitioner’s specialist knowledge of art, how ideas for art were initiated, the extent of preparation and organization for artworking and the crucial importance of ‘practice’ for artist, child and teacher alike.

    pp. 85-98.

     

     

    Developing thinking skills through the visual: An a/r/tographical journey

    Veronica Garcia Lazo and  Jill Smith

    Abstract

    This article reports on research that investigated how students’ critical thinking skills can be developed through images. The research was located in New Zealand, a country whose national curriculum and assessment systems stress ‘thinking’ as a key competency and place emphasis on developing visual literacies. The research was underpinned by a critique of the impact of images on students living in an image-saturated world and the importance of them being visually literate. It involved examination and documentation of strategies used by two teachers to foster the critical thinking of year 13 students in visual arts education and their responses to those experiences. The research was positioned within an a/r/tographical framework, a method which links art, research and teaching, and privileges both text and image. The findings, presented as an integration of participant and researcher ‘voice’ and the ‘visual’, illustrate the profound effects of critical looking practice through an enquiry framework.

    pp. 99-116.

     

    Models of culture and modelling culture: Visiting artists as cultural ambassadors

    David Gall

    Abstract

    However lofty our educational goals, models of culture inform our teaching for better or worse. Therefore the quality of our theories of culture makes a difference to alleviating teacher anxieties about teaching diverse cultures and to better transcultural teaching. Effective preparation for multicultural teaching needs the best models of culture available, opportunities to interact with diverse cultures, and reflective practice about art teaching as a transcultural event. The limitations of dominant models of culture, which generally either assume people are puppets of cultural systems, or that cultural systems are epiphenomena of people’s actions, are reviewed. Transformative models developed by Critical Realists are recommended. Reflection on a visiting artist workshop as a case study of transcultural interaction complements the review of theory. Not knowing is the engine of cultural change; and lack of total control a reason for improvisation. Familiarity with culture’s Janus faces, fluid/incoherent and comforting/coherent, relieves teacher anxieties.

    pp. 117-128.

     

     

    Reviews

    Mary Blatherwick And  Nicholas Houghton And  Laurel Lampela

    Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education, 2nd ed., Eungie Joo, Joseph Keehn II and Jenny Ham-Roberts (eds) (2011) New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 436 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-96085-4, p/bk, £34.99, h/bk £95.00

    Artist Scholar: Reflections on Writing and Research, G. James Daichendt (2012) Bristol: Intellect, 161 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84150-487-2, p/bk, £16, $23

    Art and Queer Culture, Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer (eds) (2013) London: Phaidon, 412 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7148-4035-5, h/bk, £49.95

    pp. 129-136

  • Vol. 9 No. 3 (2013)

    Creative Industries Special Issue

    Stuart MacDonald

    pp. 287-291

     

     

     

    Beyond the creative industries

    Stuart MacDonald

    pp. 293-309

     

    Abstract

    Although Creative Industries as engines of post-industrial economies have assumed an increasing global priority with implications for art education at all levels few studies exist. Nomenclature here is contested, especially when arts’ role appears freighted with alien concepts of industry and commerce. But much of this debate concerns visual and performing arts, only part of a larger cluster comprising, amongst others, architecture, design, fashion and games. And, Creative Industries are now seen as important socially as economically. This article takes classification as least problematic, concentrating instead on people working in the Creative Industries (largely in Glasgow and Scotland), their interactions and networking within a creative ecology, and real-world interactions with education. It presents examples of collaboration, co-creativity and co-design, and cross-disciplinarity, arguing for a strategic role for design and design thinking linked to social and economic innovation, where educational gains are prime, and revisiting earlier debates about postmodern art education.

     

    Keywords

    Creative Industries, design, design thinking, co-design, creative ecology, cross-disciplinarity

     

     

     

    Supporting the creative industries: The rationale for an exchange of thinking between the art and business schools

    Gemma Kearney and Paul Harris

    pp. 311-326

     

    Abstract

    Increasing interest in the concept of the ‘Creative Industries’ with emphasis upon the ‘industry’ aspect, presents questions as to how Art Schools can best prepare students. Indeed the industrial aspect encourages consideration of business and entrepreneurship and by adopting a conceptual approach to draw together different strands of literature from art, design, business and entrepreneurship research, this article explores the issues and challenges in supporting students in a creative context. Areas where an exchange of thinking could occur between the Art and Business Schools are identified and where the cross-fertilization of ideas and teaching practices could offer new methods to support students to engage in the Creative Industries. Barriers remain in teaching entrepreneurship, but viewing it as a process, utilizing the Theory of Effectuation and drawing attention to the prevalence of entrepreneurial teams proffers insights.

     

    Keywords

    creative industries, art school, entrepreneurship, Scotland

     

     

     

    UK artists competing against despotic nations? The muddle of enlisting artists to develop a creative workforce

    Tyler Denmead

    pp. 327-341

     

    Abstract

    The Robinson Report in the late 1990s argued that the structure and delivery of schools needed to be updated for the United Kingdom to remain competitive economically. The argument assumes that the United Kingdom needed to develop a workforce adept at working in the creative industries to drive economic growth. Required capabilities include generating and delivering intellectual property, symbolic meaning and other goods and services in unprecedented ways. UK education policy from 1997 to 2010 enlisted so-called creative practitioners – workers in the creative industries that include artists, musicians, and performers – to foster creative practices in schools and contribute to their structural change. But this economic rationale and its policy implications for arts education have not been examined in great detail. I argue in this article that the ambiguities and contradictions of creative industries policy rhetoric and its implementation obscure and mitigate artists, musicians and performers’ pedagogies.

     

    Keywords

    artist pedagogy, creative practitioners, creative industries, creative partnerships

     

     

     

    What creative industries? Instrumentalism, autonomy and the education of artists

    John Baldacchino

    pp. 343-356

     

    Abstract

    As the narrative of the Creative Industries becomes commonplace, arts institutions are increasingly expected to interface arts practice with business and enterprise. This article opens with a critique of the CBI’s document ‘First Steps’ (2012), arguing how this minimizes the arts’ role in schools. It then provides an analysis of two pedagogies: productivism and autonomism. Following the implications that emerge from the tension between productivism and autonomism in arts pedagogy, and reading these implications from within the contexts of the divergent and increasingly hybrid forms of contemporary art practices, this article then moves on to state that to argue for the legitimation of the arts by gathering what they do under the designation of the Creative Industries would amount to reifying art into an object of mere use, thus distorting both its productive and autonomist possibilities.

     

    Keywords

    creative industries, instrumentalism, productivist aesthetic, autonomy, CBI, pedagogical aesthetics

     

     

     

    The mechanics of managing the Cultural and Creative Industry ParkCultural and Creative Industry Park in National Taiwan University of Arts

    Mei-Hsien Huang

    pp. 357-368

     

    Abstract

    In response to the trend of creative economy and in support of the national education policy of university-industry links and the mission of cultivating talents, National Taiwan University of Arts established the first Cultural and Creative Industry Park in Taiwan in 2007. This also qualifies National Taiwan University of Arts as the only university affiliated with a cultural and creative park in Taiwan. This paper aims to explore the mechanics of managing the Cultural and Creative Industry ParkCultural and Creative Industry Park in National Taiwan University of Arts. Through document analysis this article reveals the six operational characteristics of this park, including renovating the old paper mill factory, planning the multifunctional space, inviting excellent cultural and creative manufacturers to station in, establishing a specialized management unit, utilizing university academic and administrative resources, and striving for the government subsidy and industry reward. There are five objectives of the operational content of the Cultural and Creative Industry ParkCultural and Creative Industry Park, including teaching and internship, consultation for starting an enterprise, research innovation, industry incubation, and life aesthetics promotion. Finally, the paper points out three concerns regarding current operations.

     

    Keywords

    educational strategies, academic-industry collaboration, the Cultural and Creative Industry ParkCultural and Creative Industry Park, National Taiwan University of Arts

     

     

     

    Illuminating creativity with cultural engagement: Colour inspiration in cooperative learning through reflective action

    Tsen-Yao Chang

    pp. 369-385

     

    Abstract

    Colour plays an important role in the physical and aesthetic learning environment. A major element in basic design training, colour affects student performance and creativity. Cultural colours, closely connected with stories from time immemorial, are topics that inspire student creativity. As instructor and researcher, I based this study on action research and used in-class, cooperative learning to engage colours and their corresponding stories in unique cultures with freshman students from the Department of Creative Design of National Yunlin University of Science and Technology. Two teaching formats – traditional and creative – were used to understand the difference between active and passive learning and to determine whether colour could be applied within a cultural context. The investigation suggests that introducing cultural issues in colour studies develops both aesthetic and cultural awareness, and creative activities help students apply colours to their lives and future creations.

     

    Keywords

    cultural colour, action research, colour application, cultural observation

     

     

     

    New creative product design industries: International Young Designers Exhibition, Taipei, 19–21 May 2012 – a visual essay

    Mary Stokrocki and Han (Sandrine) Hsiao-Cheng

    pp. 387-398

     

     

     

    Portfolio as a topological tool to define a professional profile in the area of creative industries

    Aldo Serra Passarinho, Ana Velhinho de Sousa, Tiago Caldas Nunes, Viviane Silva

    pp. 399-410

     

    Abstract

    The main goal of this visual essay is to explore visual data mapping and mining of an Art and Media B.A. Portfolio as means to define a professional profile in the creative industries. As artists, researchers and teachers with a multidisciplinary background, we intend to focus our research in art-based methodologies that allow us to explore dialogical and processual methods to envision and improve our art practice and teaching as reflective practitioners. A/r/t/ography was identified as a valuable methodology for this purpose. Furthermore, Portfolio was also identified as an insightful tool to map topographic and topological paths within the B.A. curriculum. Through a visual thinking process we explored and discussed several means of representation translated in this visual essay. This experimental framework will allows us to proceed with the professional profile definition informed by the outcomes obtained through visual mapping of the B.A. Portfolio.

     

    Keywords

    portfolio, creative industries, higher education, art-based research, a/r/t/ography, visual mapping

     

     

    Reviews

    pp. 411-417

     

    World Art: An Introduction to the Art in Artefacts, Ben Burt (2013) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 272 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84788-943-0, p/bk, $29.95, £17.99
    David Carrier


    Zeichnen: Wahrnehmen, Verarbeiten, Darstellen. Empirische Untersuchungen Zur Ermittlung Räumlich-Visueller Kompetenzen IM Kunstunterricht, Edith Glaser-Henzer, Ludwig Diehl, Luitgard Diehl Ott, Georg Peez (2012) München: Kopaed, 201 pp., ISBN: 978-3-86736-133-0, p/bk, €18.80
    Folkert Haanstra


    Künstlerische Kunstpädagogik. Ein Diskurs Zur Künstlerischen Bildung, Carl-Peter Buschkühle (ed.) (2012) Oberhausen: Athena Verlag, 482 pp., ISBN: 978-3-89896-514-9, p/bk, €29.50

    Diederik Schonau

     

     

  • Vol. 9 No. 2 (2013)

    NOTE: INSEA members have full access as a membership benefit through the membership portal at www.insea.org

    Volume 9 Issue 2

    Cover Date: July 2012

    Contents

    Editorial

     

    Glen Coutts

     

    Page Start: 151

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Visual Expression of Beauty and Ugliness in Adolescent Art

    Authors:  Andrea Kárpáti  and  Lisa Kay

     

    Page Start: 155

     

    Keywords

    adolescent art, visual language, self expression, kamasz-rajz, vizuális nyelv, énkifejezés

    Abstract

    In this article, we present preliminary findings of a cross-cultural pilot study undertaken on the common borders of education and therapy through art. We examine images of beauty and ugliness drawn by adolescents in Hungary and the United States. Using beautiful and ugly drawing tasks as a personality test was first developed by researchers at an interactive digital testing site in Hungary. However, this method had not been used as a research tool, so with the developers’ permission, a small pilot was performed to facilitate standardization of the task. The described research method is especially useful for adolescents and young adults whose verbal communication is richly supplemented by their creative imagery. Our analysis focused on themes, emotional responses in the drawings, which are vital signs that express adolescents’ perceptions about the two extreme aesthetic experiences. The use of the Ugly and Beautiful Image Task (UBIT) as an educational and therapeutic assessment tool is also addressed.

     


    A tanulmány egy kultúraközi összehasonlító vizsgálat első eredményeit tartalmazza, amely a művészetterápia és a vizuális nevelés közös határain mozog. Magyar kamaszok alkotásait hasonlítjuk össze, akik a szépség és a rútság fogalmát próbálták meg kifejezni képi eszközökkel. A két ellentétes minőség megjelenítését pszichológiai tesztként alkalmazták először a Psychogalaxy weboldalt megalkotó kutatók. Korábban ezt a feladatot kutatási célra még nem alkalmazták. A fejleszők engedélyével egy kismintás pilot kísérletet végeztünk, amelyben a feladat értékelési rendszerének finomításához kívántunk hozzájárulni. A vizsgálati módszer különösen hasznos kamaszok és fiatal felnőttek esetében, akiknek a szóbeli kommunikációját gazdag információs háttérrel egészíti ki kreatív képi közléseik. Elemzésünkben a rajzok témáival és az alkotók érzelmi reakcióival foglalkoztunk, melyekből kitűnik, hogyan vélekednek az esztétikai ellentét-párról. Írásunk végén a Rút és Szép Képalkotó Feladat (RSZKF) pedagógiai és művészetterápiás alkalmazási lehetőségeit is felvetjük.

     

     

    ‘Silver Scorpion’ Communal comics and disability identities between the United States and Syria

    Authors:  Valerie L Karr

     

    Page Start: 173

     

    Keywords

    disability identity,United Nations,comic books,education,disability,Middle East

    Abstract

    This article will explore the development and expression of disability identity and agency through a cross-cultural communal art experience, the creation of comic book heroes with disabilities. The narrative voice of youth participants with disabilities from the U.S. and Syria was examined to understand ways in which this group learning experience in visual art facilitated their causal agency and the development of disability identity. This article explores artistic expression and human rights education as curricular spaces for the development of causal agency skills, and investigates how the final artistic product represented the vision of youth participants. The study found that the creative process encouraged the development of causal agency skills through visual narrative. For future educational interventions at the intersection of art, youth and disability culture, this framework may serve to illuminate particular youth and disability experiences through stories, goals, and representations.

     

    Non-traditional education using cultural heritage: A case study from Syria

     

    Authors:  Maya Alkateb

     

    Page Start: 189

     

    Keywords

    non-traditional education,folk culture,cultural education,oral tradition,heritage education,Syria

    Abstract

    This article explores the issue of using culture and cultural heritage as themes in non-traditional education to foster teamwork attitudes and leadership, research and presentation skills, in addition to looking at ones’ environment with a critical eye and valuing culture as an asset. It presents an educational programme where youth from Syria documented oral heritage, explored their cultures with photography as a probing tool and participated in creating public displays of their heritages. In this article, I describe the educational programme, its rationale, the employed concept of culture, faced challenges and learned lessons. Feedback from participants and host communities is discussed and questions for further enquiry are raised, including on the applicability of such programme to promote cultural diversity, the long-term effects on participants, and ways to highlight the value of cultural heritage towards the communities that own it when its continuity is threatened.

     

    Factors affecting low ceramics specialization decisions within the KNUST Industrial Art degree programme

     

    Authors:  Samuel Nortey and  Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa and  Edwin K. Bodjawah

     

    Page Start: 205

     

    Keywords

    specialization decisions,ceramics,Department of Industrial Art,high school location,introductory ceramics course

    Abstract

    This article looked at the trend of specialization within the four-year Industrial Art degree programme at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana. Specialization decisions during the period 1999–2011 were studied, which confirmed that ceramics receives low specialization after the first-year diagnostic studies. The Social Learning Theory provided the framework for the study to explore factors that influence students of the Industrial Art department in low ceramics majoring as compared to the other disciplines (textiles design and metals product design). Findings showed that there is a significant association between studying ceramics in high school and students’ decision to specialize in ceramics at the university level. The results obtained from the odds ratio (OR) further indicated that if students are taught ceramics in high school, then they are 115.96 times more likely to specialize in the course at the university level. The study also revealed using the logistic regression that the course content satisfaction and other explanatory variables such as age, gender and location influenced decisions. The findings of the study strongly support the idea of background student motivation and the need for teaching that is exploratory, practice focused, problem centred and process oriented to motivate first-year students in majoring in ceramics.

     

     

    Introduction to theatre at primary school: A short-term evaluation of a French experience

     

    Authors:  Jean-Yves Leroux and  Nathalie Moureau

     

    Page Start: 219

     

    Keywords

    education policy,childhood,theatre,cultural consumption,cultural capital,school,politique éducative,enfance ,théâtre,consommation culturelle,capital culturel,école

    Abstract

    The aim of this study is to observe the impact that an introduction to theatre in schools has on a child’s subsequent theatre attendance. Insofar as it has been generally accepted that cultural consumption by children depends on the child’s family background, it may be possible to justify that governments should provide access to the Arts in schools for children of disadvantaged families. We conduct a study on a French programme called ‘Lectures en scènes’, whose purpose, among others, is to increase child theatre attendance. A statistical survey was distributed among 550 French pupils in the south of France between 2007 and 2009. One-fifth of the children changed their practise: they decided to take courses in theatre or to attend plays the year following the programme. Moreover, the effect is stronger for children belonging to high social classes, a paradox for a programme, which aims at reducing social inequalities. This result could lead the efforts of the government policies to be concentrated on disadvantaged districts.


    L’objet de cet article est d’étudier quel impact l’introduction du théâtre à l’école a sur la fréquentation théâtrale ultérieure des enfants. Dans la mesure où il est généralement accepté que les consommations culturelles des enfants dépendent de leur contexte familial, nous posons ici l’hypothèse que l’introduction du théâtre à l’école favorise l’accès à la culture d’enfants venant de contextes défavorisés. Afin de vérifier cette hypothèse, nous avons mené une enquête à partir d’un programme français intitulé “Lectures en scènes”. L’enquête a été menée entre 2007 et 2009 dans le sud de la France auprès d’environ 550 enfants. Un cinquième des enfants ayant suivi le programme a décidé de suivre des cours de théâtre ou d’assister à des représentations au cours de l’année qui a suivi leur expérience. Il apparait toutefois que le changement a été plus marqué pour les enfants appartenant aux classes sociales favorisées, un paradoxe dans la mesure où un des objectifs du programme était de réduire les inégalités sociales. Ce résultat pourrait conduire à préconiser que les politiques d’éducation à la culture concentrent leurs efforts sur les zones géographiques défavorisées.

     

     

    Lessons about identity formation from contemporary art

     

    Authors:  Rachel Mason and  Raphael Vella

     

    Page Start: 235

     

    Keywords

    contemporary art,identity,citizenship,education,Europe

    Abstract

    This article describes and interprets artworks that interrogate identity and explores their potential application as a resource for teaching in schools. The artworks in question were selected for interdisciplinary curriculum experiments carried out by research teams taking part in the Images and Identity project funded by the European Commission. There is much public debate about the changing nature of identity today and the art and citizenship teachers collaborating on curriculum development during this project used contemporary artworks to encourage young people to reflect on, explore and express their understanding of their identities within the context of Europe. The article draws on social science theory to explicate some of the artworks sourced for the project that examine identity as a personal and/or socially constructed representation of self (ethnic, national, civic, etc.) and/or engage with identity politics in various ways. It ends with a brief discussion of ways art teachers could use contemporary art to explore citizen identifications with Europe.

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

    On Loss: A Strange Beauty

     

    Authors:  Alexandra Cutcher

     

    Page Start: 253

     

     

    Becoming arts-based researchers: A journey through the experience of silence in the university classroom

     

    Authors:  Rachel Fendler and  Judit Onsès and  Fernando Hernández-Hernández

     

    Page Start: 257

     

    Keywords

    arts-based research,higher education,student transitions,narrative enquiry,image-based enquiry,investigación basada en las artes,educación superior,tránsitos del estudiante,investigación narrativa,investigación con y sobre imágenes

    Abstract

    This visual essay captures the changes that students experienced in the undergraduate class Arts-Based Research, an elective offered at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Barcelona. This class was structured around a collaborative enquiry involving both students and professors, which explored the experience of silence in the university classroom. While carrying out the investigation, students learned to research, by researching. In doing so, the group experimented with and became more fluent in different arts-based methodologies, and generated three final results: a video, an article and an installation.
    Este artículo visual refleja los cambios experimentados por los estudiantes durante la asignatura optativa de Investigación Basada en las Artes, ofertada dentro del Grado de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Barcelona. Dicha asignatura se estructuró como una investigación compartida en la que se involucraron tanto los alumnos como los profesores, y cuyo objetivo fue explorar la experiencia de silencio en las clases de la universidad. Durante el proceso de investigación, los estudiantes aprendieron a investigar ... investigando. Así, mientras el grupo experimentaba con diferentes metodologías basadas en las artes, a su vez aprendían más sobre éstas, dando lugar en el final del proceso a un video, un artículo y una instalación.

     

    Project ‘Adriatic Fish and Sailing Ships’ was conducted with 255 children: Visual essay of the art project in Croatia

     

    Authors:  Dijana Nazor

     

    Page Start: 265

     

    Keywords

    film,learning outside of school,combined materials,creativity,film,učenje izvan škole,kombinirana tehnika,kreativnost

    Abstract

    The project ‘The Adriatic fish’ was conducted with 240 children from a primary school near Split, Croatia. The aim of this project was to show that children can learn and creatively collaborate outside of school, in their surroundings, by finding natural forms (of stones) on the beach. Learning how to observe and recognize the shapes around them, they acquire the skills of research and creating by combining materials (stones and wire). Throughout this project, the students learnt about the species of Adriatic fish. This project helped to develop children’s ability to observe and also encouraged their creative cooperation.
    Projekt Jadranske ribice nastao je u suradnji s 240 djece iz osnovne škole pokraj Splita. Ovim projektom nastojalo se pokazati da djeca mogu učiti i kreativno surad-ivati i izvan škole, u svojoj okolini, pronalaženjem prirodnih oblika kamenja na plaži. Ucˇenjem gledanja i prepoznavanjem oblika oko sebe stječu se vještine kreiranja i istraživanja s kombiniranim tehnikama (kamenja i žice). Kroz ovaj projekt učenici su učili i o vrstama Jadranskih riba razvijajući spoznaju o bogatstvu Jadranskog mora i svog podneblja. Cilj projekta bio je razvijanje dječjeg opažanja i zajednička suradnja med-u učenicima.

     

     

    Book Reviews

     

    Authors:  Suzanne Caines and  Marjorie Cohee Manifold and  Diederik Schönau

     

    Page Start: 275

     

    Abstract

    The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968–1978, Garry Neill KENNEDY (2012) Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 421 pp., ISBN: 9780262016902, h/bk, £41.95
    Debates in Art and Design Education, Nicholas Addison and Lesley Burgess (eds) (2013) London and New York: Routledge, 221 pp., ISBN: 978-0415-61887-8, p/bk, £23.99
    The Arts in Education. An Introduction to Aesthetics, Theory and Pedagogy, Mike Fleming (2012) London and New York: Routledge, 134 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-62029-1, p/bk, £ 34.96


  • IJETA cover 9.1

    Vol. 9 No. 1 (2013)

    Volume 9 Issue 1

    Cover Date: March2013

    For access to the articles and Visual Essays click here.

    If you are a member of InSEA, you are entitled to full, free access to IJETA from Vol 7 No 3. To access sign into the members section of the InSEA web pages


    Contents

    EDITORIAL

    Authors:  Glen Coutts

    Page Start: 3

     

    ARTICLES

     

    Creating art, creating identity: Under-privileged pupils in art education challenge critical pedagogy practices

    Authors:  Dalya Yafa Markovich And  Tamar Rapoport

    Page Start: 7

    Keywords

    cultural knowledge,critical Pedagogy,under-privileged students,agency

     

    Abstract

    Studies in the field of education in general, and in art education in particular, point to the contribution of critical pedagogy to the identity empowerment of pupils from an underprivileged socio-class background. Most of the studies conducted so far have examined in detail the theoretical–ideological characteristics of the critical praxis in education, but little attention has been given to the ways in which it operates in practice as part of the learning process in class. This article focuses on the meanings given by pupils from one art class in an underprivileged high school to the critical praxis, and on the ways in which they understood their identity and their social position in light of it. The study is part of an ethnographic field work that took place in the class over an entire school year. This included participant observations in 25 lessons and in-depth interviews with eight leading pupils. The findings suggest that the pupils tended to reject typical critical pedagogical practices that sought to empower them – adopting hegemonic creative tools (the master’s tools) and high-lighting peripheral narratives (ascribing a voice to the subaltern) – this on account of seeing them as reflecting and replicating their underprivileged condition. These objections suggest that critical pedagogy works in differential and unpredictable ways in underprivileged ethno-class contexts, which put its universal ideological assumptions to the test.

     

    ‘In Between the Fireflies’: Community art with senior women of chinese heritage around issues of culture, language and storytelling

    Authors:  Heather Mcleod And  Kathryn Ricketts

    Page Start: 23

     

    Keywords

    community art,empowerment,senior women,Chinese culture,immigrants,multiple literacies

     

    Abstract

    Participants were empowered through their engagement in the process of two recent separate community art research projects that highlighted the benefits of dialogue in art-making and increased participation as facilitators ceded authority to participants. Both projects used ethnography and narrative methods. The participants were senior women of Chinese heritage in Western Canada who could not fluently speak Canada’s dominant languages and some could not read or write in any language. Their involvement focused around issues of culture, language and storytelling. Reflecting on the projects suggested new avenues of research to learn more distinctly about such empowerment, and facilitated our personal creative work. Based on this learning, we continue to develop new initiatives for the education of pre-service teachers that will involve possibilities for transformation and the counter-hegemonic. Dialogue benefits art-making, and the possibilities for participation in creative community education projects are increased when planners surrender power to participants.

     

     

    The lost and found space of the arts in education

    Authors:  Lisa LaJevic

    Page Start: 41

     

    Keywords

    art education,teacher education,arts integration,elementary education,curriculum

     

    Abstract

    Using the metaphor of the ‘lost and found’, I will explore the curricular and pedagogical space of the arts in the elementary classroom and address implications for teacher education. The lost and found – a space where found items are kept for reclaiming by their owners – can help provide insight into the complexities and uncertainties of integrating the arts into the general elementary classroom. This article is based on findings from a qualitative study that attempted to understand arts integration and what is truly happening with the arts in elementary classrooms.

     

    Learning and seeing through walls: The Karlín school’s form of education through art (raising questions of location, nation, trans-nation, history, myth and modernity)

    Authors:  Jeremy Howard

    Page Start: 55

     

    Keywords

    art history,education history,art and education

     

    Abstract

    This article examines the Karlín School in Prague as a work of educational art. Built between 1904 and 1906 the school appeared like a modern learning palace and was adorned externally with four large scale murals and a range of sculptural works that taught not just the children studying in the school but also the local citizens about the value of art in education. As much as the monumental artwork combined with the architecture of the school was about sensibility to beauty and quality, it was also pedagogical, historical, highly politicized and ideological. The nature of these multiple signs of the artwork is analysed here, and considered within the contexts of national awakenings (particularly that of the Czechs in the early twentieth century) as well as the rise of teaching through art that Bohemia (through Comenius) had done so much to instigate.

     

     

    Investigating interrelations in visual arts education: Aesthetic enquiry, possibility thinking and creativity

    Authors:  Victoria Pavlou

    Page Start: 71

     

    Keywords

    aesthetic enquiry,possibility thinking,creativity,studying artworks,elementary education

     

    Abstract

    Visual arts education can be an important and powerful field of learning for children. This article explores interrelations between the study of artworks and the development of creativity in children’s thinking and art-making. Starting from the premise that engagement with artworks does not automatically release children’s imaginative capacities, the article discusses how an aesthetic mode of enquiry can support children’s artviewing and enable the development of possibility thinking; the ability to make connections, to think differently and envisage new possibilities. Aesthetic enquiry can enable children to actively engage in taking their ideas further, exploring options and employing critical reflection. Providing children with opportunities to materialize their ideas after viewing an artwork, set the prerequisitions for innovative solutions and the development of creativity. These interrelations between artviewing and art-making are argued theoretically and explored empirically through a small scale exploratory study with 7–8 year olds.

     

     

    DOUBLE PESPECTIVES: Multimodal degree projects and society

    Authors:  Helena Danielsson

    Page Start: 89

     

    Keywords

    degree projects,multimodal forms,visual representation,disability,participation,examensarbete,multimodala former,visuell representation,funktionshinder,delaktighet

     

    Abstract

    The aim of this article is to highlight the experiences from a research project that studied the use of multimodal forms in degree projects. A visual representation and a written report were presented. Phenomena that occurred in the process are discussed. The article focuses on parts that were conducted in the field of Art Education and uses, by way of example, two degree projects, both of which had disabilities and the inclusion of the disabled as their theme. Participants chose a museum to exhibit their finished projects, to share ideas with the community, and to inspire the industry of pedagogy. The study looked especially at design theory and a socio-cultural view of learning; further, research into visual literacy, media literacy and media reception was used. Using the results, I describe various aspects of tutoring, thesis presentation in a public venue, and the significance of feedback from a student perspective

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

     

    Scotland vs The United States: Teaching art in universities

    Authors:  Jo Ganter

    Page Start: 107

     

    Keywords

    empirical teaching experience,studio practices,teaching abroad,developmental and modular methodologies

     

    Abstract

    This is a short account of my own particular experience teaching a studio-based art course in America. It compares my experience there with my more common practice of teaching art in a Scottish university. Both institutions have their pluses and minuses when compared with one another, and this essay is intended only to provoke further discussion rather than present any conclusions about national pedagogies.

     

    ‘ street water’: A community project to discover the underground network that connects the city with its rivers

    Authors:  Rachel De Sousa Vianna And  Gaby De Aragão

    Page Start: 116

    Keywords

    community art,environment,art education

     

    Abstract

    This is the story of ‘Street Water Project’, which took place in the neighbourhood of Santo Antônio, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, between November 2010 and July 2011. The activities consisted of art and environment workshops in schools and poetic interventions in public spaces designed to raise awareness of the population regarding the water sources that supply the city.

     

    Visual Essays: A practice-led journey

    Authors:  Lisa Kay

    Page Start: 131

     

    Keywords

    visual data research,Arts-based methods,practice-led

     

    Abstract

    The metaphor of research as a practice-led journey and art making as a catalyst in the research process is the focus of this visual essay. Using a multi-method researchdesign, which combined qualitative and arts-based methods, relationships, patterns, and meanings in the data were examined and clarifiedto explore how students and teachers in alternative high school settings characterize art education. This visual essay includes a selection of these art works to illustrate the research process.

     

    REVIEWS

    Authors:  Jin-Shiow Chen And  Susan K. Leshnoff And  Katy Macleod

    Page Start: 139

     

  • IJETA 8.3

    Vol. 8 No. 3 (2012)

    Volume 8 Issue 3

    Cover Date: October 2012

    For access to the articles and Visual Essays click here.

     

    If you are a member of InSEA, you are entitled to full, free access to IJETA from Vol 7 No 3. To access sign into the members section of the InSEA web pages

    Contents

    Special Issue: Community art

    Editorial

    Authors:  Glen Coutts and  Timo Jokela

    Page Start: 217

     

    Interrogations: Art, art education and environmental sustainability

     

    Authors: Helene Illeris

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.221_1

     

    ARTICLES

    Keywords

    sustainable art education,environmental sustainability,contemporary art,currents in art education

     

    Abstract

    How can art educators begin to inhabit questions of environmental sustainability, accepting to be ethically normative but avoiding becoming dogmatic? This article investigates three interconnected approaches to sustainable art education with the aim of building a platform from where to explore ‘environmental sustainability’ without losing the epistemological and ideological complexities that have been developed within the contemporary research field. The first section, Art, presents two contemporary art projects and discusses their possible contributions to environmental sustainability. The second section, Art Education, introduces four currents in contemporary art education: critical art education, post-structuralist strategies, visual culture pedagogy and community-oriented visual interventions, and ‘interrogates’them about environmental sustainability. Keywords from the interrogations are used as ‘cornerstones’ to create an epistemological ‘platform’. In the third section, Environmental Sustainability, the insights and keywords from the previous sections are used to exemplify how moments of environmental sustainability could be introduced in art education.

     

    The makers of new words: A principally ethnographic account of community artists’ language

     

    Authors: Tyler Denmead

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.239_1

     

    Keywords

    community arts,pedagogy,metaphor,socially-engaged arts,dialogic pedagogy,artist pedagogy,early childhood education

     

    Abstract

    This principally ethnographic research investigated the pedagogies of eight community artists. Unstructured, artist-led interviews produced salient concepts that were examined in participation observation of twenty workshops across five sites. I chose to represent their pedagogies through three descriptive cases studies that feature four of the eight artists working in outdoor settings. Their workshops served nursery and primary school children, alongside nursery nurses, teachers and members of their families including parents and grandparents. Using a nested case study approach, I included the perspectives of all eight artists to provide their interpretations of what they do and why do it when engaging others in so-called informal, community settings. I found that the community artists attempt to create conditions for open-ended enquiry across five dimensions: space, time, material, body and talk. This article focuses on one of these dimensions – that of language.

     

    Floats, friendship and fun: Exploring motivations for community art engagement

     

    Authors: Mary M Hoefferle

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.253_1

     

    Keywords

    community art,motivation,parade floats,folk art

     

    Abstract

    This article addresses parade floats as a form of community art and explores float builders’ artistic motivations and their interactions within the context of collaborative float building. Distilled from the author’s ethnographic study of three groups of folk artists who build Labor Day parade floats in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the United States, and a material culture analysis of their parade entries, the research indicates that the float builders engaged in art making primarily to meet their social needs, which include motives regarding group solidarity and civic obligations. This examination expands our understanding of community art by elucidating how the presence of a public audience, maintaining local traditions and opportunities for friendly competition, play and social bonding motivate community art engagement.

     

     

    Academy and community: The experience of a college programme in socially- engaged practice

     

    Authors: Nuala Hunt And  Gary Granville And  Chris Maguire And  Fiona Whelan

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.271_1

     

    Keywords

    socially-engaged art,community,citizenship,higher education,Collaboration,Inner-city Dublin

     

    Abstract

    A review of Irish art indicates that socially-engaged and collaborative art is firmly rooted within certain communities. Whilst there is an array of terms used to describe the range of practices emerging within the field of relational arts, making for some confusion, the establishment of socially-engaged art within particular communities in Dublin can be traced to the 1990s. In this article the role of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in supporting the development of socially-engaged art is examined through the lens of a post-graduate programme entitled Community/Arts/Education. The concepts and practices underpinning the programme are considered in the context of on-going change within teacher education at the NCAD. The relationship between the academy and community is examined critically in the context of local developments in socially-engaged practice. Key features of socially-engaged art are analysed in two case studies by artists whose practice is located in Dublin.

     

    Berry wars: A science centre as a forum for a dialogical activist, interdisciplinary art project

     

    Authors: Maria Huhmarniemi

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.287_1

     

    Keywords

    dialogical art,interdisciplinary projects,community art

     

    Abstract

    The Berry Tours project was a collaboration between artists, activists, researchers (politics and social sciences) and science communicators. Its focus was the berry industry, which has seen a rising number of seasonal foreign berry pickers arrive in Finnish forests and has resulted in conflicts between foreign and local berry pickers. The aim of the project was to create dialogue between foreign berry pickers and locals, increase understanding of the richness of berry picking culture in Finnish Lapland, gain knowledge about interdisciplinary collaboration, and promote the use of art at science centres. One result was a joint exhibition, titled Berry Tours, which was presented at the Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi (Finland). In this article, the author describes the Berry Tours project and discusses similar collaborative projects in the field of activist art, dialogical art, and art and science collaborations.She describes the experience of showing art in a science centre and considers some of the possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration in art education. The educational potential of dialogical art, community art and interdisciplinary exhibitions is the core of the article.

     

    Green My Favela – An act of defiance

     

    Authors: Lea Rekow

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.305_1

     

    Keywords

    activism,geography,social engagement,contested territories,slum

     

    Abstract

    This article looks at socially-engaged artistic structures that open up physical and conceptual possibilities within sites of contestation. It asks: what happens when the rules and boundaries of our marginalized systems are challenged through critical arts practice; how does this relate to the material production of knowledge; and how does this open up potential to redress systems of control and to reprogramme space? Specifically, it examines recent cultural activism within Rio de Janeiro’s notorious Rocinha favela, Brazil’s largest slum.

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

    Where are we? Mapping the field of community arts

     

    Authors: Marit Dewhurst

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.321_7

     

    The positive influence of art activities on poor communities

     

    Authors: Nóra L. Ritók And  Istvan Bodoczky

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.329_7

     

    Keywords

    visual story telling,cooperative painting,community building,needlepoint

     

    Abstract

    For the author, art education in very poor areas means extended pedagogical work that focuses not only on the children and the goals of art education, but also the social-educational background of the children’s families, the communities they live in. The article gives two distinct examples (from Hungary) of how the teachers got the families of the children involved in visual art activities in order to promote cohesion in the village communities and the families, to provide positive models for the children, and – in some cases – also ensure some income for the family.

     

    The Billboard Poetry Project

     

    Authors: Daniel T. Barney And  Ashley Mae Christensen Hoiland

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.337_7

     

    Keywords

    community art,art education,poetry,public art,subversive billboards

     

    Abstract

    The Billboard Poetry Project is an artistic investigation that asks, What if billboards encouraged creative discourse and interaction within a community rather than solely functioning as invasive advertisements for commercial purposes? An artist/researcher/educator and an artist/poet sought to challenge the commercial imagery found on the streets of their local community by repurposing three consecutive billboards to share the work of a local poet who uses fragments constructed by other poets. The project also invited local artists and writers to hold free workshops throughout the area, after which the entire population was welcomed to join in a public event where anyone could exhibit artwork, eat food and listen to original poetry read by their neighbours in a community park.

     

    Catch and release: Artworks inspiring insight into environmental issues

     

    Authors: Ruth Beer And  Kit Grauer

    DOI: 10.1386/eta.8.3.349_7

     

    Keywords

    informal learning,arts-based research,pedagogy,artist/museum collaborations,socially-engaged new media,environmental interactive art

     

    Abstract

    ‘Catch+Release’ is a Canadian government-funded research and creation project of interactive new media artworks produced by a team of artists, educators and designers in collaboration with Parks Canada’s Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. Its exhibition component addresses marine environments and coastal communities that once relied on the fishing industry. Through viewer engagement with the artworks, within the context of the museum, the exhibition fosters awareness of the region’s social history and contemporary cultural conditions – ‘catching’ stories and ‘releasing’ stories into the public sphere. The aesthetic and pedagogical strategies for promoting sensory, experiential, participatory learning opportunities and critical engagement, acknowledge the museum as an important informal educational site in its role as custodian, maker of meaning and source of regional identity. The exhibition’s themes resonate globally in coastal communities that share challenges in adapting to (g)local ci cumstances of cultural and geographic transitions due to the demise of fishing industries.

  • Vol. 8 No. 2 (2012)

    IJETA 8.2 Contents

    For access to the articles click here.

     

    If you are a member of InSEA, you are entitled to full, free access to IJETA from Vol 7 No 3. To access sign into the members section of the InSEA web pages

    EDITORIAL

    Authors:  Glen Coutts

    Page Start: 117

     

    ARTICLES

    Tools for community: Ivan Illich's legacy

     

    Authors: Stuart Wyllie MacDonald

    Page start 121

    Keywords

    tools,craft,design,community

     

    Abstract

    Although it is 40 years since Ivan Illich published Tools for Conviviality, the word 'convivial' retains an appeal conjuring up liveliness, sociability and, in this age of economic uncertainty, optimism. But in an era of co-creation and co-production the word 'tools' has attracted greater attention, heralding Illich is due for regeneration. Superficially, the rise of technologies like Facebook and smartphones signal Illich's convivial tools have arrived, giving creativity to a mass audience. This article questions whether this is so by revisiting Illich's critique of capitalism and its institutions, particularly education, and examining claims that we have indeed built tools of conviviality. It seeks to reframe convivial tools and the democratization of education by looking at developments beyond digital technology to include design strategy linked to community challenges. The opportunity is taken to re-contextualize Illich's ideas on de-schooling by providing models and a case study exemplar whilst raising issues for design education.

    Turning community stories into community art

     

    Authors: Shelley Margaret Hannigan

    Page start 135

    Keywords

    community art,narrative,Place,identity,art education,Australia

     

    Abstract

    There is a growing interest in community art, yet few resources are available for art teachers to develop curriculum material in this area, and there are few opportunities for students to engage in community arts-based learning. This article reports on an innovative community art project that engaged narrative, and sculptural form, as a way of learning about community, Place and identity. The project is explained from the perspective of an art educator, researcher and artist who was employed in the project both as community artist and as facilitator. This 'insider's perspective' aims to afford some context to relevant theories through which such projects can be understood as potentially beneficial to art education – particularly in the way people have used narrative to communicate issues of Place, and the ways in which artists have translated community narratives into sculptural form. The author's insider perspective is a lens into how community arts could offer students an opportunity to learn about contemporary art whilst at the same time learning about ways of engaging in community.

     

    Art Trek: Looking at art with young children

     

    Authors: Eunjung Chang

    Page start 151

    Keywords

    young children,looking at art,Metropolitan Museum of Art,Art Trek

     

    Abstract

    The Art Trek is a learning programme for families with children between the ages of 5 and 12 at Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met). It interactively exposes children to different artworks across cultures and styles in multiple artistic experiences, by questioning, listening, discussing, playing and drawing in a group setting. With access to museums at an early age, children can experience impressive images, explore cultures and develop skills to interpret visual language. I was able to observe the Art Trek programme with five pre-service elementary art teachers who were university undergraduate students in an art methods class I taught. In this article, I will discuss the importance of art and museum education for children at an early age. I then will address some suggestions on how art and museum educators can provide more meaningful and quality art experiences for young children as they view and explore works of art.

     

    Children's engagement with art: Three case studies

     

    Authors: Phivi Antoniou And  Richard Hickman

    Page start 169

    Keywords

    children's art,Cyprus,case study,artistic development

     

    Abstract

    This article reviews the literature on children's engagement with art and identifies a gap in the field that is concerned with the relationship between making and judging art. A project that sought to examine this is reported, focusing upon three case studies of 11 year olds attending a primary school in Cyprus. The data were collected through a variety of methods, including interviews, art class observations, document examination and questionnaires. It was found that the way these children created and responded to other children's artworks was determined by the significance and the role they attributed to art. We conclude that individual differences play a significant part in determining children's artistic and aesthetic development.

     

     

    VISUAL ESSAYS

    Transforming practices and inquiry in-between arts, arts education and research

     

    Authors: Teresa Torres de Eça And  Maria Jesús Agra Pardiñas And  Cristina Trigo

    Page start 183

     

    Keywords

    arts education,art activism,community arts,a/r/tography,arts-based research

     

    Abstract

    This Vissual essay intends to discuss possibilities of reframing conceptions of arts and arts education from an art activism perspective and describe the Web-based research platform INTER-Action. The platform is a virtual space for researchers interested in arts-based research, a/r/tography, collaborative research and community arts. Following Paulo Freire's ideals, INTER-Action members claim that educational methods need to change in order to reach a sustainable future. They believe that contemporary community art practices in educational settings can be explored as rituals of transformation in a period of disenchantment and loss of hope, a consequence of centuries of rationalism, materialism and individualism.

     

     

    The Gate "Illyes": Visual essay of a community art project in Hungary

     

    Authors: Dr. Kinga Ráthonyi

    Page start 191

    Keywords

    community art,shaping visual environment,ceramics,mosaic,extra curricula,design process

     

    Abstract

    Over the past fifteen years the authors have been working together, creating and promoting community art projects. The main objective of these works has always been to shape the users visual environment, with maximum involvement of the local community. Participation in the projects has allowed people to share creative thoughts, production, ideas, and communicate. These have taken place on site in a communal environment which respects and appreciates the individual. People are free to work/talk/look or just be there. The following visual essay documents a recently completed project.

    Further documentation can be found at the facebook page: "az illyes kapuja"

     

    REVIEWS

    Authors: Brad Buckley And  Adele Flood And  Su-Lynn Tan

     

    Page start 203

     

    THE PLEASURE OF RESEARCH, HENK SLAGER (2012) Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 88 pp., ISBN: 978-951-53-3397-1, p/bk

     

    THINK INSIDE THE SKETCH BOOK, GILLIAN ROBINSON, DAVID HULSTON AND ALISON MOUNTAIN (2011) London: Harper Collins Publishers Limited, 93 pp., ISBN: 978-0-00-743479-4, p/bk, £25.00

     

    EXTRAORDINARY SKETCHBOOKS, JANE STOBART (2011) London: A & C Black, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 144 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4081- 3442-9, p/bk, £16.99


  • IJETA cover 8.1

    Vol. 8 No. 1 (2012)

    IJETA 8.1 Contents

    For access to the articles click here.

    If you are a member of InSEA, you are entitled to full, free access to IJETA from Vol 7 No 3. To access sign into the members section of the InSEA web pages

    EDITORIAL

    Authors:  Glen Coutts

    Page Start: 3

     

    Title: The identities of an arts educator: Comparing discourses in three teacher education programmes in Finland


    Authors: Miia Collanus And  Seija Kairavuori And  Sinikka Rusanen 

    Keywords
    arts education,craft education,critical pedagogy,identity,teacher education,visual arts education

    Abstract
    The aim of this research was to find the structures affecting the construction of an arts educators' identity. We compare the subject areas of visual art and textile craft in three different teacher education programmes: the kindergarten teacher, classroom teacher and textile teacher education at the University of Helsinki. Drawing from critical pedagogy, we approach teacher identity as a subject position constructed discursively in particular social and historical contexts. Our data consisted of 152 essays and portfolios from pre-service teachers. Using articulation as our research strategy, it was possible to identify two (meta) discourses positioning an arts educator: the discourse of technical knowledge and skills, and the discourse of self-expression. We suggest this tensioned discursive space could serve as a starting point for further research, and that the critical engagement with meta-level knowledge of the subject areas should be given more attention in teacher education.

     

    Title: Environmental education through art


    Authors: Susana Tereso 

    Keywords
    art,education,creativity,sustainability,well being,creative workshop

    Abstract
    The work presented in this article aims to examine different approaches to experiencing the relationship between art and nature as a model of sustainability. The objectives include the enhancement of sensibility – senses, emotions, feelings, affections – as a way to directly experience the well-being promoted by joining art and nature, including harmony, beauty and diversity. The importance of the natural cycles is revealed by focusing on the light and colour during the day. Scientific knowledge is associated with the hands-on approach to achieving a superior consciousness. Different methodologies relating education through art psychopedagogy, the creative workshop and the experience and knowledge of the natural environment are created. The ultimate goal is to generate new ideas and creative procedures for joining individual well-being with global sustainability. The experiences developed in a natural reserve were applied in rethinking the city as a common space where human beings and local nature are joined to build a superior way of living.

     

    Title: Towards developmental self-assessment in the visual arts: Supporting new ways of artistic learning in school


    Authors: Diederik W. Schönau 
    Keywords
    developmental self-assessment,art education,competences,twenty-first-century skills

    Abstract
    Education in and through the arts has a long history in defining its educational goals and the best means to reach these goals. This has generated an enormous diversity in goals and means that threatens to obfuscate the essential contribution of the arts to the education of all children. This essence - learning to give form to meaning – should be central in compulsory education, as it addresses fundamental skills that are part of the human cognitive system. Instead of focusing on the quality of the art products, more attention should be given to the competences needed to give form to meaning. The concept of developmental self-assessment is introduced to focus on the acquisition of these competences.

    Title: Transplanting Froebel into the present


    Authors: Wendy Strauch-Nelson 

    Keywords
    Froebel,kindergarten,nature study,creative self-activity

    Abstract
    Friedrich Froebel created the kindergarten and in doing so initiated a pedagogy rooted in creative self-activity that helped prepare the path for art education in schools. The purpose of this article is to look back at the lasting influence Froebel's principles have had on art education. I will identify and examine six fundamental ideals that Froebel introduced. Next, I will compare these to the results of recent research in science fields that are dedicated to educational research. Special attention is then given to the issue of nature study in the context of recent literature concerning the relationship of children and the natural world. Finally, I will present questions that may further the dialogue regarding the suitability of Froebel's philosophy for today.

     

     

    Title: Young people's encounters with museum collections: Expanding the range of contexts for art appreciation


    Authors: Makoto Ishikawa 

    Keywords
    museum collection,art appreciation,school,contemporary art,calligraphy

    Abstract
    This article reports on attempts to expand the range of contexts for art appreciation through practical school–museum collaboration. Since various arts require various ways of being viewed, I encouraged opportunities for youngsters to encounter art in ways they had not previously experienced in their classrooms. Focusing on contemporary art, photography and calligraphy, my students and I endeavoured to expand appreciation activities in terms of modern, contemporary and traditional art, by conducting a number of 'practice trials', four of which are considered in this article. One example is the art project on the wider appreciation of calligraphy, which is taught in Japanese language class during compulsory education. Another lies in workshops involving art appreciation and creation with new and traditional media. It was clear to us that arranging art-making as a part of art appreciation programmes helps to engage young people effectively, and also that innovative drawing techniques can be developed using both new media and traditional tools.

     

     

    BOOK REVIEWS


    Authors: Nicholas Houghton And  Peeter Linnap And  Bryna Bobick


    ON CRAFTSMANSHIP: TOWARDS A NEW BAUHAUS, CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING (2011) London: Oberon Books, 144 pp., ISBN 978-1-84943-072-2, h/bk, £9.99
    PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER CONCEPTUAL ART, DIARMUID COSTELLO AND MARGARET IVERSEN (EDS) (2010) Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 200 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4443-3360-2, p/bk, £19.99, €24.00
    UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS WITH AUTISM THROUGH ART, BEVERLY LEVETT GERBER AND JULIA KELLMAN (EDS) (2010) Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 174 pp., ISBN: 978-1-890160-48-7, p/bk, US$39.00

     

    EXHIBITION REVIEW


    Authors: Nicholas Houghton


    2011 VENICE ART BIENNALE, GIARDINI, ARSENALE AND VARIOUS OTHER LOCATIONS AROUND VENICE

     

    For access to the articles click here.

     

    If you are a member of InSEA, you are entitled to full, free access to IJETA from Vol 7 No 3. To access sign into the members section of the InSEA web pages

  • IJETA cover 7.3

    Vol. 7 No. 3 (2011)

    Volume 7 Issue 3

    Cover Date: November 2011

    EDITORIAL

    Glen Coutts, University of Lapland

    Page Start: 219

    To access this and earlier issues, please CLICK HERE.

     

     

    Contents: Articles

     

     

    Researching personal images and multiple voices: The methodological questions of ethics and power

    Authors: MÄKIRANTA, M.; YLITAPIO-MÄNTYLÄ, O.

    Page Start: 221

     

    Abstract:

    The article describes the use of personal photographs in a teaching case and in a research project. The teaching case was based on memory work and photographs; its aim was to make students aware of the socially constructed and everyday practises that shape our knowledge of the world and affect meanings associated with gender. In this case, the memory work also suggested for the participants the ways to affect our own future and operate in society. The research case concentrated on autobiographical photographs as well as the ways such images enable to arrate, present and recall the self. In the article, we ask: what are the methodological and practical possibilities and challenges introduced by the use of personal photographs in teaching and study cases? What ethical and power-related questions do private and personal data raise? By analysing the aforementioned cases, we will illustrate the methodological criteria and dilemmas for using images in teaching and research cases.

    Keywords: photography; ethical issue; power; memory; identity; photo-related memory work

    Document Type: Research article

    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386///eta.7.3.221_1

    Affiliations: 1: University of Lapland

    Publication date: 2011-10-11

     

    Coming to our senses: Revisiting the haptic as a perceptual system

    Authors: LEE, YUJIN; DUNCUM, PAUL

    Page Start: 233

     

     

    Abstract:

    The article responds to current calls by art educators to expand consideration of the senses beyond the visual. Revisiting the haptic is necessary in order to understand recent, especially feminist, art. Reconceptualizing the haptic is necessary because the haptic carries baggage from past uses of the concept that are deeply problematic. These include the proposal by art historians that the haptic constitutes an artistic drive comparable, though inferior, to a visual drive, and the proposal by art educators that the haptic represents a favoured personality type. These problematic proposals are outlined in order to demarcate them from the current reconceptualization that draws upon recent theorizing from psychology about the senses and perceptual systems as well as phenomenological philosophy, feminist art theory and women's art practice.

    Keywords: haptic; perceptual system; senses; phenomenology; women's art; occularcentricism

    Document Type: Research article

    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386///eta.7.3.233_1

    Affiliations: 1: University of Illinois

    Publication date: 2011-10-11

     

     

    Cultural dialogues in European art education: Strategies for enhancing children's culture and constructing diversity

    Authors: RUSANEN, SINIKKA1; RIFÀ-VALLS, MONTSERRAT2; ALEXANDRE, RUI3; BOZZI, GIOVANNA MARIA4; HÄIKIÖ, TARJA KARLSSON5

    Page Start: 245

     

    Abstract:

    The aim of our article is to discuss the potential of art education to enhance children's culture. In so doing, we are contributing to a debate that began at the InSEA congress in Rovaniemi (2010) during the symposium on cultural diversity. The article is based on recent research and art pedagogy projects conducted by the writers in five European countries: Finland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. When comparing and evaluating these projects, we focus on the space given to children's culture and on the power art has in constructing childhood as a social and cultural phenomenon. It was evident from the projects that enhancing children's culture can be achieved in multiple ways, as cultural dialogues that can produce new understanding and places for further cultural encounters. The projects also made visible how childhood can be constructed and reconstructed through art both by and for children. The projects emphasized the responsibility art educators have for organizing art education that enables the social and cultural participation of children.

    Keywords: art education; contemporary art; cultural education; children's culture; identity; intercultural education

    Document Type: Research article

    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386///eta.7.3.245_1

    Affiliations: 1: University of Helsinki 2: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 3: Polytechnical University of València 4: Liceo Artistico E. Simone 5: University of Gothenburg

    Publication date: 2011-10-11

     

    Assessment techniques practiced in teaching art at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman

    Author: AL-AMRI, MOHAMMED

    Page Start: 267

     

    Abstract:

    Assessment in general, and in art and design in particular, is a problematic issue. Nevertheless, it is essential to inform teaching and learning n art and design education and to identify patterns of art achievement and development within different student groups. Assessment also provides a basis for art education epartments to be accountable to their communities for student learning in all visual art disciplines. In this study, the researcher draws attention to a number of important issues regarding the assessment techniques used in assessing students' work at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Oman. The data from this research provide some indication of the problems of using a non-standardized system for assessing creative art courses at SQU. It appears that there is a need to re-think the assessment techniques practised in teaching art studio ourses at SQU for better preparation of art teachers as well as to try to find new mechanisms for implementing commonly practised assessment methods in art education. As a result, it is important to have appropriate approaches to the assessment of art-studio courses, and they should take into account developments in the field.

    Keywords: art assessment; art studio; art lecturer; art education; higher education; SQU; Oman

    Document Type: Research article

    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386///eta.7.3.267_1

    Affiliations: 1: Sultan Qaboos University

    Publication date: 2011-10-11

    Some notions of artistic creativity amongst history of art students acquired through incidental learning

    Authors: NEWTON, DOUGLAS P.; DONKIN, HAZEL

    Page Start: 283

     

    Abstract:

    In the West, creativity may be admired and valued but what it means can be elusive. Rather than being the subject of discussion in the classroom, meaning generally develops incidentally. We elicited twenty final-year history of art students' beliefs about artistic creativity in England using a questionnaire and interviews. The responses provided qualitative and quantitative data about these students' notions of artistic creativity. Beliefs and clusters of beliefs were identified. Together, these were similar to those of western artists and art academics, but clusters of beliefs showed there were also narrow and deficient notions regarding the product, process and locus of creativity. Teachers in higher education should be aware that students' responses may give the impression that their beliefs about art are sound when, in reality, they are unsound or narrow. This could have implications for employment, especially in a widening global economy.

    Keywords: undergraduate; art education; notions of creativity; incidental learning

    Document Type: Research article

    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386///eta.7.3.221_2

    Affiliations: 1: Durham University

    Publication date: 2011-10-11

     

    Critiquing commonly available multicultural art education resources

    Author: CHIN, CHRISTINA D.

    Page Start: 299

     

    Abstract:

    To assist art teachers in making informed choices regarding multicultural programmes for implementation within the artroom, within this article the author critically reviews and critiques a broad range of multicultural art education materials that are currently available to practitioners. These include commercially providedmulticultural art curricula and kits and praxis-oriented multicultural literature in art education. The author additionally highlights ethnographic art education literature that offers promising direction for remedying the tendency of many multicultural art education resources to advance Eurocentricity, superficial appropriation of formal elements, cultural stereotypes, ahistorical understandings and a hegemonic game of ethnic determinism to authorize representations of what allegedly constitutes a so-called culture's art.

    Keywords: multicultural education; Eurocentric; hegemony; multicultural kits; multicultural curricula; stereotypes

    Document Type: Research article

    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386///eta.7.3.299_1

    Affiliations: 1: Western Michigan University

    Publication date: 2011-10-11

     

     

     

  • IJETA cover 7.2

    Vol. 7 No. 2 (2011)

    Volume 7 Issue 2

    Cover Date: July 2011

    Contents

    EDITORIAL

    Glen Coutts, University of Lapland

    Page Start: 107

    To access this and earlier issues, please CLICK HERE.

     

    Beyond craft and art: A pedagogical model for craft as self-expression

    Sinikka Hannele Pollanen

    Page Start: 111

    Abstract

    Craft as a school subject faces new challenges as the array of learning objectives widens and the traditional distinctions between craft and art begins to blur. In an effort to redefine the subject of craft, teachers can strengthen the relevance and meaningfulness of craft education by contextualizing craft with different kinds of pedagogical models. This article focuses on a pedagogical model that combines craft and art education. This kind of approach includes not only the production of crafted items, but also the demonstration of one's skills, knowledge, thoughts, experiences, perceptions and emotions - tasks traditionally reserved for artistic expression. At the core of the learning task is the personal and active processing of a mental image or association. Craft as a form of self-expression can be a way of learning sensitivity towards different cultural or ecological phenomena, reflecting on culture and society, and better understanding cultural differences. In this model, the relationship with tradition is future oriented and renewable.

     

    It doesn't help to call a professor if your washing machine is leaking: The Norwegian Minister of Knowledge, December 2009

    Mette Gårdvik

    Page Start: 127

    Abstract

    The purpose of this study is to create a holistic understanding of society's need for developing and safeguarding children's knowledge and skills regarding handicrafts. An investigation of a fourth grade class shows that over half of the students had not learned to tie their shoes. The Norwegian educational guidelines from 2006 divide each course into five basic skills to be developed. The five skills are reading, writing, arithmetic, verbal expression and use of digital tools. Arts and handicrafts is a practical-aesthetical discipline that makes use of several tools to help develop students' basic skills. As arts and handicrafts teachers at the college level, we have seen an increasing trend towards the hand's fine motor skills being underdeveloped in favour of the computer keyboard. The study concludes that children have underdeveloped fine motor skills in handicraft techniques and are not getting enough training in this area; therefore, the hand's formative abilities appear to be forgotten.

     

    A university course in mindful viewing: Understanding art and self through contemplative experience

    Sally Armstrong Gradle

    Page Start: 137

    Abstract

    This enquiry has two goals. First, it explores the benefits of a university art education course designed to develop mindfulness and initiate student appreciation of other world-views through art. Students at the undergraduate and graduate level were encouraged to create and use daily insight practices that would enable appreciation of unfamiliar artists, as well as visual works of other cultures. Through contemplative viewing, journal writing, discussion and art making, students developed what Dustin and Ziegler refer to as a 'practical recovery of intuitive vision', which can be explained as an everyday activity connected to either viewing or creating something that one values. The second goal of this writing is to suggest the necessity of developing a viewing practice built upon mindfulness as a creative act in order to explore art deeply. Mindful viewing and the reflection on one's practice expands to an appreciation of others' experiences in creating and living with their art. Contemplative viewing also gifts the viewer with the suspension of judgement about unfamiliar art long enough to appreciate what cannot always be understood in an initial viewing encounter.

     

    The U-curve going Dutch: Cultural differences in judgements of artwork from different age and expertise groups

    Folkert Haanstra, Marjo van Hoorn and Marie-Louise Damen

    Page Start: 153

    Abstract

    The U-curve model of graphic development posits a decline in aesthetic production in middle childhood. This theoretical model has been criticized for having an underlying western and modernist bias, and a number of empirical studies have tried to confirm or disprove its assumptions. This study is a partial replication of previous research that was done to challenge U-curve findings, in order to show that the model reflects culture-specific aesthetic judgements, rather than universal trends. To demonstrate this, artists and art educators from different cultural backgrounds judged a cross-cultural collection of drawings by children from different age groups (5, 8, 11 and 14 year olds), adult non-artists and artists. The results indicate that differences in the cultural background of the judges generated different developmental patterns in aesthetic production.

     

    Judging a book by its cover: Preschool children's aesthetic preferences for picture books

    Katherina Danko-McGhee and Ruslan Slutsky

    Page Start: 171

    Abstract

    This article discusses the results of a research investigation into the aesthetic preferences of young children, aged 2-5, with regard to their choice of picture book covers. The objective was to assess the nature of children's aesthetic preferences by observing which picture book covers they like as they peruse a selection of them (abstract, representational, colourful, and black and white illustrations). The results of the research indicate that 2-, 3- and 4-year-old children gravitate towards book covers that are representational and colourful and that have images that they are familiar with. Five-year-old children preferred colourful and black and white images. However, the difference, when compared to younger children, is that they liked illustrations that are scary and mysterious. Literacy learning should be child-led with the teacher serving as facilitator during the process. This includes allowing children to have access to a variety of books with covers that are aesthetically pleasing to them, not to adults.

     

    Cultural identity in the murals of Sirigu women and their role in art education and social sustainability

    Eric Appau Asante and Nana Afia Opoku-Asare

    Page Start: 187

    Abstract

    Although mural art, unlike pottery, is not widely practised by African women, the predominantly female art known as 'Bambolse' in the indigenous language of Sirigu, in the Upper East Region of Ghana, performs a number of important social functions, from adornment and communication to the assertion of cultural identity and the preservation of traditional values. The murals employ traditional motifs and symbols, and are either representational, geometric or a combination of the two. Despite Bambolse's significance in the local culture, however, there has been very little formal chronicling of its aesthetics and iconography, and it is the aim of this study to address that shortfall. In examining the cultural, symbolic and aesthetic aspects of this unique art form, we will demonstrate, using findings based on a qualitative research approach, how it not only empowers its practitioners as artists but also plays an influential role in the region's socio-economic development.

     

     

    REVIEWS

    Anabela Moura, John Mathews and Kay Lawrence

     

    Page Start: 203

     

     


  • IJETA cover 7.1

    Vol. 7 No. 1 (2011)

    Volume 7 Issue 1

    Cover Date: May 2011

    Contents

     

    Editorial

    Glen Coutts, University of Lapland

     

    To access this and earlier issues, please CLICK HERE.

     

     

    Questions before words An Educational Space, a Stimulating Space

    Authors:  Maria Jesús Agra Pardiñas and José María Mesías Lema

    Page Start: 7

     

    Abstract

    An Educational Space, a Stimulating Space is a project by the Educational Sciences Faculty at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, which has been developed through the collaboration of university lecturers, the Galician Center of Contemporary Art and teachers. This project poses the question: What do we understand by an educational space This question is posed in order to initiate a community work process that is formative, artistic and educational. This process is formative because it means a shared reflection upon the concept of public space as a shared space. It is educational because it does not involve just the group class (90 students), but every faculty student and teacher in order to discover the different faculty building spaces. Working on educational spaces and how they are perceived, lived and used is a way of encouraging a collective, intergenerational agreement to live together. And it is artistic because it highlights the need to experiment with teaching as a process of artistic creation in which we can understand and put into practice creativity as a tool of transformation into reality: liberating arts from being a representation of things and transforming them into action, into direct, active participation. In this article, we propose educational photoactivism as a line of artistic action and research for teacher training. This approach is targeted to reflect on the situations involved in teachers' work by means of the narrative, suggesting the power of photography. Educational photoactivism favours a type of spiral learning on the part of the trainee teachers, because there is a constant flow of ideas, hypotheses, opinions and photographic interpretations from the teaching point of view.

    The city as a site for interdisciplinary teaching and learning

    Authors:  Deborah L Smith-Shank and  Ismail Ozgur Soganci

    Page Start: 27

     

    Abstract

    In this article, the authors make a case for using the city as a classroom, and through semiotic lenses, they reflect on the assignments and the outcomes of three courses they offered in diverse geographic locations. In these interdisciplinary courses they encouraged students to purposefully explore aspects of their cities and reflect on them as multifaceted theatrical performances. The pedagogical intention is to facilitate their students' engagement with the city's identity in ways they normally would not consider.

    Seven ways to talk about art: One conversation and seven questions for talking about art in early childhood settings

    Authors:  David Bell

    Page Start: 41

     

    Abstract

    This article establishes a rationale for learning about art in early childhood settings through rich conversational engagements with artworks that can inform lifelong dispositions and skills. It presents one exemplary conversational learning sequence provoked by a child's own interests in a real early childhood setting. It suggests seven different questions as windows on artworks that can encourage different kinds of rich talking, feeling and thinking about the art objects that attract childrens' attention.

     

    A study of an after-school art programme and critical thinking

    Authors:  Nancy Lampert

    Page Start: 55

     

    Abstract

    In this article, I discuss an Institutional Review Board-approved, community arts programme that was designed to enhance the critical thinking skills of ten urban elementary children by engaging them in enquiry-based art lessons. I conducted a single group, mixed methods study on a US campus through an undergraduate service-learning, honors course. Eight undergraduate honors students enrolled in the class. The interdisciplinary group of college students consisted of three art education students; a student from the sculpture department, one from social work, and three students from humanities and sciences. All of the undergraduate students had worked with children before and all had an interest in serving the community. To assess the children's critical thinking gains from the programme, I used qualitative observations and a quantitative critical thinking pre-test/post-test. The results of a t-test showed a statistically significant increase in the children's average critical thinking scores from the pre-tests to the post-tests (p.020).

     

    Cartoon and gender: Masculinities in SpongeBob

    Authors:  Analice Pillar

    Page Start: 69

     

    Abstract

    This article reports on a study that deals with how male gender is constituted in SpongeBob SquarePants, one of the most widely watched cartoons on TV in Brazil. By analysing three episodes, the research team sought to understand the effects of meaning related to masculinity and how this signification is constructed in the interplay between visual and sound systems. Another objective was to understand the significations children elicit from this syncretic text. Both the cartoon episodes and the children's interpretations were analysed based on the discursive semiotics theory, in studies regarding cartoons and contemporary studies concerning childhood and cultural production. The results indicate that discussing in school what is portrayed and how genders are represented in cartoons is a way of denaturalizing the process of the constitution of men and women in our culture.

    Children's funny art and the form it can take over time

    Authors:  Eliza Pitri

    Page Start: 81

     

    Abstract

    Children's untutored graphic representation is best understood as a form of visual communication rather than a form of perceptual development. A descriptive qualitative study was conducted in an attempt to investigate the specific visual and conceptual characteristics of children's humorous images. The participants of the study were 578 children between the ages of 4.5 and 12. They were asked to draw something funny and describe why what they drew was funny. What the children drew and said was coded, recorded and analysed using both qualitative and quantitative methods for different purposes, based on the following questions: Which are the themes of children's humorous art Where are these themes derived from How are the themes of children's humorous art presented The use of statistical analysis helped track correlations between age groups, and different categories and characteristics of children's humorous art. No significant gender differences were found in children's humorous images.

     

     

    Reviews

    Page Start: 97

     

  • IJETA cover 6.3

    Vol. 6 No. 3 (2010)

    Volume 6 Issue 3

    Cover Date: December 2010

    Contents

    Editorial

    Glen Coutts  University of Lapland

    Page Start: 275

     

    To access this and earlier issues, please CLICK HERE.

     

    Demystifying three-dimensional virtual worlds for art education

    Authors:  Lilly (Li-Fen) Lu

    Page Start: 279

     

    Abstract

    Three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds (VW) have great potential for contemporary art education. This article introduces the characteristics of 3D VWs and addresses the theory and practice of utilizing the VWs as virtual learning environments (VLE) for art education. The author investigated student art conversations conducted and facilitated through a 3D VW, Art Caf, in Second Life (SL) after students visited the virtual exhibitions. The findings show that all participants were highly engaged and motivated to participate in art conversations in SL. They were able to be open and freely discuss art in depth because of their anonymous identities. Study implications and recommendations for future research and art education practice are addressed in the conclusion.

     

     

     

    Illuminating the gap: An overview of classroom-based arts education research in Australia

    Authors:  Christopher Klopper and  Bianca Power

    Page Start: 293

     

    Abstract

    Arts education is an internationally recognized term referencing education through the arts. The term arts is seen to encompass different things in different contexts, including but not limited to the performing arts- music, dance, drama, and theatre; visual arts, media, industrial arts, and literary arts. In this article, the authors provide an overview to date of classroom-based arts education research in Australia. In so doing, the gap in the literature describing and discussing classroom-based arts education is illuminated. We call for attendance to classroom-based arts education research in Australia given that the heart of curriculum transfer and transformation is in the classroom. We offer a research methodology and design of practitioner enquiry to empower and enlighten collective knowledge sharing of professional practice. Such attendance will establish a base that can bring about sustained policy and practice change.

    Freedom and dignity Identity through creation

    Authors:  Carl-Peter Buschkühle

    Page Start: 309

     

    Abstract
    The Images & Identity research project, which is funded by the European Union, develops materials that can be used for the multidisciplinary teaching within the subjects of Citizenship Education and Art Education. On the basis of a project in a class of year 9 German high-school pupils focusing on the issue of Freedom and Dignity, this article examines the extent to which art education can act as creative work on identity. Joseph Beuys once stated: Everyone is an artist. In this comment, he refers to every individual's ability to shape their own life. In order to do so, the individual needs to comprehensively train his/her creative abilities. Is art, in connection with reflected knowledge and individual creation, able to advance the development of such abilities? If so, does this give rise to the prospect of art as an alternative principle of education and learning?

     

    Considering the framework of art appreciation repertoires

    Authors:  Wenchun Wang and  Kazuhiro Ishizaki

    Page Start: 327

     

    Abstract

    We consider a framework of repertoires in art appreciation and suggest its relationship with learning in art appreciation of youth. An art writing programme was administered to 31 students ranging from junior high school to graduate school. Their art writings were analysed according to two themes: (1) the diverse elements of repertoires and their acquisition; (2) the relation of complex repertoires to proficiency in art appreciation. First, the framework of repertoires is presented, and analytical standards for art writings are established. Undergraduate/graduate students showed greater diversity and accumulation of appreciation skills in their repertoires than did junior and senior high school students. In addition, case analyses demonstrate that the properties of accumulation and diversity in repertoires are essential to forming complex repertoires. Further, the formation of complex repertoires can be said to be an important step for attaining sophisticated art appreciation.

     

    The museum experience in the environment of the Japanese collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Authors:  Jungwon Lee

    Page Start: 343

     

    Abstract

    The purpose of this study was to examine how viewers experienced the museum environments of the Japanese collection, and to explore how these physical environments affected visitors' experiences. The museum environment selected for the study was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A phenomenological research methodology using qualitative data-gathering techniques and analysis was employed. Data-gathering involved the observation and description of the museum environment housing the Japanese collections, the observation of visitor behaviour, including conversations at the research site, and in-depth interviews with visitors. The proposed study provides a model for the phenomenological examination of personal meaning-making in museums. It is hoped that this study will encourage museum educators, curators, designers and directors to reconsider museum exhibitions and physical environments in order to facilitate the process of making meaning by visitors.

    An intercultural learning of similarities and differences of rituals and customs of two cultures

    Authors:  Steve Willis and  Ryan Shin

    Page Start: 361

     

    Abstract

    In this article, we present intercultural learning as an art education approach that can develop a student's sense of cultural diversity and its value by qualitative immersion in and comparison to other cultures (Amorim 2001). As an example, we chose two popular rituals, Korean Ancestor Worship Ceremony and Native American Sweat Lodge, which are written as anecdotal narratives providing first-person voice to cultural experiences, to discuss cultural similarities and differences discovered in both ceremonies. We hope that our approach of intercultural learning provides an example to honour each other's tradition and culture, treating each other as a member of the group of people who have equally invaluable cultural traditions, as well as leading to learning that cultural information should be understood in its authentic contexts.

     

    Meaning making, democratic participation and art in early childhood education: Can inspiring objects structure dynamic curricula?

    Authors:  Biljana C Fredriksen

    Page Start: 381

     

    Abstract

    Young students' democratic participation in the pedagogical work of early childhood education is required by law in Norway. In order to explore pedagogical methods, which allow students' democratic participation in visual arts curricula, an action research project with a sociocultural profile was conducted. Generating space for the students' contributions required ongoing interpretation and reflection during the pedagogical work, and through this process a new understanding of curricula as dynamic emerged. During the research project the teachers and students mutually and continuously influenced each other's meaning making. This challenged the teachers to search for a suitable balance between planning and pedagogical improvisation, which involved careful listening to children. The findings from the study suggest that flexible curricula can be structured around careful choices of inspirational objects (stories, sculptures, art paintings and art materials) in art-based and interdisciplinary work in early childhood education.

     

    Social functions of art: Educational, clinical, social and cultural settings. Trying a new methodology

    Authors:  Catalina Rigo Vanrell and  Rosaura Navajas Seco and  Marián López Fernández-Cao and  María Del Río Diéguez and  Ana Eva Iribas Rudín and  Guillermo García Lledó and  Matilde Mollá Giner and  Julio Romero Rodríguez and  Miguel Domínguez Rigo

    Page Start: 397

     

    Abstract

    The fruit of the work of our research group, set up ten years ago at the Faculty of Education of the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, this article will present a review on how art can help and empower children and adults at risk of exclusion in different settings. We have been working from an intercultural, gender-equity and social inclusion perspective, introducing methods of art therapy practice. From this standpoint, we will show how our group has developed a methodology that can be validated in several domains. We will show the foundations of our proposals, and will present experiences in educational and social areas, showing how we can work on gender and interculturality, in clinical areas, where we have been working with art therapy and empowerment, and in cultural areas, where we show, from a new museological perspective, how it is possible to reconstruct new narratives that help marginalized groups to become stronger, and that transform museums into social agents for change.

     

    Reviews

     

    Index Volume 6

    Authors:

    Page Start: 421