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

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