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

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