Vol. 18 No. 2 (2022): International Journal of Education Through Art
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
- 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
- Patton (eds) (2020)
Reviewed by Robert Sweeny, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA
Published:
2022-05-17
