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

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