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

 

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