Limitations of language: developing arts‐based creative narrative in stories of teachers’ identities

This paper is based on a multidimensional study employing a heuristic methodology termed ‘creative narrative’ that combines arts‐based methods with narrative inquiry. Six female teachers’ narratives of identity are explored through artistic, visual images to illuminate if and how they story ‘unconscious’. The creative narratives, illuminated through a multi‐layered extract from one creative narrative, illustrate various ways in which the participants imputed meaning and power to tacit and non‐conscious influences which were emotionally potent but previously hidden from themselves and others and that continued to affect their professional identities. The paper argues that such unconscious or non‐conscious dimensions to teachers’ lives are crucial to the experience and exercise of professional identity and yet are largely absent from our understandings and outside the capture of narrative inquiry as it is presently conceptualized. Narrative inquiry should strive to extend its theoretical boundaries and incorporate non‐verbal arts‐based research methods in order to go beyond the limits of language and capture the meaning of lived experience in more holistic ways.     

The careers of fine artists and the embedded creative

While there is a growing body of scholarship on the creative industries and on the career trajectories of graduates from creative industries programmes, there has to date only been a limited amount of research that examines in detail, the careers of fine arts graduates. Fine art is arguably the least ‘vocational’ of creative disciplines, in that there are relatively few employers that seek to employ fine artists as fine artists. If fine arts graduates are not employed in their chosen field – that is, in the ‘Creative Trident’ terminology, in a core creative occupation – how do their careers parallel or differ from those of other creative graduates? Do they find employment as ‘embedded creatives’, using or applying their experience and practice in sectors beyond the core creative industries, or as ‘support workers’, enabling and facilitating the creative work of others? Do they experience portfolio careers? And how do their artistic training and attitudes to creativity affect their working relationships and experiences? This article draws on rich qualitative data about the experiences of a small group of graduates (including the author) who all graduated from the same course at the same institution in the UK in 1994, to provide some insights into the career paths and trajectories of a sample of fine arts graduates.     

The Artist‐Led Pedagogic Process in the Contemporary Art Gallery: Developing a Meaning Making Framework

Drawing on recent research which examined how selected artist educators perceive themselves as arts practitioners and analysed how these constructions inform their pedagogy, this article proposes a framework of meaning making in the art gallery. Art practice is defined as a process of conceptual and experiential enquiry which embraces inspiration, looking, questioning, making, reflective thinking and the building of meanings. The pedagogic process instigated in the gallery resembles art practice in that artists seek to ‘teach’ skills including questioning and critical reflection and promote experiential learning. Hence artist educators function as facilitators enabling learners to engage directly with art works (which are seen to embody the knowledge of the artist creator and contribute actively to the construction of meaning), whilst sharing their knowledge through dialogic exchange. The devised Meaning Making in the Gallery (MMG) framework encapsulates the pedagogic relation‐ship between artist, learners and artworks in the gallery and proposes a model of creative teaching and learning which has potential application within cultural institutions and beyond.     

The arts in the Aotearoa New Zealand Curriculum: challenges for educating teachers in contemporary conditions

In this paper, preliminary comments are made about The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum document questioning its framing of the arts ‘disciplines’. The notion of the ‘the arts’, which appears to take its meaning from the generic term ‘art’ that directs us to class together music, painting, visual art, dance and other diverse activities, is examined. The idea of ‘literacies’ in the arts is questioned, as well as the ideological nature of representing the arts as ‘essential skills’. Suggestions are made concerning the identity and role of educators in the arts areas of the curriculum. I then take strands within the Arts curriculum document (‘Communicating and interpreting in the arts’ and ‘The arts in context’) and scrutinize these in terms of the possibilities for a critical interpretation of pedagogy and what I believe to be our obligations as teacher educators within a pre-service programme in university setting.     

Pure and bitter spaces: gender,identity and territory in Northern Irish youth transitions

This paper examines young people’s narratives of space and territory and the ways in which they are gender specific. Drawing upon data from two ESRC funded research projects beginning in 1996, the paper focuses upon the ways in which boundaries are perceived, constructed and managed in the everyday lives of young women and men growing up in one area of Northern Ireland. The paper considers how the territorial boundaries that young people adhere to create ‘pure’ and ‘bitter’ spaces which serve to reinforce their own sense of cultural and ethnic differences. It also looks at the experiences of those who travel beyond these boundaries, the impact of gender and the implications that traversing boundaries has on young people’s lives. Finally, the paper suggests that young women appear more willing and able to cross boundaries by seizing opportunities presented by cosmopolitanism and changing patterns of leisure. In so doing, young women challenge the legacy of ‘bitterness’ inherent in pure spaces.     

Beyond regimes of signs: making art/istic portrayals of haptic moments/movements with child/ren/hood

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we try to move beyond fixed narratives of child/ren and childhoods, a fixity that comes, in part, as a consequence of the adult/child dyad. We undertake a cutting together-apart of childhood photographs which allows us to explore the complex machinery that produces the categories of child/ren as human beings that are, variously, de(scribed) as not only ‘natural’, ‘innocent’ and ‘romantic’, but also ‘uncanny’ and ‘sexual’, tropes that find meaning and depiction through child/hood bodies and faces. Inspired by non-representational ethnography, we want to generate pictorial acts that move beyond the face – ‘as regimes of signs’ so that body and language can interrelate where ‘the configuration of the face is inextricably tied to the evolution of the voice’. In undertaking a form of schizoanalysis, we undo images of child/ren/hood from ‘the inside’ by connecting to haptic thinking as well as cutting together-apart, processes that allow us to think otherwise about our own and other childhood(s). Additionally, we want to liberate child/ren/hoods through artistic photograph sensing, and doings may be seen as a political act, a way to break down boundaries of power through art as events.     

Art Education for Understanding: Goodman,Arts PROPEL,and DBAE

‘What is art for?’ This provocative question was the motto of the 31st Annual Convention of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) held in Atlanta, Georgia, 1991. As a visiting scholar for a semester at Harvard Project Zero, I had rich opportunities to study art education programmes in higher education and public schools all over the United States. As a consequence, I felt complelled to reformulate the NAEA question, and ask ‘What is art education for?’ This essay argues for the importance of understanding and meaning-making in art education. It starts with a review of some common rationales for the teaching of art that stress both the alleged ability of the arts to promote ‘good’– i.e. creative, harmonious, and civilised – characters and the instrumental value of the arts as a means of communication. These rationales are then evaluated within the context of Nelson Goodman's philosophy, which emphasises the primary role of curiosity in the arts. The following two sections discuss the rationales, contributions and limitations of two art programmes that are currently being carried out in the United States: Arts PROPEL and Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE). Arts PROPEL has introduced long-term, open-ended projects that integrate production (making) with perception (learning to ‘read’ art works and observe the world closely) and reflection (thinking about one's work and the works of others). The DBAE curricula are sequentially organised and integrate content from the disciplines of art creation, art criticism (learning what to look for and how to interpret), art history (studying contexts and alternatives of taste and style), and aesthetics (building a personal philosophy of art). In the final section, Arts PROPEL and DBAE are compared. In the context of previous rationales for the teaching of art, the similarity in aims of these programmes stand out as more important than the differences in approach. Neither do these programmes overstate the humanising power of art, nor do they focus on visual literacy per se. Instead, both programmes emphasise the role of reflection, interpretation, and understanding in art. Productive and analytic art activities are used as important vehicles in making sense of the world and of ourselves. It is concluded that Arts PROPEL and DBAE offer promising and supplementary approaches to promote curiosity and to teach art for the sake of understanding.     

Changing Play – writing,researching and learning in an early years arts project

ABSTRACT

‘Changing Play’ is an ongoing project initiated by education curators from the Serpentine, a prestigious London art gallery, working with the Portman children’s centre nursery. Viewed by curators as a collaboration between artist, children’s centre staff and parents, and the gallery, Changing Play combines art and action research, and expands the boundaries of the gallery. In the words of one of the education curators, ‘the project is about social change’. It is not for the gallery curators to develop proposals but to ‘co-develop work’. Ethnographic evidence employing narrative, visual arts informed analysis is being used by the gallery to report to funders, inform iterative planning and inform future directions. The paper focuses on methodological questions on ways in which ethnographers might meet artistic projects both during and after being in the ‘field’. It takes the form of a ‘loose parts’ montage which reflects the ways in which the art project was conducted.     

Authoring the Textual Classroom in Digital Times

This article explores language and literacy teachers’ classroom experiences in a digital age. Drawing on multi‐literacies and new literacy studies frameworks, we use metaphors of classroom as text and teacher as author to build an understanding of the challenges and changes examined in the findings of two separate studies. The teachers were challenged to reconsider conceptions of individual ‘knowers’ and textual authority/authorship in their classrooms and how they engage students critically in an exploration of the word and the world beyond the edges of the page and the walls of the English language arts classroom.     

The art of teaching children the arts: music,dance and poetry with children aged 2–8 years old

In this article, the theoretical framework of developmental pedagogy is presented as a tool in studying and developing children’s knowing within the arts. The domains of art focused on are music, poetry and dance/aesthetic movement. Through empirical examples from a large‐scale research project, we illustrate the tools of developmental pedagogy and show how this perspective contributes to our understanding of children’s learning of music, dance and poetry. More specifically, we will analyse: (a) the important role of the teacher in children’s learning within the arts; (b) the importance of conversing when learning the arts; (c) what constitutes the knowledge, what we refer to as ‘learning objects’, to be appropriated within the three domains of art focused on; and (d) how to conceive of progression in children’s knowing within the arts.     

Clipboards and cups of tea: two women’s narrative constructions of professional identity in Sure Start outreach work

Using stories from two employees in the UK Sure Start initiative, this paper offers insight into the complexity of developing a professional identity within a newly established, nebulous role of ‘outreach worker’. Such a role is highly diverse in terms of its duties and the people with whom it engages. As such, it poses challenges for individuals occupying the position, in terms of both populating their professional existence with meaning and locating the evaluative frameworks that provide this existence with a sense of value. Interviews were used to collect data on participants’ experience of working in the new post, their prior background and imagined futures. The study considers the relationship between biography, context and the way in which individuals story their professional selves. It attempts to utilise narrative theory to illuminate the dynamics within which these outreach workers exist, and methodologies they draw upon in order to inhabit their role meaningfully.     

The Multiple Faces of Visual Arts Education

This article identifies recent, mainly Nordic, research approaches to visual arts education. A concept map was developed as a heuristic tool in order to highlight salient traits and blind spots. Contemporary research typically has its origin either in education or in the art world, with an emphasis either on art as language or on art as text. These two dimensions were used to organise the studies and to select representative exemplars in different domains. The framework helped to chart the knowledge base of, and research approaches to, visual arts education. However, the result of blending subject matter and pedagogy tended to be a ‘mixture’ of viewpoints rather than emerging domains of subject‐specific pedagogical knowledge (Lee Shulman: an ‘amalgam’).     

Using different art forms to investigate the impact on children’s involvement in literacy activities

Much of the research into factors that affect children’s school performance has focused on parental involvement rather than the nature of children’s activities undertaken in school. More research is therefore needed to examine the kinds of activities that affect performance and, in particular, whether the degree of involvement children experience in those activities can affect school performance. Children in free play often choose to be involved in arts activities so the arts could be considered as a promising approach. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of ‘Play and Learn through the Arts’ programme on children’s involvement during literacy activities in five- to six-year-old children. It was examined if the arts in general or a specific art form could contribute more to children’s involvement in literacy activities. Children from four different settings participated in this study. To measure the outcome of the intervention the LIS-YC was used and items such as children’s concentration, persistence and precision were measured. The findings were analysed using a mixed method approach and showed significant benefits in all the items in children’s levels of involvement in the arts group over the control group and no difference in effects among the different art forms.     

Beyond the Understanding of Visual Culture: A Pragmatist Approach to Aesthetic Education

In the recent decades art education has tried to move away from the trends based on practical skills and techniques towards a greater stress on interpreting and understanding visual culture, created by the mass media. This approach implies a revision of the field of study and a redefinition of goals, replacing the study of art with a study of ‘visual culture’, a concept that better describes the daily environment of students and which reorientates art education towards social and cultural awareness. In this article, starting from Dewey's conception of art as experience, a theoretical framework is offered based on three ideas. Firstly, the subject of art education involves aesthetic experience, which includes both ‘high’ art and popular culture. Secondly, it is necessary to reconstruct the balance between understanding and production in art education, in order to consider art products as narratives, stories or comments about life experiences. Thirdly, to review the educational function of art education in order to determinate its value for social reconstruction and for which Rorty calls ‘self‐creation’.     

The role of artistic experiences in the comprehensive inductive educational approach

Postmodern pedagogy is constantly confronted with Lyotard’s condemnation of grand narratives found in the philosophy of modernity, on the basis of which basic patterns of moral education were developed. In searching for new answers to the question of how education can prepare individuals for life in an age of late modernity, this paper presents the idea of approaching identity and moral development through the inductive educational approach and highlights the importance of education through the arts in the latter, especially in view of the theoretical notion of aesthetics as ethics of postmodernity. In an age in which artistic creativity is deemed less important than acquiring competences aimed at technological development, it is crucial to provide a clear answer as to why and how different art practices may exert an influence on the full development of a child’s personality. In order to demonstrate the meaning of artistic experience in general education, one must seek arguments supporting the intrinsic value of the artistic experience. This paper stresses the meaning of artistic experience as a means of communication providing both the artist and the art recipient with the opportunity for personal fulfilment. In this context, Aristotle’s concept of mimesis and its role in education through the arts is emphasised as part of the comprehensive inductive educational approach. The argument is illustrated with some qualitative data from the implementation of a project in Kindergarten Vodmat, Ljubljana, Slovenia, using the inductive educational approach and art as a tool for cultural enrichment of pre-school children.     

Teachers Curating Virtual Exhibitions for Learning Visual Arts: A Study of Impact and Effectiveness

Although visual arts teachers have free access to high quality online artwork images offering them immense teaching resources, making meaningful use of them remains a pedagogical challenge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition from face-to-face to online teaching caused an immediate need for teachers to enhance their digital competencies and technological capability for planning and delivering a blended art curriculum. Herein, I propose a ‘teacher-curator pedagogy’ via a study in six primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong to assess its effectiveness. The study took place in the academic year of 2021-22 with 331 student participants. The proposed pedagogy puts visual arts teachers in the role of ‘digital curators’ who create virtual exhibitions for teaching art appreciation and artmaking. This paper addresses the theoretical framework, implementation strategies, and the results of the study highlighting its effectiveness, impact and limitations on teaching when using teacher-curated virtual exhibitions in both physical and virtual learning contexts. It was found that the technological capacity and confidence of the teacher participants was enhanced through the use of online resources and virtual exhibition tools. Making use of the 3D presentation of exhibits in themes and context through digital content curation, the teachers engaged students with deep interaction through the blending of online and face-to-face teaching. However, the proposed pedagogy was limited by the high demand of training and preparation work, hardware and software support, and difficulties in assessing and monitoring learning beyond class.     

Coming‐of‐age in 1980s England: reconceptualising black students’ schooling experience

Much conventional ‘race‐relations’ research of the schooling of black youth has tended to be underpinned by models of social pathology and subjective discrimination. It is argued here that there is a need to reconceptualise black youths’ schooling experience within a theoretical framework that moves beyond mono‐causal explanations and examines the multifaceted dimensions of racially structured English schooling. Placing students at the centre of the research enables us to see how schooling for black female and male youths is a central part of an alienating social response to them, that results in their experience of a structured ‘different reality’ from the white population. In response to this, they have, collectively and individually, creatively developed coping and survival strategies. These are examined here.     

“发现—体验—探索”渐进式教学模式在美术作品欣赏教学中的应用

小学美术欣赏教学中如何唤起学生的切身的感知和体验,是当前欣赏教学亟需解决的关键问题。笔者以《富春山居图》欣赏教学为例,以生本课堂理论为依托,运用体验式学习方法展开教学,在美术作品欣赏教学中开展"发现—体验—探索"渐进式的以学生为主体的欣赏活动,将传统教学中单向的美术观赏课程转化为双向的、多元的探究式互动欣赏教学,促进了学生艺术知觉的逐步形成。     

The social field(s) of arts education today: living vulnerability in neo-liberal times

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the ‘real business’ of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a ‘perfect storm’ for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of ‘vulnerability’ as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education – a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment.     

Insights into the Integration of Traditional Filipino Arts in Art and Design Education: Voices from the Academe

This article presents the first segment of a qualitative study that explores the feasibility of integrating traditional arts in Philippine art and design education. The views of educators on traditional arts were sought to provide an impetus for the study and a springboard for discussion regarding the relevance of traditional Filipino arts in a predominantly Westernised educational system. The educators’ views and opinions on the central question, ‘Why and how should the study of traditional Filipino arts be integrated in the art and design programme?’ will be used to guide a trial integration of the learning of traditional arts in tertiary art and design classes. They will form part of the multiple perspectives that will be gathered from various sectors throughout the course of research. This phenomenological study, on the whole, seeks to uncover the potentials of traditional arts as a rich resource for learning, particularly for students of art and design.