Art Education in Zimbabwe

Art education in Zimbabwe has a rather negative image which dates back to the colonial era. Art was usually confined to wealthy urban schools and taught mostly to white students. The subject was often used as a dumping ground for nonachievers and girls (who had few career options available to them outside of marriage). As a result art was considered an expensive and non‐academic subject in former Rhodesia. The situation did not improve after independence. Art still retains a poor image and has not expanded into mainstream education. However, the country has a rich artistic heritage and informal art education has developed to provide sculptures and crafts for the tourist industry. The government made art compulsory in primary education but have been unable to provide the necessary financial backing to implement the scheme. Only about 80 of the 1548 (5%) schools who have students sitting ‘O’ level examinations offer art as a subject. Third level education has been hindered by the lack of a degree course in art and design, and financial difficulties are again a concern.     

Anton Ehrenzweig,the Artist Teacher and a Psychoanalytic Approach to School Art Education

In the 1960s Anton Ehrenzweig devised an experimental course for school art teachers based on his deep knowledge of British psychoanalytic theory, especially Melanie Klein’s ideas of projection and introjection. Ehrenzweig’s early advocacy for the idea of an artist teacher, which formed a key element of his Art Teachers Certificate course at Goldsmiths, could be seen as ahead of its time, anticipating some of the ideas and practices of the past couple of decades. However, his claim that good teachers use their pupils as a medium for the teacher’s own creativity raises ethical questions that still resonate today. In this article, I will draw out some comparisons between Ehrenzweig’s theories of creativity and art education, and recent writing on the artist teacher. I will consider ways in which Ehrenzweig’s development of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory can both complement and challenge current thinking about the merging and differentiation of artist, teacher and student identities.     

Art Animates: Ideas Inspired by a University-Sponsored Summer Arts Academy for Middle and High School Students

ABSTRACT

Art can provide a vehicle for animating learning. Teachers bring ideas to life through curriculum, while artists realize their ideas through images, often translating between forms, media and spaces. This paper describes the context, content and format of a residential Summer Arts Academy for gifted and talented middle and high school students, held on a university campus. In 2013, the theme of the visual art program at the Summer Arts Academy was animation, which linked to the summer exhibition at the local art museum. Collaborations among university faculty, public school teachers, community artists, and art museum and gallery staff have potential to animate learning for students, while stimulating additional forms of public engagement.     

A Toe in the Water: Introducing Exhibitions on Video with Young People at the Whitechapel Art Gallery

This paper focuses on the production of introductory videos for gallery exhibitions through collaborations between young people, professional artists and gallery staff. Fundamental to this process is the quality of encounter young people involved have with original works of art, artists and gallery staff. Their enquiries about the work on show and critical response is valued by the gallery and its diverse audiences for its unique and individual perspective. Students are invited to explore and familiarise themselves with the work prior to articulating their ideas and views on video within the exhibition spaces. Recorded footage is then edited to a professional standard and shown in the gallery during the run of each show. The videos are also posted out to local schools, marketed as peer‐led introductions to each exhibition, in order to offer up questions and ideas to students and teachers prior to their gallery visit. A commissioned, external evaluation of the videos, against their stated aims and objectives, was undertaken by Goldsmiths College's Art in Education team.     

《讲话》之前——以“边区美协一九四一年展览会”的一次争论为例

1941年8月16日,延安边区美协举办了一次美术展览会。针对此次展览会,胡蛮于1941年8月28、29日在解放日报上发表了《美术上的创作问题——为<边区美协一九四一年展览会>而作》一文,文中批评此次展览作品缺乏政治性。同年9月22日,力群在《解放日报》发表了《美术批评家与美术创作者——读了胡蛮底<目前美术的创作问题>之后》一文,批评胡蛮的观点。力群认为胡蛮只是从政治口号的角度去理解艺术作品,而没有从现实生活体验、艺术家的爱好、内容与形式的关系上去了解艺术作品。通过两人文章对比可知,力群似乎有断章取义之嫌。究其原因,在《讲话》之前,艺术家们始终还没有厘清政治、人民、艺术三者的辨证关系,同时背后还隐藏着力群与胡蛮的个人关系问题。     

Exploring the Benefits of Culturally Responsive Art Learning Experience for Rural Chinese Students

This ethnographic case study explored the benefits associated with culturally responsive art learning experience in a Chinese rural town in the process of urbanisation. The case of this study, Fuchong Art Education Programme (FAEP), provided culturally relevant art activities for primary and secondary rural students who cannot access enriched art programmes in schools. Art studio learning, a summer art camp, an art exhibition, neighbourhood sketching, online teaching, student home visits and teacher meetings were documented and examined over an eight-month period of fieldwork. Semi-structured interviews with the participating students, their teachers and parents and the programme coordinator were conducted to elicit the participants’ perspectives on the FAEP experience, the benefits of participation and the challenges involved in implementing a culturally responsive art programme. The emerging themes included artistic, personal, social and external benefits, which were examined in relation to previous research on the intrinsic and instrumental benefits of art learning and a local understanding of the value of community art engagement in the lives of rural people. The implications offer guidance for promoting culturally responsive art learning in rural settings.     

融合奥林匹克精神的学校武术教育

学校武术是继承和发扬民族传统体育、传播民族传统文化的重要途径,在中国武术逐步向国际化发展的趋势中,武术自身也需要改革和调整,在保持民族性的同时加快与奥林匹克文化思想的交流和融合。思索、宏扬和发展学校武术与中国传统文化、奥林匹克文化的结合点,以便更有效地积极开展迎合奥林匹克精神和学校武术教育,是中国学校武术发展的方向和重要保证。     

探索敦煌壁画对现代造型艺术研究发展的重要意义

敦煌,一颗闪耀在大漠戈壁中的文化明珠,被称为"东方卢浮宫",历经十六国、北朝、隋、唐、五代、西夏、元等时期的兴建,现存的735个洞窟中汇集了大量珍贵精彩的佛教艺术作品,以精美的雕塑和壁画而闻名于世。敦煌"莫高窟"又称"千佛洞"被誉为20世纪最伟大的发现之一。"藏经洞"的发现又衍生了"敦煌学"研究。本文重点讨论敦煌壁画艺术对现代造型艺术研究发展的重要意义。     

From Obstacle to Growth Dewey's Legacy of Experience‐Based Art Education

In the last decades theories that emphasise visitors’experience as the key element in the process of meaning‐making have influenced art education in museums considerably. However, there is remarkably little evidence in practice that museums shape their exhibits and educational tools by the actual experiences of visitors. Because museum education is still too much knowledge‐based, people often do not come to understanding or engagement of thinking. This article demonstrates this inconsistency and its consequences based on visitors’conversations during a museum visit while looking at contemporary art. In order to engage visitors into their own thinking and create lasting experiences, the article also investigates Dewey's ideas about experienced‐based education and inquiry learning. The study especially shows that experiences felt as obstacles for interpretation are extremely suitable to stimulate, deepen and improve visitors’engagement in the inquiry cycle.     

Language in Art and Art in Language

The National Curriculum is bringing a systematic attention to the place of language in the teaching and learning of Art, but may be suppressing some of the liveliness of language in art. Art teaches a specialist vocabulary with benefits beyond the art lesson, but there are dangers (and opportunities) in the use of words in art which have different meanings elsewhere. Art rooms have traditionally promoted a rich variety of language uses, but new pressures could lead to formulaic didactic lessons with too little pupil discussion. One language use in art, from which English teachers could learn, is discussion about the aesthetic qualities of artefacts which pupils make or are shown. English teaching too often treats poems as documentaries, but art can teach pupils to use words for looking and thinking about artefacts in their own terms. A danger here, in art as in English, is that introducing a canon can encourage talking about art in second-hand language which does not connect with pupils’ experiences. Language would drive a model of pedagogy in which experience and perception inform the formation of new concepts, then new concepts inform the search for new experience and perception, in an ascending spiral of aesthetic understanding which could also be both a pleasure and an education of the feelings.     

The Project ‘Art for Learning Art’ in Contemporary Art Museums

Projection‐based augmented reality and virtual reality are used in a visual arts‐based educational project in contemporary art museums from an a/r/tographic perspective. The project ‘Art for Learning Art’ (in Spanish, Arte para aprender arte), at the Museo CajaGRANADA in Granada (Spain) has been developed in collaboration with the University of Granada since 2013. We have employed creative, educational and research methodologies inspired by exhibited works in art museums to encourage visual feedback of visitors participating in collaborative installations. Two such experiences also were produced at the Tate Liverpool Gallery and Museum in March 2018; utilising the methodology of mediation through projection‐based augmented reality and virtual reality, which introduces facets of visual and physical experience that alter the whole experience for the museum's public. By putting on virtual reality headsets, and playing with physical movements, we generate images and change the projections in the museum using projection‐based augmented reality to disrupt the way the public typically moves in the museum. The purpose of the developed interrelations with artworks in the Museo CajaGRANADA and the Tate Liverpool Gallery and Museum was to create collaborative digital images by playing with select artworks exhibited in the museums’ collections. We use this kind of mediation in art museums to develop a visual understanding to provoke learning about art through art creation in a contemporary way. The results are extraordinary as images; they are collaborative artworks, which connect visually with the artworks in the exhibition.     

Kenneth Burke at the MoMA: A viewer’s theory*

When Kenneth Burke visited the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War” in the summer of 1942, he most likely did not expect to leave with such intense and intensely contradictory impressions. His visit there offers rhetoric scholars an opportunity to examine the exhibition – important for museum rhetoric because of its propagandistic political message and its innovative visual and material design. Considering the exhibition on its own terms, and the way designers managed problems of circulation and implemented new methods of “extended vision” helps us to present Burke’s then-developing theories (placement, the pentad) as themselves decidedly visual – photographic, even – and concomitantly, for that moment at least, as decidedly war-directed.     

Getty Museum Family Room – Educational Issues on Scaffolding and Transfer of Learning

In order better to support children’s learning experiences, art museums have begun to establish interactive art exhibitions designed for family visitors. However, as more of these interactive exhibitions are established, some museum professionals are raising concerns about whether these exhibitions actually facilitate young visitors’ learning or impede them from engaging further with the art objects exhibited. Using the Family Room (FR) of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angles as a case study, this research examines the educational principles considered and the challenges encountered when conceptualising and implementing its interactive exhibition. My research shows that the FR project team emphasised three educational principles to be integrated into the exhibition design: (1) interactive learning, (2) family as a learning unit, and (3) enhance the learning of basic artistic elements. The FR’s overarching educational objective is to encourage transfer of learning between the FR to the Getty traditional art galleries. My research concludes with three suggestions to be considered in future practices of art museum education (1) the limits and potentials of interactives, (2) the interactive exhibition design and scaffolding, and (3) transfer of learning between galleries.     

Developing a School Drawing Policy with Newly Qualified Teachers of Art and Design

This paper describes part of a one–day course run by the authors for Newly Qualified Teachers of art and design (NQTs) planned to develop subject knowledge and assessment expertise. The former was achieved partly through an examination of the roles of drawing in secondary school art and design education. Through review and discussion of their pupils’ drawings, the NQTs developed ideas about the functions and purposes of drawing. These ideas were then refined and some practical work undertaken. The nature of drawing policies for secondary art and design departments was considered. The session concluded with a consideration of ideas that might inform the development of such a drawing policy. Secondly, the authors take up and develop several issues from the NQTs’ ideas and responses. These include reference to participants’ drawing performance and understanding, their judgements about the value of drawing, and to how these may be influenced by factors in art education, including those associated with GCSE and assessment. Finally, reference is made to two distinctive perceptions of drawing in schools and, with reference to the work of Wilson, Hurwitz and Wilson, the authors suggest a strategy and argue for the development of drawing policy and curricula for secondary school art departments. The paper is based on part of a presentation given at the Annual Conference of the NSEAD, York, 2002.     

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Anti‐Racist Education: An Introduction to the Talacchanda Exhibition and Education Project

The Talacchanda project took place as an independent research/exhibition undertaking supported by the Glasgow School of Art. Over seventeen months an exploratory education programme was introduced at various levels of schools and higher education. The education programme sprang from a contemporary art exhibition and dance performance called Talaccahnda which was informed by ancient Indian thought on art and drama. The exhibition and performance took place in Glasgow's Tramway Project Room and Theatre in October 2002. It had been shown previously in the British Council Gallery in New Delhi in 2000, and later in 2001 at the artist run space ‘Out of the Blue’ in Edinburgh. Thanks to Scottish Arts Council Lottery funding, Talacchanda Glasgow was accompanied by an education programme, which offered workshops and events in schools, at the gallery, through community groups as well as at GSA and Reid Kerr College, Paisley. By demonstrating connections between apparently disparate activities, the project aimed to serve as a catalyst for fresh thinking on inter‐cultural and anti racist education, and to strengthen connections between the community groups and institutions involved.     

透视高校美术史教学中的探究性学习

美术史是高等院校美术专业的一门必修理论课程,其宗旨是指导学生艺术创作实践、提高美术审美、培养创新意识和能力。文章从激发学生的探究兴趣和培养学生问题意识两方面讨论如何在美术史教学过程中,训练学生进行探究性学习。     

Universal themes

In this article, the author proposes a model for teaching Art across Key Stages 1 to 3, which takes the concept of ‘Universal Themes’ as its central focus. He welcomes the emphasis on ideas, meanings and communications contained within the new National Curriculum 2000 document for Art & Design. He also describes examples of how schools might develop their teaching of art through this approach in order to re-animate the practical curriculum.     

Art,Design and Environment: A Programme for Teacher Education

This account of a programme for PGCE Art/Design students at University College Bretton Hall, Wakefield (UK) describes an attempt in initial teacher training to develop a course of study which links art, design, environment and education. It seeks to develop a range of perceptions of the built environment, including those of the artist, the critic and the designer. The ideas and methods of working developed on this programme support students’ work in schools. The paper explains the rationale and describes the intensive workshop programme, which includes streetwork, studio sessions and critique. It reports on students’ research and their work in schools. Issues include the place of built environment studies in the Art/Design curriculum, the use of the environment as an educational resource and learning methods and teaching strategies. It comments on the satisfactions and frustrations of developing such a programme in initial teacher education. It presents the work at Bretton Hall as a case study in a wider range of work currently being developed by students, tutors and teachers involved in other courses. They have come together through the ‘Site Specific Project’ to create a research network to support curriculum innovation and teachers’ professional development.     

Lifelong Learning for People Aged 64+ Within the Contemporary Art Gallery Context

This paper reports the initial findings from Contemporary Visual Art and Identity Construction—Wellbeing Amongst Older People: a two-year research project that aims to understand how the lives of older people can be improved by examining their use of contemporary visual art in the art gallery and museum. It will focus on data relating to lifelong learning for postretirement people. The paper investigates the impact of engaging with contemporary art on a sample of 43 participants aged 64+.     

Key Skills Enhancement for Students,Artists and Designers through Residencies in Education

In September 1999, the Glasgow School of Art ‘Artists and Designers in Education’ programme was accepted as an important component of the GOALS project, an ACCESS initiative funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council including students in schools as project leaders, tutors and mentors. This stable and long-term funding validates and ensures the future of an experimental key skills programme which has been carefully nurtured in Glasgow School of Art for the past ten years, often in the face of scepticism, voiced by those for whom higher education and especially higher art and design education is ‘only about engaging with, becoming expert in and in due course advancing the discipline itself’. [1]This paper suggests that key skills enhancement through supported and evaluated residencies in education is of demonstrable value to most emergent artists and designers regardless of their subsequent career trajectories.