Rethinking Education through Contemporary Art

This article is part of a broader investigation exploring how contemporary art allows us to think about the process that underpins our teaching and learning in order to change it. We are tutors in initial teacher education and we teach, learn and communicate through contemporary art for a pedagogical module. In the following article we will show how teaching, learning and communicating through contemporary art helps future teachers to be aware of their educational models. Art encounters generate new learning and teaching experiences by allowing students and teachers to make various rhizomatic wanderings. The rhizomatic wanderings are diverse with the content and the form depending on the personal experience. The article concludes that the more rhizomatic wanderings future teachers make, the more they will be able to rethink the process of teaching and learning in order to attend to the diverse situations of classrooms of the twenty‐first century.     

From the Saltmarsh and the Deershelter

When we think about approaches to teaching and learning in art and design education the diverse and complex role of the teacher soon becomes apparent. Teachers often find themselves working through situations which require them to shift between subject‐ and learner‐centred approaches, where they negotiate authority and freedom in their teaching relationships. On closer inspection the tensions found in these negotiations reveal contradictions for teachers, where they try to do one thing but cannot avoid doing another. The article explores these perplexing and contradictory experiences as possible encounters where we can speculate about ourselves as teachers and discover powerful opportunities for learning. It aims to do this through the critical lens of Tubbs's (2005) ‘Philosophy of the teacher’. Tubbs's analysis provides an opportunity to closely examine the tensions in teaching approaches, and proposes the possibility of their contradiction as educational. In addition, the article explores Henri Lefebvre's ‘moments of presence’, suggesting that encounters in our lives, which appear to exist at the intersection of one thing and another, where we find ourselves experiencing a contradiction, offer exciting possibilities for teaching and learning. The article builds its ideas around landscape encounters, from the saltmarsh and the deer‐shelter. It uses these encounters with landscapes to locate experiences of contradiction, and to work out how a teacher could respond.     

What is Art in Education? New Narratives of Learning

In this paper I address some questions pertinent to the development of school art education. I begin by considering how we relate to art and how we might understand the notion of this relation in terms of human subjectivity and the art object. To do this I describe particular art practices that have broadened social conceptions of art, which in turn, become part of art itself and shape performances of understanding, learning and practice. Implicit to this discussion is a change in how artists, art practice and engagement with art are conceived. I then consider some art events in school art education and analyse how human subjects, art practices and objects are understood in this context. This leads to further remarks about how learners and practice in school art education might be discerned in the light of the preceding discussion.     

Creative and aesthetic responses to picturebooks and fine art

It has long been accepted that one can respond to fine art in a variety of different ways. However, it is only in the last decade or so that picturebooks have been attracting the kind of recognition that they have long deserved as art forms to be considered and responded to both creatively and aesthetically. There is a growing body of research focusing on how we can respond creatively to the illustrations in picturebooks in addition to the picturebooks themselves as art objects. There is also a growing number of author illustrators who use famous works of art as an integral part of the storyline in their picuturebooks. This article describes how one such book, Katie's picture show, was initially used as the stimulus for some reader response work which quickly led onto more in-depth, detailed responses to fine art – Fernando Botero's art in particular. It then goes on to share the oral, written and illustrative responses of some 10 year old children, showing the creative and aesthetic links between picturebooks and fine art.     

Polyvocal Play: A Poetic Bricolage of the Why of Our Transdisciplinary Self-Study Research

ABSTRACT

We have come to conceptualize our transdisciplinary, transnational, and transcultural interaction and reciprocal learning through self-study research as polyvocal professional learning. Our conceptualization of polyvocality has made visible how dialogic encounters with diverse ways of seeing, knowing, and doing can deepen and extend professional learning in self-study research. For this collaborative self-study, we created a poetic bricolage composed of frequently used words in three of our published research poems as we asked, “Why? Why does our work together exist? And why should anyone care?” What emerged became an organic abstract of the impetus for our collaborative learning over time. Through inventing a poetic bricolage, we were able to make visible and available how our multiple interests, practices, and methods have come together to support fluid, dialogic co-learning, and re-learning. Discovering the why of our work included unearthing our gravitation toward transdisciplinary scholarship, which offers university faculty a wide range of possibilities for co-learning and co-creativity. Our demonstration of methodological inventiveness in action through poetic bricolage will be useful to others interested in exploring the promise and tensions of plurality, interaction and interdependence, and creative activity in self-study methodology.     

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.     

The Intertextual Method for Art Education Applied in Japanese Paper Theatre—a Study on Discovering Intercultural Differences

In art education we need methods for studying works of art and visual culture interculturally because there are many multicultural art classes and little consensus as to how to interpret art in different cultures. In this article my central aim was to apply the intertextual method that I developed in my doctoral thesis for Western art education to explore whether the method would also work from a non‐Western point of view. My hypothesis was that it is possible to find local and global differences that arise from selected texts and study them interculturally. As postmodernism calls attention to marginal areas, I applied my method to a form of visual culture that is not well known in the European art education context, the Japanese kamishibai which can be translated as Japanese paper theatre. Based on the results, my study will propose a method for understanding visual culture and the multiple relations ‐ local and global ‐ between different cultures. Japanese paper theatre also offers an interesting potential for using visual and verbal stories in the theory and practice of art education.     

Fabricated childhoods: uncanny encounters with the more-than-human

ABSTRACT

This article is based on uncanny encounters with Julia deVille's exhibit, Phantasmagoria. Inspired by Deleuzian-informed research practices, the author experiments with provoking practices to defy dominant developmental notions of childhood. This article reworks a humanist ontology by bringing together the discursive, the material, the human, and the more-than-human through the interweaving of provocations and encounters. Enacting an experimental and performative methodology, the reader's movement through the article mimics the journey through an exhibition and the storm of thought and feeling that art can provoke. These provocations set into motion meanings about childhood that sit outside of developmentalism and are rarely entertained in the field of early childhood education.     

School Art Education: Mourning the Past and Opening a Future

This article begins with a brief summary of the findings of a recent research project that surveyed the content of the art curriculum in a selection of English secondary schools. The research findings suggest a particular construction of pedagogised subjects and objects rooted in ideas of technical ability and skill underpinned by a transmission model of teaching and learning. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and social theory reasons for passionate attachments to such curriculum identities are proposed, when in the wider world of art practice such identities were abandoned long ago. Working with the notion of the subordination of teaching to learning and the difficulties of initiating curriculum practices within increasingly complex social contexts, the article argues for learning through art to be viewed as a productive practice of meaning‐making within the life‐worlds of students. The term, ‘encounters of learning’ is employed to sketch a pedagogical quest in which an ethics of learning remains faithful to the truth of the learning event for the student.     

Nature watch

In our previous article ‘On observing the night sky’¹ we had introduced the reader to the stars and constellations and suggested how they may be observed. In this article we will provide a few technical details, which we had deliberately left out earlier and also introduce the reader to a number of the other remarkable objects that may be seen in the sky.     

Negotiating a ‘Radically Ambiguous World’: Planning for the Future of Research at the Art and Design University

Theoretically and methodologically, understanding the role of research within art and design practices is a recurring theme within contemporary dialogue and debate. In the published literature, there are many questions around how categories and definitions of artistic research are employed within the increasingly under‐resourced realm of higher education. This article contributes to this larger discussion by building up our knowledge of a particular feature of this landscape: how research policy and planning documents at art and design universities represent and define artistic research. While examining research at the level of practice remains important, we must also understand the symbolic and practical weight that institutional directives carry. In light of recent literature on artistic research and the debates concerning its evaluation and institutionalisation, this article develops our contemporary understanding of the role of the art and design university as an important mediator of conflicting perspectives on the ‘value’ of art and design research. Based on a discourse analysis of research planning documents from Canada's three independent public art and design universities, this article will argue that it is not the definition of artistic research itself that is the most contentious feature of university research planning – it is defining the value of this research that invites conflict and concern.     

‘Is he allowed to have a crush on you?’ interrupting adultism in fieldwork with youth*

ABSTRACT

Scholars have called for ethnographers to reveal the emotional and controversial aspects of fieldwork. Through analysis of our fieldwork with teens in the United States and Japan, this article documents how we, two adult researchers, attempted to address adultism—a pervasive system of oppression that deems young people inferior. We discuss three types of encounters which we believe reflect how adultism operated in our fieldwork and the challenges related to de-stabilising it. The encounters revealed specific patterns and manifestations of adultism including 1) how adults regulated young people’s identities, 2) our assumptions about what rapport and reciprocity with youth meant, and 3) the dilemmas of whether or not to deploy adult power to intervene in youth dynamics we found to be troublesome. This article suggests that adult researchers reflexively examine and document challenging and unsettling moments with youth in fieldwork in order to interrupt and unlearn adultist behaviours and beliefs.     

Winter Art Education Project

The purpose of this article is to describe how the Department of Art Education at the University of Lapland in Finland has developed winter art as a method of environmental and community‐based art education. I will focus on the Snow Show Winter Art Education Project, a training project funded by the European Union and the State Provincial Office of Lapland. The general aim of the project was to increase the know‐how of winter art in Northern Finland. This goal was put into practice through workshops on snow construction, documentation of winter art, winter‐oriented media production, and snow and ice sculpting; through continuing education seminars, workshops, and school projects for teachers; and through public lectures and seminars on winter and winter art. In this article, I describe the challenges that winter offers to community and environment‐based art education in the North. Further, I introduce the methods of implementation and the outcomes of winter art exercises carried out by several schools in Lapland in cooperation with and inspired by the Snow Show Winter Art Education Project.     

Understanding Art: Preparing Generalist School Teachers to Teach Art with Artworks

This article focuses on ways of building preservice primary teachers' confidence in teaching art with artworks and, in particular, on how to develop their pedagogical content knowing. It is suggested that through opportunities offered for engaging in observational and reflective practices with artworks an initial groundwork is set that can challenge pre‐service teachers' preconceptions about art and promote an aesthetic form of inquiry. A qualitative approach was followed which included in‐depth interviews with twenty pre‐service teachers regarding their attitudes and knowledge towards artworks. The findings indicate that enhancing teachers' abilities to practice factual inquiries and then move on to interpretive inquiries of artworks can help them learn how to learn about artworks and how to organise meaningful art viewing activities with children. Issues relating to the participants' level of aesthetic understanding are also discussed as participants were asked to engage with artworks and their aesthetic encounters were documented.     

The Artist‐Teacher in the Classroom and Changes in the Teacher–Student Relationship,with Reference to the Issue of Censorship

This article examines a case study of an A‐Level student's work and how the inclusion and integration of my own practice as artist‐teacher into the classroom has changed the teacher‐student relationship, resulting in a more collaborative environment. It investigates how the mutual sharing of practice supports opportunities for pupils to discuss and investigate socially provocative issues and raises the issues of censorship. Through the case study the following questions will be addressed: how a collaborative classroom environment impacts on process and outcomes; the effect of discussing social/ political/ cultural issues within the art and design classroom; and the issues of censorship and ownership within the environment of a comprehensive secondary school context.     

The Creation of the ‘Hong Kong Visual Arts Education Web’ and the Use of the Inquiry‐Based Teaching Approach

This article describes a collaborative action research conducted by a lecturer and several primary school art teachers, who between 2001 and 2006 created the Visual Arts Education Web (‘iii web’) in Hong Kong. The creation of the ‘iii web’ was accomplished through research that employed questionnaires, focus group discussions and individual interviews. Teachers' perceptions of using websites in teaching were examined, art education websites from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and the USA were compared, in order to create a website that could meet the needs of Hong Kong primary school art teachers. Inquiry‐based learning is one of the important teaching approaches that were introduced during the Hong Kong Education Reform in 2003. An example of using the ‘iii web’ to teach public art is described to illustrate how the teacher and students used inquiry‐based learning in art education.     

Embodied meaning-making: using literacy-as-event to explore a young child's small world play

This article uses the concept of literacy-as-event to explore the embodied meaning-making of a young child during small world play. Recent developments in literacy research, influenced by relational thinking, have led to a reconsideration of how meaning-making unfolds in home and school settings. The concept of literacy-as-event suggests that meaning-making is unpredictable and dynamic, responding to novel socio-material interactions between texts, people, objects and moments. This view suggests that there is a need to ensure children have opportunities to engage with embodied and material meaning-making beyond shared reading events. In this article, small world play after a shared reading event is positioned as enabling socio-material meaning-making through embodied and material encounters with people and objects. A single episode of small world play is presented for analysis. A multimodal analytical approach is used, drawing attention to the embodied interactions between a child, her adult and objects. Analysis of the data shows that the young child's meaning-making involved moments of physical and material almost-hiatus, followed by erratic movements. These often unexpected fluctuations, between stillness and motion, created generative tensions between the child and her adult, enabling creative swerves in engagement between narrative action, character traits and story themes.     

Haraway's ‘bag lady story-telling’: relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape’

In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking three short forays into what Donna Haraway calls a ‘post-human landscape’. This exploration takes us beyond the horizons of orthodox educational approaches, in which the individual child is typically seen to be developing and learning within his/her (exclusively human) sociocultural context. The post-human landscape relocates childhood within a world that is much bigger than us (humans) and about more than our (human) concerns. It allows us to reconsider the ways in which children are both constituted by and learn within this more-than-human world. Adopting Haraway's feminist narrative strategy, we offer three very different ‘bag lady’ stories that consider the ethics and politics of child/non-human animal cross-species encounters. Each of these stories gestures towards the ways in which we can learn to live with ‘companion species’ rather than only ever learn about them.     

Learning with the Natural Environment: How Walking with Nature Can Actively Shape Creativity and Contribute to Holistic Learning

Learning takes place in various spaces through human and nonhuman interactions. Considering the urgent need for rethinking how humans relate to nature, in this article we present a MA level course in the context of art, craft and design to discuss how learning with the natural environment approach can impact learning experiences. We introduce walking with nature as a creative method that fosters students’ ability to let the environment actively shape their creative events. The encounter with nature-based materials in their different forms and following the material's flow provides students with a foundation for their creative processes. This study proposes that walking can facilitate the entanglement between the student's knowledge and encountered materials, generating an emotional and dialogical relationship with the natural environment that contributes to a holistic learning experience. We propose that such an experience can help in comprehending the importance of the caring actions we need to take and maintain towards the nonhuman world.