EXPERIMENTS in induction: new approaches to the probationary year*

Abstract

Feedback from educators in England, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland was obtained regarding the performance of U.S. student teachers in the schools of these nations. Reported in this paper are the educators' observations and beliefs pertaining to topics such as the professional and cultural/social strengths of U.S. student teachers; major cultural/social ‘mistakes’ often made by U.S. student teachers; ways in which they could better prepare for classroom teaching assignments in overseas schools; goals motivating them to seek placements in overseas schools; and ways in which the foreign pupils benefitted from the U.S. student teachers. Based on the feedback, recommendations are offered to student participants and university/college faculty for the improvement of teaching experiences in overseas nations. In addition, the need for internationalizing teacher education programs in the United States is recognized.     

Art,ordinary work and conceptuality: sculpting the social relations of the art world

ABSTRACT

This research reveals the social relations of the art world through an investigation of visual artists’ ordinary art-making practices. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, the article attends to art and ordinary work, clarifying how visual artists’ work, is not only shaped socially and historically, but also reveals tensions about what counts as art and who counts as an artist. The article clarifies how today’s art world valorises conceptual approaches – centred on mobilising concepts and ideas, while devaluing expressivist approaches – centred on accessing intuition or inspiration. The article makes visible an increasingly conceptual, academic art world in which an expressivist practice is harder to sustain. By tracing shifting forms of work and shifting social relations, the study contributes to educational research on art, while calling attention to organisational processes that deeply shape artists’ lives.     

Predicting Position on Teaching Creationism (Instead of Evolution) in Public Schools

ABSTRACT

The federal government has repeatedly denied the introduction of creationism into public schools as it is a direct violation of the separation of church and state. Little is known about those who would opt to eliminate evolution in scientific curriculum altogether. The authors examined this more extreme anti-evolution perspective in a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults ( N = 2,000). A binary logistic regression model involving 11 relevant predictors revealed that the most important predictor of support for the teaching of creationism-only education in public schools was low educational attainment, which yielded a stronger magnitude of effect than did belief in God or importance of religion. Results are interpreted and discussed in the context of implications for educational policy and science curriculum in public schools.     

Mapping Access and Opportunity for Students with Disabilities: Urban K–8 Schools as Pockets of Privilege

Abstract

Using a DisCrit intersectional lens and statistical and spatial methods, we trace how the creation of K-8 schools functioned to create pockets of privilege in one urban U.S. school district. K-8 schools were both whiter and wealthier than district averages, serving as “enclave” schools. Although far fewer students with disabilities were served in K-8 schools compared to traditional elementary and middle schools, those attending K-8 schools were more likely to be educated in inclusive settings.     

Social Expectations and Workplace Challenges: Teaching Artists in Korean Schools

Social interest in art integration for curriculum enrichment and innovation, particularly at the turn of the century, has promoted extensive institutional partnerships between cultural organisations and public schools in many countries. Stimulated by social demands for innovative educational practices, these institutional partnerships have increased the numbers of teaching artists sent to schools. These artists are expected to contribute to the development of students’ creative imaginations by providing learning opportunities beyond conventional classroom practices. However, the extent to which teaching artists are able to develop creatively within their socially expected roles remains unclear, especially considering the marginal status of the arts in formal education settings. A recent survey‐ and interview‐based study conducted by the present author in South Korea demonstrated that teaching artists in schools find the structured educational system often limits the scope of their classroom practice. This article reviews the teaching artists’ concerns and needs identified in the study context and discusses ways to support their professional development and expand the roles of institutions in improving the quality of their teaching practice. The discussion also examines historical and socio‐political factors that have influenced the persisting challenges of structural issues inherited in the Teaching Artists in Schools Program in South Korea to provide suggestions for more sustainable and instructive collaborations.     

Transnational Mexican-Origin Families' Ways of Knowing: A Framework Toward Bridging Understandings in U.S. Schools

Transnational students and families are those who cross real and metaphoric borders, spanning countries, to engage family and community in meaningful ways. Based on a three-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, I show the distinct ways of knowing of four Mexican-origin, working class families and how the U.S. schools where the children from these families study hardly recognize these ways of knowing. The families’ ways of knowing can be characterized as a form of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls conocimiento, or knowing, under three interweaving categories: Nepantlera or in-between, bridge-building knowing; sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing; and chained knowing, in which families are chained in their knowing to the realities of the U.S./Mexican border and their extended communities and families who also are impacted by the border. The article shows that schools recognize neither transnational practices, such as return trips to Mexico, nor transnational ways of knowing. Educators may strengthen their own ways of knowing and create a more equitable pedagogy for all students if they learn to help co-construct the bridges families such as the ones in this study have already begun to build.     

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.     

U.S. Virtual School Trial Period and Course Completion Policy Study

Abstract

Variation in policies virtual schools use to calculate course completion and retention rates impacts the comparability of these quality metrics. This study surveyed 159 U.S. virtual schools examining the variability in trial period and course completion policies—two policies that affect course completion rates. Of the 86 respondents, almost 70% had trial periods that varied from 1 day to 185 days. Course completion definitions varied from remaining in the course irrespective of the final grade to receiving an A– in the course. Such wide variation renders the completion and retention rate metrics useless. We recommend virtual schools adopt consistent measures for calculating student retention to allow meaningful comparisons among virtual schools and between virtual and brick-and-mortar schools.     

Culturally reimagining education: Publicity,aesthetics and socially engaged art practice

Abstract

This paper sets out to reimagine education through a cultural perspective and explores education as a performative practice that establishes certain borders of ‘public’ belonging. Wide-spread debates about the public dimension of schools and universities have focused on how economic rationales need to be replaced with alternative visions of education. This paper seeks to contribute to this revisioning of the public in education by reclaiming education as a specifically cultural endeavour, one tied to practices that are at once both performative and aesthetic. To this end, I draw on theoretical notions of publicity that highlight its performative character. I then offer a reading of a socially engaged art project in order to suggest ways in which this performative character of publicity can be seen to be educational. This paper argues that education itself emerges through various cultural enactments that delineate the contours of who counts as a public and who does not.     

Special educational needs and art and design education: plural perspectives on exclusion

Abstract

Education policy proposals by the UK Coalition government appeared to be based on a process of consultation, participation and representation. However, policy formation seems to prioritise and confirm particular ways of knowing and being in the world. This article recognises the ontological and epistemological invalidation at work in education policy by examining the shared context for policy formation in special educational needs (SEN/D) and art and design education. There is value in recognising plurality, acknowledging the ways in which apparently singular policies relating to special education are understood through subject or disciplinary perspectives. The neoliberal aim to foster an economically productive ‘subject’ is evident in policy formation relating to art and design education as well as SEN/D. Both subjects, the disabled child and art and design education, are defined as excessive and are excluded where they do not conform to particular notions of productivity. The article explores theoretical frameworks that are essential for recognising meaning in education when subjects cannot be put to work.     

Critical Theory and Visual Practice in the Art School

This paper reflects upon the recent debates concerning the relationship between theory and practice in British art schools. Much has been done during the last two decades by artists, academics, writers and exhibition curators to bridge the traditional polarization between thinking and making. Underlying this venture is the keenly felt conviction that our task as teachers is to work with our students to develop creative practices which make a difference – particularly in relation to how we might use the arts to reformulate the ways in which we articulate our sense of self in a wider social and political context. In the last thirty years we have witnessed a sea change in art schools. The formerly inward looking reclusive art school culture is now inhabited by groups and individuals who are engaged in the everyday concerns of consumer culture and are committed to, first of all, harness creative production as an agent of change and, second, reject the notion that art practice is divorced from theoretical concerns.     

Two Poems

Very little information exists regarding the mental health needs of student artists. This study compared psychological symptoms and diagnoses of college students in 3 conservatories (n = 607) with those of college students in traditional colleges and universities (n = 87,105). The study found no difference in psychological symptoms except for increased stress among art students. The study also found that art students in these conservatories were more likely to make use of counseling services than students at traditional schools.     

Surviving Being Dark: A Pedagogy of the Sacred for Survival in a Divided Society

Abstract

Historically, Blacks have out of necessity prioritized survival in educating their younger generations for existence in the racially hostile and divided context of the U.S. This education and religious education has occurred formally and informally in homes, schools, community organizations, and in congregations. This paper examines three aspects of survival: survival and emancipatory education, survival and justice, and survival with emerging Black generations. Three examples will be offered that highlight each aspect of survival. The examples will demonstrate how education generally and religious education in particular have undergirded pedagogies of the sacred for the survival of Black life.     

Reading Derrida close reading Lemov close reading close reading

Asbtract

This article does exactly what the title suggests: It reads Derrida’s idea of close reading into Doug Lemov’s idea of close reading by close reading Lemov’s definition for close reading. Building on work that considers poststructural approaches in reading classrooms, I engage Lemov and Derrida in a conversation about the meaning and uses of reading as a classroom practice. This approach asks questions about who gets to read, where, and in what ways. Within this conversation, I aim to open new considerations of reading in classrooms in public schools in the U.S. The article concludes with some possibilities and risks of pursuing these ideas, focusing on the potential of new inquiries into the ‘right’ to read.     

Genealogy of self-expression: a reappraisal of the history of art education in England and Japan

Abstract

In both England and Japan, art education was viewed as having nothing to do with self-expression, but was considered to be an efficient means for industrial development. In England, it was designed to train the eyes and hands of artisans. The art critic Ruskin has often been referred to in the context of the transition to self-expression in the history of art education. This article shows, however, that Ruskin was not an advocate of self-expression. In Japan, drawing was introduced into the general education curriculum at the beginning of the Meiji era, and the aim of that instruction was to train the students' eyes and hands. In response to this trend, the Free Drawing Movement was introduced by Kanae Yamamoto. He attempted to introduce the methods of creation used by professional artists into general education. But this aspect was neglected by both his supporters and opponents, and Yamamoto has been presented instead as an advocate of self-expression. Drawing on the genealogical approach, as developed by Foucault, this paper re-examines this well-known history of art education. By replacing Ruskin and Yamamoto in the historical context of the transition of art education in two respective countries, the genealogy of self-expression will be revealed.     

The dream deferred: Why multicultural education fails to close the achievement gap. A cultural historical analysis

Abstract

The authors critically examine multicultural education and its failure to address the stark differences that characterize student achievement in North America in terms of a praxis that would bring equity in learning or other developmental outcomes. Arguing that dismantling proportional group based inequality depends on the systematic reform of structures and policies currently perpetuating the correlation between children's ethnocultural and economic history and their school achievement, we draw from a cultural historical theoretical framework to outline how the multiple and complex factors influencing underachievement might be better understood and, moreover, effectively counteracted in ways that begin to reverse the rates of school failure for U.S. ethnic minority students, in particular U.S. English learners.     

Envisioning the Future: Working toward Sustainability in Fine Art Education

Fine art education provides students with opportunities to acquire knowledge and skills to respond creatively to their experience of society and culture. Fostering creative ways of knowing, thinking and doing requires studio learning conditions that promote the exploration of embodied perceptions, material sensibilities and conceptual ideas that are provisional, socially constructed and ever changing. Traditionally, art schools provided these conditions unchallenged because they were autonomous. Since the 1980s, however, art schools have been integrated into the academy, and face increasing pressure to meet the institutional demands of being in a university. Some argue this changed status means the academy, with its research and pedagogic traditions, is actually straitjacketing creativity. Furthermore, contemporary art practice has changed as artists are increasingly experimenting with interdisciplinary modes of working. This article discusses a two‐year major change initiative, undertaken within an urban Australian art school, designed to respond to this complex set of changed circumstances. It considers ways to address institutional compliance and viability demands while maintaining deeply held values about how to foster creativity in undergraduate students. The outcome is a new organising structure and renewed curriculum for the largest programme offering in the school: the fine art undergraduate degree. Educational renewal is conceptualised as a creative process and the approach to change is thus adapted from creative research methodologies. By treating pedagogy and curriculum design as a creative process, this change initiative, rather than straitjacketing creativity, has re‐envisioned an epistemological framework for undergraduate fine art that will sustain creativity education into the future.     

Lesbian and gay teachers and sex/uality education policy enactment in schools

ABSTRACT

This paper examines lesbian and gay teachers’ identities and experiences in schools in the context of school policies relating to homophobia and to sex and sexuality education. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 12 lesbian and gay teachers working in English and Welsh schools, and using the concept of ‘policy enactment’, I analyse the ways in which school policies around homo/bi/transphobic bullying and sex/uality education and their enactment are perceived by lesbian and gay teachers. The article examines teachers’ personal experiences in relation to sexuality in school, and then broadens out into related issues for pupils and a discussion of the varied approaches to sex and relationships education in the schools. I argue that the enactment of these policies is not straightforward, and that they could be better supported by a more inclusive and comprehensive sexuality education curriculum.     

Art and Design Blogs: a Socially‐Wise Approach to Creativity

Many images of the ‘artist’ or ‘designer’ pervade the media and popular consciousness. Contemporary images of the artist and creativity that focus solely on the individual offer a very narrow depiction of the varying ways creativity occurs for artists and designers. These images do not capture the variety of creative processes and myriad ways artists and designers work. Young creatives in particular are choosing to work with a social approach to creativity. An example of this approach is the world of blogging, a form of social media where young creatives have a very active voice. This article explores how creative bloggers, that is, artists, designers and makers who blog about their practice, use a social approach to foster creativity with a sense of community, environmental and ethical awareness, a value framework that is in opposition to the market‐driven notion of liberal individualism. Is there a way to include participation in the broader art and design blogging world as part of art and design education? What can we learn from such a social approach to learning in higher education art and design programmes? This article explores these questions and shares findings of an ethnographic approach to an analysis of art and design blogs. In doing so it argues for a socially‐wise approach to creativity in art and design education as a means of promoting values other than those usually connected to the market.