Playing to Draw [for Design]

There is a disconnect for a number of applied design students who utilise drawing from online, published and photographic sources, in the development of design collections. In practice they are engaged with a subject that physically demands the direct use of hands in the making of artefacts, particularly within textile fields. Drawing is at the core of the development of ideas but it is often seen as being different or awkward and can cause anxiety amongst students who may be more focused on the end [designed] result. This article reflects upon the teaching of a drawing class with year two undergraduates on a textiles degree course at a UK university. Rather than relying on that which is readily available (from museums, online content, galleries, archives or trend forecasting sites), students make their own 2D and 3D primary sources from which they develop drawn proposals for textile and surface samples. Does this approach allow fresh visuals, new languages and translations for design to emerge? Will it provide a further level of engagement for those students who already love drawing as well as those who don't (yet)? Data has been drawn from key texts, questionnaires, journals and observations of the work carried out by participating students.     

Leaders or led? A qualitative analysis of how young people explore express and experiment via new media in an Irish higher education context

This paper provides a systematic review of students' multimedia projects and reveals how a complex web of institutional, local, global and gender issues influence the process of digital media creation by young adults. The significance of this research for this Special Issue lies in the study's longitudinal nature, which examined students' final-year multimedia productions over a 12-year period (2003–2014) in a university setting. The analysis provides a unique insight into how sociocultural norms, access to technology and institutional forces such as the curriculum and lecturers' subject area of expertise, as well as politics and Ireland's economic recession, have influenced and shaped student voices. It also provides the opportunity to track how the student voice changed and adapted in response to events both inside and outside the university and to identify areas of silence and question what they might mean. The potential for student-produced multimedia to carry gendered qualities, especially regarding audience orientation and media type, is highlighted. Student-produced multimedia artefacts and accompanying written documentation are analysed in terms of genre, media type, audience and purpose, with gender providing a useful overarching framework to further refine the analysis.     

Developing strategic readers: a multimodal analysis of a primary school teacher's use of speech,gesture and artefacts

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a ‘telling case’ on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts as a means of communication while instructing her students in reasons to predict when reading. Data sources for this case study consisted of field notes, artefacts and digital video. We analysed the teacher's use of gesture, speech and artefacts from a social semiotic multimodal perspective. Findings indicate that the teacher created meaning by interweaving multiple modes in the communicative contexts of strategy instruction using speech, deictic gestures, metaphoric gestures and artefacts. These findings are important to reading strategy instruction because much of the research and discussion of practice to date has centred on the instruction of reading strategies using teacher and student speech and not attending to the use of semiotic resources beyond speech.     

Representation, Arts and Media in Education and Community

This paper outlines a view about the use of art and why it matters. It discusses the purposes of education in the arts, the role of individual consciousness in the making of the arts, the arts role in developing societal self-awareness, the way art brings about a cultural presence and the relationship between the production and consumption of culture.     

‘Fitting in’ and ‘standing out’: the peer group and young people’s development of reader identity

Abstract

The benefits of reading for pleasure and positive reader identities have been well established in previous research. However, much discussion regarding young people’s reading is underpinned by a discourse of deficit, placing emphasis on what young people should be reading. In an attempt to move away from this discourse, this article considers reading in the context of young people’s broader social and cultural worlds, exploring the role of the peer group in young people’s development of a reader identity. The article argues that the reading practices young people engage in are part of their broader social and cultural participation and, consequently, part of a broader project of identity formation. By highlighting the complexity of young people’s development of a reader identity and the meaning ascribed to specific reading practices, the findings challenge deficit models of young people’s reading lives, which underpin attempts to redistribute cultural capital through educational and cultural policy.