Art Education Research Research Articles

Ahead of its time? Reassessing what is core content in Visual Arts in the New South Wales Curriculum

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the extent to which Visual Arts syllabus content currently known as the ‘Conceptual Framework’ represents core concepts and principles for learning in Visual Arts K-12 in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Set within the context of the NSW Curriculum Review, Nurturing wonder and igniting passion: designs for a new school curriculum (NESA, 2020), and in the absence of regular cyclic curriculum evaluation or reform of the Visual Arts syllabuses for over 21 years, this investigation evaluates the fit between existing curriculum content and requirements for new syllabuses in the revised curriculum. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research in Visual Arts education, this article examines how the conceptual framework and the principles underlying its function provide the conceptual foundations of understanding in art making and art interpretation as primary forms of practice in K-12. Discussion then examines how the framework meets the requirements for new syllabuses in the NSW Curriculum Review. It is argued that the conceptual framework (1) represents core concepts and principles for learning, (2) supports the development of praxis-oriented learning, and (3) sustains stable content over years of schooling which supports students to develop deep understandings of practice in art. The article concludes that the conceptual framework should be retained in the revised Visual Arts curriculum as it represents a conceptual core and principles for learning that are essential to teaching and learning in Visual Arts K-12 in NSW.

교양교육연구사의 진단과 제언

This article diagnosed the research results accumulated in the field of liberal arts education for academic theorization of liberal arts education and exploring the direction of future liberal arts education research. The study classified the results of various liberal arts education research conducted from 1946, when university liberal arts education began, to 2020 into eight types, including academic theses, doctoral dissertations, books, and policy research, and then analyzed historical trends and progress. According to the result of the analysis, 75.3% of academic papers were published during 2010s and since then the study of liberal arts education has dramatically increased. Majority field of research was basic education such as writing and English. This study confirmed that there were only 49 dissertations for doctoral degree in liberal arts education and most papers were from the major in pedagogy.<BR> For the sustainable development of liberal arts education research, the study suggests that it is necessary to establish an archive compiling various research achievements, strengthen the theoretical systematization of liberal arts education, revitalize exchange and cooperation between academic journals, build an institutional foundation for fostering academic successors, and expand the publication of specialized academic journals in liberal arts education. Now is the time for liberal arts education to secure an academic identity as a research-based academic field.

Axiological Basis of Exploratory Research in Art Education

Values that perform the function of general methodological reference-point in scientific cognition and artistic education are considered in the article, originality of axiological cognition and its semantic characteristics are educed, cognitive values are exposed at an exploratory research, value reference-points in artistic education are determined. It is proved that cognitive values become a direct determinant for the researcher, have a significant impact on understanding the meaning and objectives of research. Special and general scientific knowledge forms him as a specialist, involves him in scientific concepts, theories, scientific traditions, schools and methods of scientific activity. It is noted that the originality of the exploratory research in art education is manifested in purposeful axiological cognition, i.e. value-based semantic development and reproduction of human existence. The inseparable connection of axiological cognition with worldview, semantic and vital components of artistic activity is traced, and the categories “meaning” and “values” become key categories for understanding the specifics of axiological cognition. It is argued that the construction and understanding of the essence and content of the axiological environment should be considered in a methodological perspective — within the context of morality and spirituality as a form of social consciousness (epistemological approach), as a special way of spiritual and practical understanding of the world (ethical and aesthetic approach). as a regulator of behaviour (social approach). It is drawn conclusion, that the comprehension of category of “value” will allow to define the trajectory of development of educational space of axiology, work out strategy of preparation of future teachers-musicians, apt at work in the mode of the scientific and methodological dialogue valued, and also outline contours spiritually the valued and technological integration of the educational systems and cognitive process in the field of a culture and art.

The Only Artist in My Family: Selective Self‐Identification in University‐Level Art Students

AbstractSelf‐identification is essential to the mediation of educational outcomes, however the selective self‐identification of students as an artist remains a relatively unexplored area of research in art education. This project uses qualitative narrative analysis to deconstruct the life stories of university‐level art students, to examine formative processes underlying selective artistic self‐identification, and to discern how dispositions developed in earlier experiences impact student engagement, performance and motivation at the university level. Research findings indicate students‐as‐artist identities develop along two distinct dramaturgical positions and emphasise the importance of mentor relationships, student‐choice, open exploration, and environmental support to the development of emerging student‐as‐art identities. The researcher reviews literature broadly supporting an examination of selective self‐identification, outlines methods used to deconstruct the life stories of university‐level art students, examines evidence of emerging patterns in the data, and concludes with a short discussion of how findings of this project impact the teacher’s role in corroborating selective artistic self‐identification in students.

삶의 조건으로서의 문화와 미술교육 연구

삶의 조건과 사회가 변화하면서 인간에 대한 이해로서의 문화의 정의는 시대에 따라 새롭게 변화하고 있다. 한 시대에서 이해된 인간의 조건을 담고 있기 때문에 문화의 정의는 인문학과 예술—결과적으로 미술교육 연구에 내재된 이론적 틀로 작용한다. 계몽주의 시대에 문화는 문명과 동의어로 사용되었다. 미술교육도 이러한 맥락에서 학생들의 미감을 계발하면서 문화적 소양을 갖게 하는 데에 있었다. 이후 많은 문화들이 확인되면서 삶의 양식이라는 인류학적 정의가 전개되었다. 소서사를 선호하는 포스트모던 사고는 많은 문화들의 확인에서 비롯된 것이다. 많은 문화들의 담론은 하나의 문화를 단위로 묶는 다원론에 기반 한 다문화주의를 이론화하였다. 21세기의 삶의 조건은 상호작용에 의해 변화해가는 인간의 모습을 상정하고 있다. 관계적 삶은 리좀의 개념으로 이해가 가능하다. 관계접속, 이질성, 다양체, 탈의미화하는 분절, 지도 제작, 그리고 전사의 원리를 가진 리좀은 후기구조주의에서의 인간에 대한 이해이다. 이는 예술과 학문, 또한 미술교육에의 리좀적 방향을 제시하는 것이다. 리좀으로서의 문화는 정동과 지각체계에 기초한 비인간, 반인간의 포스트휴먼의 이해이다. 바로 21세기 미술교육의 한 방향이다.

Narrating arts education research impact in and through research policy: affordances and constraints for professional transformation

Governments and funding agencies increasingly expect researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work not only within the academy but also for a range of stakeholders beyond academia. Whilst arts researchers have tended to resist impact measurement, in this article, we will describe one form of demonstrating impact, namely through writing impact narratives in order to argue that such writing can be effective in promoting learning and reflection on the researcher’s work in the society. We provide collaborative autoethnographic narrative accounts of our experiences as arts education researchers, located in Australia and Finland, of developing research impact narratives and consider the ways in which the development of impact narratives can shape researcher identities, research processes and epistemic cultures of disciplines. We suggest that impact narratives are inevitably retrospective but may also be future-oriented in the ways in which they structure ongoing research processes and future projects and their activities providing a space for ‘narrative learning’ and professional transformation. We also suggest that arts educators experiment with and explore the potential for narrative impact statements to inform and engage society beyond academia with research findings and outcomes.

Methods in Practice: Grounded Theory in Media Arts Education Research

Grounded theory qualitative research is a powerful method of practice, particularly for researchers aiming to explore complex processes through the perspectives and experiences of others. Grounded theory is also a powerful method of practice for researchers seeking to deepen a field of study in which the literature is thin and few theories exist. However, grounded theory is an often-overlooked research method, perhaps due to its inherent messiness. The purpose of this article is to demystify grounded theory practices by walking the reader through a grounded theory study conducted by the author in the field of media arts education. The study’s findings led to the development of The Theory of Dispositions in Filmmaking, which will be used to illustrate the data analysis process. The article will describe the process of moving from raw qualitative data to open, axial, and selective codes. The study will also demonstrate how techniques such as sketching can be used to develop figures and diagrams in order to draw connections between codes and cultivate the data’s visual narrative. Providing readers with an example of grounded theory methods in practice, specifically in the field of media arts education, will hopefully encourage additional studies in the realm of media arts research and education leadership, while also illustrating the methodological process for researchers new to grounded theory.

Teaching Digital Game Design With Preservice Art Educators

In this article, art education researchers from four universities share a multisite research project dealing with teaching digital game design to preservice art educators. The research project was initially designed in response to recent trends to develop 21st-century skills in education, digital media, and art/design education, as advocated by groups such as the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] to STEAM [science, technology, engineering, art, and math] Initiative, and competitions such as the STEM Video Game Challenge and Scholastic Arts. The authors describe the major findings from this collaborative research, focusing on preservice art teachers’ responses, challenges, and promises in introducing digital game design as art and curriculum, and make suggestions for further research and practical application.

My Stage: Participatory Theatre with Immigrant Women as a Decolonizing Method in Art-based Research

This article discusses how art-based research can function as a decolonizing research method. Its analysis is based on the collaboration of social work and art education disciplines for advancing social justice and deconstructing power dominances. Empirically, the research builds on a participatory theatre project, “My Stage,” with immigrant women. The project was established as part of a larger interdisciplinary project, “Art Gear,” in Northern Finland, which promoted the bidirectional integration of the local population and people with immigrant backgrounds. The research data were collected through participatory observation and reflective discussions by the social work researcher in the theatre workshops. By the analysis of an interdisciplinary team of social work and art education researchers, we develop a context-sensitive framework of art-based research to advance decolonizing research methods, which contribute to supporting the agency and inclusion of marginalized populations in research and in their integration processes at times of complex and rapid demographic and societal changes.

Concept Mapping: A Practical Process for Understanding and Conducting Art Education Research and Practice

The newly adapted core arts standards emphasize students' thinking and learning processes that reflect critical 21st-century skills such as synthesizing, visualizing, and systematic thinking (Natio...

Talking Textiles, Making Value: Catalyzing Fashion, Dress, and Textiles Heritage in the Midlands

There are hundreds of small museums, archives, and collections in the English Midlands, United Kingdom (UK), many of which are the legacy of the region’s rich industrial heritage. A surprising number of these include dress and textiles in various forms, from the costume collection of Charles Paget-Wade at Berrington Hall (Leominster) to intricately stitched smocks made by local needlewomen in Herefordshire, and the wealth of manufacturers’ samples that comprise the silk ribbon trade archive at the Herbert Museum, Coventry. These are challenging times for many such organizations as they face cutbacks in staff and local authority funding. Yet they offer a unique and largely unexploited resource for staff, students, and researchers in art and design higher education (HE), not only for primary research but also as a catalyst for design innovation.The discussion here, which takes the format of group research practitioner interview, builds on a Knowledge Exchange event that was held December 2017 at the Fashion Lab, University of Wolverhampton (UoW). The event brought together a diverse group of fashion and textiles professionals to talk, exchange ideas, take part in object handling sessions, mind-map, and brain-storm how to catalyze connections between heritage collections and HE and build value. With seed funding from the Museum-University Partnership Initiative (see National Coordinating Center for Public Engagement—NCCPE 2019), the day built on a series of scoping visits to collections in the region undertaken by Professor Fiona Hackney and Dr Emily Baines. The group involved staff, students and museum professionals including those from UoW, De Montfort University, Hereford College of Arts, Nottingham Trent University, artist Ruth Singer who leads the Arts Council-funded Criminal Quilts project in association with Staffordshire Record Office (Singer 2019), and representatives from Herefordshire Museum Service, the Herbert Gallery (Coventry), Walsall Museums Service, the Lace Guild Stourbridge, and Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust. The following conversation reflects themes that emerged in the project including: the need to embed archival work and primary research in fashion and textiles curricula at all levels, the development of hubs to connect university research with museum practice, the added value of artist-led projects, and the significance of place-based textiles heritage as a catalyst for new business and sustainable design practice.

Democratizing Knowledge in Art and Design Education

Welcome to 18.2 This is the last edition of ADCHE that Professor Alison Shreeve will contribute to. Alison has decided to relinquish her role as Associate Editor of ADCHE and the journal starts with a short article by Alison talking about her role and the field of art and design educational research. I want to take this opportunity to thank Alison for her contribution to ADCHE. When Professor Linda Drew stepped down from the role of ADCHE Editor and I became Editor Alison ensured continuity and her advice and support were invaluable. ADCHE has benefitted from Alison’s expansive knowledge of the field of art and design higher education research and her supportive and rigorous editorial review approach. Alison has problem solved with me when we have encountered particularly challenging editorial decisions. I will miss her contribution.

Modelling Experiential Knowledge Ethically: An Artefact‐Based Approach to Visually Documenting a Participatory Design Process with Young People

AbstractThis article contributes to the growing debate within art and design education research about the role, legitimacy and accountability of artefacts in the creation and generation of knowledge. I present an artefact‐based approach to visually documenting and disseminating my doctoral practice‐based fieldwork that protected the anonymity of the participants whilst supporting my exploration of the situational, interactional and tacit dimensions of participation. Constructing a three‐dimensional scaled model of the fieldwork setting and using narratives from my field notes, I undertook a cyclical reflective process where I reconstructed critical moments that took place. This was used as both a tool for communicating my participatory design educational practice and for evaluating my findings with the participants. By sharing this sense‐making process, I offer an ethical means of visually documenting fieldwork when working in sensitive contexts and with vulnerable participants, setting out the dual role this design artefact played as both a producer and carrier of experiential knowledge.

Art‐Based Action Research for Art Education in the North

AbstractThis article introduces the art‐based action research (ABAR) methodology as part of the international discussion of art‐based educational research (ABER). The participatory and dialogical approach of ABAR was inspired by a consideration of the pressure for change in art education stemming from the practices of relational and dialogical contemporary art. The need for ABAR as a tool of culturally decolonising, sustainable art education research was identified in multidisciplinary collaboration with the University of Lapland's (UoL) northern and circumpolar network. The methodology was developed collaboratively by a group of art educators and researchers at UoL to support the artist/teacher/researcher with professional skills for seeking solutions to recognised problems and to promote future actions and aspirations in the changing North and Arctic. This article describes how ABAR has been used in school projects, in doctoral theses and finally in a development project with an impact on regional development in the North. These examples show how art education developed through the ABAR method has supported decolonisation, revitalisation and cultural sustainability in schools, communities and businesses.

Drawing, Bodies, and Difference: Heterocorporeal Dialogs and Other Intra-Actions in Children’s Classroom Drawing

In the current climate of state-mandated education standards and assessment that prioritize math and language arts in U.S. schools, drawing, an accessible and/or pleasurable endeavor for a wide variety of children, is undervalued. Although research in art education over the past four decades has shown children’s drawing and drawings to be rich sites of imaginative, sociocultural, performative, relational, and intra-active learning, encounters with drawing continue to be marginalized in elementary education settings as coloring, busy work, and/or copying. In an 8-month-long case study on children’s drawing and drawings in a kindergarten writer’s workshop, I focused on intra-actions involving material, discursive, and emergent events through which children, drawing, and discourses were mutually enacted. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to nuances in children’s classroom drawing in order to cultivate dialog between art educators, early childhood educators, and language and literacy educators, among others.

Posthumanist and New Materialist Perspectives as Navigational Tool in Art Education Research: A Diffractive Analysis

Posthumanist and New Materialist Perspectives as Navigational Tool in Art Education Research: A Diffractive Analysis

Juxtaposing professional identities and (re)telling pedagogical relations through experimental video-based research

Abstract This article focuses on art-based methodologies (ABR), particularly on practices based on the moving image such as experimental cinema/video and on how they can contribute to the construction of professional identities in art education and art-based educational research (ABER). As feminists, we locate ourselves in postcolonial visual culture studies and critical film/pedagogical theories. We explore how experimental video-based research, and auto-ethnographic video making, leads to a reflexive space in which to connect the artist–researcher–educator with the other bodies that participate in the research – María Ruido and a group of five fine art students. We focus our attention on the processes of narrating-editing as an autoethnographic and experimental way to produce the video narrative and the text Juxtaposition (2017). Finally, we show how the processes of narrating-editing enable the relocation of the different bodies, spaces and times and the juxtaposition of professional identities.

The wonder project: an early years arts education project with Traveller mothers and their children

ABSTRACTThe Wonder Project was a collaborative early-years music and visual arts project developed in partnership with Traveller children and their mothers, involving artists, Fingal County Childcare Committee, Fingal Travellers’ Organisation and the Arts Education Research Group in Trinity College Dublin. This qualitative study aimed to create an artistic space for young children (aged 0–5 years) and mothers from the Traveller community. Accounting for less than 1% of the population, Irish Travellers are a small indigenous ethnic group who are recognised for their shared history, rich cultural and arts traditions, and distinct language [Murray, C., and M. Urban. 2012. Diversity & Equality in Early Childhood. An Irish Perspective. Dublin: Gill Education.]. Facing severe discrimination for centuries, the Irish Traveller community were officially recognised as an ethnic minority in Ireland in 2017. The area of arts engagement with ethnic minorities is under-researched [DiMaggio, P., and P. Fernández-Kelly. 2015. “Immigration and the Arts: a Theoretical Inquiry.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (8): 1236–1244.], with little evidence pertaining to the early years. At the social, cultural, political, economic and policy levels, the relevance of arts engagement and participation for ethnicized minorities has been hypothesised [Vertovec, S. 2009. Conceiving and Researching Diversity. Göttingen: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, MMG Working Paper 09-01.], but greater research is needed to better understand how artistic expressions play a role in the assertion of local identities and protect against the assimilating forces of the dominant social, cultural and political order [Martiniello, M. 2015. “Immigrants, Ethnicized Minorities and the Arts: A Relatively Neglected Research Area.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (8): 1229–1235.]. Working within a Freirean and participatory and collaborative arts framework, this study aimed to examine the potential of arts education to impact on the relationship between Traveller mothers and their young children, and its potential to facilitate artistic exchanges between artists, mothers and children. Increased access to the arts, outdoor play and well-being between Traveller children and mothers was documented through audio recordings, still photographs, artists’ evaluations and semi-structured interviews. The success of The Wonder Project illustrates the importance of non-mainstreamed arts interventions for marginalised minority groups.

'You feel like you're an artist. Like Leonardo da Vinci': Capturing young children’s voices and attitudes towards visual arts

Abstract Early childhood research is focusing increasingly on issues of acknowledging and respecting the ‘voices’ of young children. Much of the focus in arts education research, however, has explored adult attitudes, resulting in what seems the invisibility of young children’s opinions. Conducted in the context of early childhood education in Australia, the study, following a phenomenological approach, sought to understand the place of visual arts in the lives of four young children aged five to six years in a combined Kindergarten/Year One classroom located in Sydney. A range of childsensitive research tools were adapted from the ‘Mosaic approach’ to explore how children understand and conceive their early experiences of visual arts learning. In acknowledging the views of children, possibilities for improving arts pedagogy were considered as new questions emerged. The study confirmed the need to acknowledge and validate children’s rich and perceptive attitudes through meaningful experiences and valued conversations.

Analysis of dance education and cultural arts education research trends for the handicapped

Analysis of dance education and cultural arts education research trends for the handicapped