International Journal of Education Through Art - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2017

Many museums now allow more opportunities for students to interact with their artefacts, often in store. At the same time, digital technologies now make it easier for those students to access information about those artefacts, interpret it, and construct and communicate their story in imaginative ways. The potential for learning about and through is evident. This article describes how this potential was realized in a collaboration between an Oriental museum and undergraduates studying a visual arts module at the University of Durham, UK. It describes some guiding educational principles, the students’ interaction with art objects, their research process and logs, and the presentation of their understandings in podcasts. Their responses achieved the aims of high levels of motivation, the construction of understandings (and their limits), imaginative communication, heightened information technology skills, and personal satisfaction. That this approach could be usefully applied elsewhere is indicated, along with some limitations.

This article examines factors identified as influencing teachers’ capacity to maintain arts practice upon beginning teaching. In exploring the storied experiences of three artists and teachers, a discussion unfolds to examine the ways that artist and teaching practices interact, and the implications this interaction has upon the beginning teachers’ transition into professional practice. A hybridized methodology has been adopted, where methods integral to autoethnography, narrative inquiry and a/r/tography are drawn together to generate a series of intricately layered stories of becoming artists and teachers. From these storied insights, the factors that emerged as critical to becoming are the beginning teachers’ perceptions and management of time, and their capacity to appropriately prioritize art and teaching practices over each other. The implications of these factors indicate a need for beginning teachers to better understand and acclimatize to the demands of becoming a teacher before attempting to resume high levels of artistic output.

The University of Malta recently introduced a one-year Diploma Course in Design Foundation Studies with an art-oriented, artist-led, practice-based programme as a preparatory and integral part of the degree courses in Architecture and Civil/Structural Engineering. The article explains the rationale behind the introduction of this new course and its methodology. It analyses why perception, coupled with basic drawing skills, are important for students of architecture and engineering. It shows how the translation of the drawing representing the concept into a threedimensional model relates to their future work. The Sculpturehouse exercise serves as an example illustrating the relation between sculpture and architecture/engineering and the relevance of a haptic experience. Observations made by the author and other members of the academic staff of the Faculty for the Built Environment as well as communications from students who have attended the course lead to conclusions that are sustained by the results of a questionnaire.

The purpose of this research was to explore waste materials and turn them into appropriate instructional resources for teaching art lessons in Ghana. This was necessary because primary, junior and senior high school art teachers in Ghana mostly teach their lessons without using instructional resources because of non-provision of instructional resources by the government. The study adopted the exploratory and descriptive research methods to carry out the study. Paper, fabric and plastic waste materials were selected and worked with. The research found that waste materials can be recycled to create appropriate and useful instructional resources that are very practical for teaching and learning of art lessons. This research projects to art teachers that they can freely turn collected waste materials into very useful instructional resources which they can use to teach effective lessons to help their students understand what they taught well and easily.

This is a case study report focusing on qualitative improvements in social and emotional communications of two children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who participated in a behavioural art programme. This study took place in a classroom located in an autism research centre affiliated with a university in the central area of Taiwan. Two 6-year-old boys with autism were referred to this programme because of their poor social skills and frequent emotional outbursts both at home and in school. The art programme, consisting of opportunities to increase social communication skills with a behaviour-analytic instructional methodology, was implemented once a week for a total of seventeen sessions. Qualitative improvements in social and emotional communications were analysed from the participant’s artwork, their statements about their work, and parents’ and teachers’ reports regarding the children’s social interactions. Results indicated that this behaviourally oriented art programme helped to facilitate both the children’s expression of their own emotions as well as social interactions with each other during the art sessions. Improvement in social communication skills also became apparent at home and school.

The article discusses how the simultaneity of actions and languages and ambivalence in ways of being and acting, present in everyday experiences, are written into audio-visual productions of contemporary art. The video art Para Dentro and the reading of this work by a group of children were analysed using discursive semiotics, as related to the effects of meaning in audio-visual texts of contemporary art, and the processes of appropriation and redefinition of images and sounds, during art education on the reading of images. Analysis of this video art highlights its articulation, through overlays, of the various languages that constitute the audio-visual text and the presentation of images and sounds ambiguously, creating effects of ambivalence. What most disturbed the children during their reading were the visual and sound ambivalences. The results indicate the need to reflect, in school, on contemporary audio-visual narratives, seeking to understand the present moment.

Artistic photographers have been engaging with educational contexts since the early twentieth century. According to Spirn and Sullivan (2005), visual creation offers a tool for reasoning which, if based on aesthetical concepts, allows us to discover new information and patterns for research into educational contexts.

In this visual essay, organized by pairs of images, we propose a photographic research project based on key visual elements obtained from studying several artistic photographers. Each pair is structured by comparisons, through which the enquiry and its argumentation is established. The visual essay examines how artistic photography can provide visual clues to explore an educational space.

Art teacher candidates, recently beginning their internships/student teaching experiences, engaged in a form of arts-based educational research (ABER) to examine their larger teaching contexts – the communities surrounding their placement schools – through a performance-based, map-based approach. Much like the Situationists’ psychogeographies of the 1950s and 1960s, where artist geographers wandered the urban landscapes in attempts to construct interpretive readings of well-known European cities, interns began by playfully ‘drifting’ through the geographic environments of their school zones. Through the act of drifting, interns conducted enquiries into their own sense of place. ‘Maps’ of place embodied these explorations and discoveries. Such explorations of place are vital as educators seek to construct rich understandings of their students’ lived worlds and to provide appropriate, relevant learning experiences. This visual essay explores the value and possibilities of one ABER approach for teacher education.

Sloppy Craft, Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, Elaine Cheasly Paterson and Susan Surette (eds) (2015) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 200 pp., ISBN: 9781472534880, h/bk, £22.00

The Routledge International Handbook of the Arts and Education, Mike Fleming, Liora Bresler and John O’toole (eds) (2015) Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 424 pp., ISBN: 9780415839211, h/bk, £131.00

Against Value in the Arts and Education, SAM Ladkin, Robert Mckay and Emile BOJESEN (eds) (2016) London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 446 pp., ISBN: 178348490X, p/bk, £ 26.95