Review of: Art Education in Israel: Navigating Diversity and Change , Sigal Barkai and David Pariser (eds) (2025) Landscapes: The Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol. 40, Cham: Springer, 266 pp., ISBN 978-3-031-88204-3, h/bk, USD 199.99
Review of: Making and Relational Creativity: An Exploration of Relationships that Arise through Creative Practices in Informal Making Spaces , Lindsey Helen Bennett (2021) London: Routledge, 166 pp., ISBN 978-0-36752-485-2, p/bk, USD 41.24
Art and design education discourse is replete with boundary references, many of which concern the need for dynamism and interference, as in dissolving, disrupting or traversing boundaries. The field also has occupied itself with some of the protective and enabling functions of boundaries, such as respect for planetary boundaries. This issue’s contributions magnify these varying capacities of boundaries and their enactments in specific contexts. Several articles specifically attune to borders that materialize as student artists and art educators enter into sensorial, embodied encounters with materials and digital technologies. In approaching this issue, I would encourage readers to conceptualize boundaries as (1) politically laden, and, thus, enmeshed in the reproduction of inequalities; but also (2) ‘inherently ambivalent’ in being capable of both constructing or counteracting power asymmetries.
This study investigates how virtual reality (VR) painting using Tilt Brush can complement foundational drawing education by supporting immersive, spatial and embodied interaction. Using a mixed-methods design, data were collected from university art and design students through surveys (e.g. technology acceptance and presence), an artwork evaluation rubric and semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate that VR environments can enhance students’ motivation and engagement through dynamic brush effects and spatial freedom. However, technical and operational constraints – such as motion discomfort, spatial navigation and depth control – limited the immediate transfer of skills to traditional drawing practice. Quantitative analyses showed no significant differences in creative thinking or artwork evaluation scores, while qualitative evidence suggested greater conceptual exploration and creative risk-taking in open-ended tasks. Overall, the results highlight VR’s potential as a pedagogical complement to traditional art education, provided that learning modules are extended, tool use is scaffolded, exploratory and embodied interaction is emphasized and assessment frameworks suited to three-dimensional creative learning contexts are adopted.
Reflective practice is central to teacher educators’ identity work, shaping how they understand professional responsibilities, disciplinary commitments and pedagogical values. In artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated education, however, reflective engagement has largely remained discursive, often overlooking how identities are sensed, negotiated and reconfigured through embodied experience. This study examines body mapping as an art-based, embodied mode of reflective inquiry through which teacher educators explore identity amidst AI-driven institutional and pedagogical pressures. Using an art-based duoethnographic approach, an art teacher educator and a language teacher educator engaged in body mapping to examine reflection on, in and for action in AI-mediated teaching practices. The analysis shows how art-making foregrounds bodily sensation, affective tension and disciplinary commitments as analytic resources for reflective identity work. Body mapping functions as an embodied, reflexive practice that enables teacher educators to think with bodies, materials and affect, reimagining professional identities and pedagogical responsibilities in AI-infused contexts.
Review of: Art Education as a Radical Act: Untold Histories of Education at MoMA , Sara Torres-Vega and Wendy Woon (eds) (2025) New York: Routledge, 306 pp., ISBN 978-1-03270-013-7, p/bk, USD 41.99
Our collaborative autoethnographic (CAE) inquiry explores what art educators need to know to teach elementary generalists well. We analysed how authors in the United States perceive the challenges and remedies for teaching generalist art methods courses and how our lived experiences support or complicate normalized assumptions about teaching art methods for general educators. We found that authors identify familiar teaching challenges (e.g. students’ misinformed beliefs about art, limited content knowledge and fear about art-making) and suggest curricular, pedagogical and philosophical remedies. However, our lived experiences revealed that many challenges consist of structural, administrative and policy-related issues beyond individual instructors’ control. Our CAE reveals what a literature review alone could not, exposing how structural and cultural dynamics profoundly shape this work. Our findings suggest that problems extend beyond our classrooms and stem from institutional and broader cultural environments that position art as supplementary rather than essential to schooling.
As artists and educators, our practice is situated in a shared territory between the studio and the classroom. We design materials for children that bring into educational contexts ways of doing and thinking rooted in artistic creative processes, understanding design not as the production of objects but as the configuration of conditions for action. From this perspective, we conceive art as an aesthetic, ethical and political process capable of opening new ways of being and coexisting. Within this framework, Trebello is presented as an open-ended material system that unfolds through play and collective making, without prescribing uses or outcomes. This visual essay seeks to think with Trebello rather than explain it. Through a sequence of images and brief reflections, it explores how minimal decisions of form, connection and repetition set in motion a field of possibilities in which actions, relationships and forms remain in continuous becoming.
This study explores an online collaboration between art students from the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, conducted over two semesters. These students were paired, one from each respective institution, to either co-create a single artwork or develop individual pieces in dialogue with each other. At the outset, the participants were introduced to two guiding concepts: metaphysical contagion (i.e. the idea that spoken or written words can shape perception of actions and objects) and entanglement (i.e. the mutual influence between paired individuals). The findings indicate that the students engaged in meaningful artistic collaboration. However, the process also revealed challenges that offered valuable insights for improving online co-creation and digital learning. Additionally, the project highlighted how global exchange and international collaboration platforms can serve as dynamic spaces for experimentation, simulation and inspiration in the context of contemporary art education.
This article examines how visual ethnography can inform art education through an investigation of the Batuh Narit Pa’ Ukat rock carvings in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia. Grounded in arts-based research, the study integrates sensory ethnography, contextual visual analysis and digital documentation to interpret the carvings as pedagogical objects that reflect Indigenous identity, ritual and symbolism. Field engagement with the Kelabit community uncovered motifs such as hornbills, dragons and ancestral faces that encode cultural memory, spirituality and governance. Digital tools, including three-dimensional scanning and vector-based reconstruction, enhanced preservation and interpretation, support heritage education and wider accessibility. Findings indicate that combining sensory and digital approaches in art education fosters critical thinking, empathy and cross-cultural understanding. By proposing a Living Heritage Framework that connects Indigenous visual heritage with culturally responsive pedagogy, this study contributes to decolonial art education and offers a transferable model for engaging with living heritage in diverse contexts.
This study examines a two-week, no-cost graphic design residency camp for high school students in Texas from historically under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds, first-generation college-bound students or those who have overcome social or economic hardship. Developed to address diversity gaps in the graphic design industry, the programme served 37 Black, Hispanic/Latino and Indigenous students over three summers. The curriculum focused on conceptual, professional and technical skills through project-based learning, professional interactions and visits to creative organizations. Through analysis of participant surveys and testimonials, we evaluated the programme’s effectiveness in building foundational design knowledge and supporting participants’ exploration of graphic design as an academic and career option. Results indicated observed improvements in participants’ design software proficiency, conceptual understanding and self-assessed creative abilities. Interest in studying graphic design remained stable across the programme (43% at completion), while career interest showed growth from 32% at intake to 46% at completion, with educational and career aspirations converging by the end of the programme. These findings demonstrate promising potential for early intervention programmes to address the critical talent shortage of designers from diverse backgrounds.
This article is the first in the field of art education to critically examine global knowledge flows and the transformation of international scholars' capital through the US-Taiwan case. This mixed-methods research employed survey and semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of Taiwanese scholars who earned doctorates in the United States and later contributed to art education in Taiwan. Data analysis revealed three key themes: 'knowledge as a commodity', 'branding and trading' and 'counter-narratives to one-way knowledge flows'. The findings suggest that these participants are not passive recipients of imposed knowledge but rather active agents who strategically select and disseminate US art education frameworks. This study underscores the critical agency of interna- tional scholars in redefining and reshaping art education landscapes in their home countries and beyond.
This article explores the intersections of personal grief, secondary trauma and compassion fatigue within the teaching profession, drawing from my experience as a K-12 art teacher who returned to work shortly after a family loss. I use visual autoethnography and arts-based research to examine how trauma shaped my pedagogical presence and emotional capacity. Through mixed-media artworks, woodcut, painting and digital collage, artmaking became a site of inquiry and reflection, allowing emotions that resisted language to surface visually. Grounded in traumainformed pedagogy, this research highlights the often-invisible emotional labour of teachers and repositions artmaking as a reflective method for sustaining wellbeing and professional growth. It contributes to discussions about teacher care, emotional resilience and the ethical possibilities of art-based reflection. Ultimately, this study offers both personal and pedagogical insights into how visual storytelling can serve as a tool for healing, meaning-making and humanity in emotionally demanding educational contexts.
More than three-quarters of current teachers report experiencing burnout and intentions to exit the profession sooner than expected. Art teachers encounter unique complexities when designing curriculum since they often work independently without the district-provided resources available to colleagues. This qualplanning and offers insight for teacher educators as they incorporate AI tools into in this study, using ChatGPT during their lesson planning process. Grounded in the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the study examines both cognitive and affective dimensions involved in AI integration. The results indicate three major roles of AI: creative partner for ideation and content development, technical assistant for efficiency and organization, and problematic collaborator with inherent limitations and risks. While AI enhanced pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge and idea generation for most participants, concerns emerged regarding dependency risks, communication barriers and ethical considerations. This study suggests the need to balance efficiency gains with critical engagement, empha-sizing that AI should augment rather than replace teacher expertise. Teacher educators must proactively integrate AI literacy into methods courses, teaching preservice teachers to engage iteratively and critically with AI as a collaborative tool that can meaningfully reduce burnout while preserving the authenticity and professional judgment essential to quality teaching.
How as art educators and researchers can we nurture our personal and professional growth? In this article, I revisit an autoethnographic pilot study that used visual-verbal journaling as a reflexive and contemplative arts-based method to challenge traditional professional development experiences. Focusing on conference attendance as a place to develop personally and professionally, this practice-led research sought to explore researcher reflexivity and identity development and contribute to slow scholarship. Through narrative writing, alongside journal entries, this article shares my experience attending the 2023 Mind & Life Summer Research Institute, an interdisciplinary and immersive conference for contemplative researchers, educators, practitioners and the like. Findings suggest that the act of journaling can enhance an embodied engagement with conference materials, supporting stronger connections to self, to artistic practice and to professional growth. The implications of the study open possibilities for art educators/researchers, as well as conference organizers, to (re)consider how we can more artfully engage with professional development events that supports our whole, developing selves.
This visual essay draws on a long-term collaborative project contemplating the cultural and ecological presence of pi & ntilde;on pine in the southwestern United States. As artists, researchers and educators, we share our methodological intentions for grappling with the ongoing loss of an essential community member due to anthropogenic climate change, including learning to read a landscape with polytemporality and 'composting' as a material-discursive process of artmaking.
This article explores experiential art curriculum from a critical feminist, crip and decolonial lens. Situated within the disciplines of critical museology and contemporary curatorial practice, this study reflects on a particular museological assignment that challenged college students to think critically about their museum to become active museum visitors. In doing so, students demonstrated generative critiques of nationalistic discourse in the museum, as well as best practices for future curatorial work. They also identified access scaffolding and technological innovation. Reflecting on this pedagogical exercise and the students' research findings, the article considers embodied engagements with visual culture, curatorial ethics and museological responsibilities from the perspective(s) of students and museum visitors and from a museum studies scholar and educator.
Sexuality in art education is examined through artistic practice and doctoral research, conducted at the University of Lapland. A feminist and queer theoretical approach to photography, embodiment and arts-based action research provide methods for exploring how personal experiences of vulnerability and agency can shape both artistic and pedagogical choices. A/r/tographic insights, including encounters with bodily limitation, emphasize the significance of corporeality in art-making, learning and evolving as a pedagogue. This visual essay suggests that when teachers embrace vulnerability, discomfort and engage with unruly lessons, art education can foster ethical awareness, relational sensitivity and creative exploration.
Review of: Product Design, Technology, and Social Change: A Short Cultural History , Laura S. Scherling (2024) Bristol: Intellect, 194 pp., ISBN 978-1-83595-022-7, h/bk, GBP 99.95 ISBN 978-1-83595-023-4, p/bk, GBP 29.95 ISBN 978-1-83595-025-8, e-book, GBP 23.95 ISBN 978-1-83595-024-1, e-PUB, GBP 23.95
As digital systems increasingly shape learning environments, the articles in this issue highlight the enduring importance of human capacities – imagination, subjectivity, moral and ethical reasoning, and social, relational intelligence. Through diverse practices, including a/r/tography, drawing, participatory action research and generative AI inquiry, contributors demonstrate how artful pedagogies foster meaningful engagement and affirm learning as a deeply human, creative process.
