When we consider art practice as something beyond making and the meaning that comes with it, we might also consider that these modes of reflection occur in a variety of ways. This set of articles show that Through art practices, we read of varieties of inquiry as seen through cultural lenses, journaling narratives, mental health and learning through the studio practice itself. In this way thinking about making and forming understandings of art and the practice that contains it become inseparable.
The Section 1 to the Special Issue ‘Knowledge and data transparency across creative visual education: Practice, research and policy’ stems from an ongoing collaborative effort for better connection and communication in art education research to elicit more effective dialogue and transparency across practice, research and policy. The issue presents six works that aim to advance knowledge rather than rediscover it, promoting a more democratic art and design education landscape.
Arts-based research, as a hybrid of theories and methods, is an ambivalent field of research. Embracing the subjective challenges as possibilities can lead to the growth of fresh new sprouts of research questions, knowledge production and works of art with additional layers of multiple truths. Artists and researchers might learn more from paying attention to the internal and external ambivalences than from a faithful choir of fixed traditions. In the field of art and in research, the quest for knowledge and development is essential; thus to step out of the comfort zone should be embraced as both useful and necessary. Increased reflections about interdisciplinary research ethics and theories, can reinforce the integrity of arts-based research – not as a field beside other fields but as a functional hybrid of methods within qualitative research – hence provide mutual understanding in our common world.
The benefit of a career spanning multiple fields and industries means a frontrow seat in identifying overlaps and differences across many contexts. As an art and design educator turned researcher turned digital transformation and strategy consultant, I am uniquely inspired by the potential to transform education and research through transparency and accessibility. With an unwavering belief that education holds pre-eminent value in fostering student learning, creativity and social-emotional well-being, my journey has uniquely positioned me to see the possibilities for better integrating research to increase the impact on practice.
Building on a decade of collaboration focused on research transparency, we embarked on what seemed like a straightforward technical project: creating an interactive map of art education research connections across five major art education journals. After contracting with JSTOR to obtain the metadata for 13,000 articles, we began designing a visualization of citation networks that is interactive. We assumed the main technical challenge would be our minimal programming skills. However, the pivotal moment came when our programmer discovered that his extraction code kept failing due to the inconsistency of the XML metadata. This discovery shifted our research focus to understanding why the data themselves were creating obstacles. We discovered that systemic issues within the infrastructure used to store, organize and communicate knowledge hindered knowledge transparency extending beyond individual access issues. This experience made us
This text reflects on the archive that compiles the learning experiences resulting from Resist & egrave;ncies Art & iacute;stiques, a programme of artists-in-residence in schools in the Valencian Community, Spain, from 2017 to 2023. The coordination of this programme required the collaboration of educational, governmental and museum institutions. The programme generated new, shared understandings through a mediation process among artists, learning communities and institutions, and provided professional development opportunities for artists and teachers. During the various stages of the programme, the museum's education department compiled documentation from the projects, as well as the participants' engagement, to create an archive of the projects. This archive, conceived as an accessible knowledge resource, could support future understandings. The projects included in the archive utilize contemporary art practices as an instrument for learning, considering art not only as an expressive medium but also as a tool for understanding and reflection. This archive was an effort towards providing transparent access to the knowledge and resources produced through the programme. However, the archive, though completed, was never made public because the programme was interrupted after a change in the government. With this article, the authors sought to highlight how the archive articulated the artistic practices that unfolded in the programme, thereby meeting an educational need that existed in this context, so that others could utilize the learning from these experiences in new iterations.
How do pre-service educators navigate shifting identities as they transition from students to teachers? This article outlines the findings of a study using a culturally responsive framework in the south conducted alongside two pre-service art teachers. This study involved reflective practitioner research where the participants were also co-researchers questioning their journey from students to teachers across three stages, including descriptive, comparative reflection and critical reflection. Together, we found five themes including identity crisis, community and vulnerability, teaching and power, theory meets reality, and research as grounding. These themes suggest important changes as programmes prepare critical teachers to navigate the habitus of art education and school culture as teacher-researchers.
Between 1908 and 1917, Chicago city administrators and Chicago Public School (CPS) educators were rethinking how to best train workers for the city's rapid expansion of manufacturing and industry. Following Murphy's theory of social closure, which states that inequality is created by monopoly and exclusion, this article discusses how high-school students were differentiated and sorted according to their ability. This meant tracking working-class students primarily to vocational programmes, which also excluded from training that would advance them socially. Consequently, working-class students engaged in forms of art education based on 'manual training', while more privileged students entered commercial high school programmes where they often studied commercial and fine art, which were regarded as signifiers of prosperity. This article is developed in three aspects, as follows: (1) school buildings were designed to support curricula of social efficiency and social assimilation; (2) curricula differentiated and sorted students by ability; and (3) school administrators restricted social and recreational activities in high schools (including the fine arts and popular art forms), which resulted in student life going underground to create what came to be known as 'the extracurricular'. These practices and social trends across the twentieth century were an informal art education in high-school popular culture; these extracurricular activities were also part of a culture of adolescence in public high schools, with art education and popular culture at the centre.
Giants in the Wind is a fictionalized exploration of the author's ongoing relationship with wind, landscape and art making in the deserts of the American West. Drawing on environmental phenomena, most notably the seasonal Santa Ana winds, the narrative blends poetic observation and artistic practice into a meditation on presence, resistance and collaboration with elemental forces. Set against the backdrop of the Anza-Borrego Desert, the story chronicles a series of wind tests between the maker and his environment, transforming acts of art making into ritualized, playful engagements. The narrative frames the artist's labour as a physical dialogue that is both a confrontation and a collaboration, and a creative practice that is grounded in imperfection, adaptation and ultimately the relinquishing of control. Philosophical allusions to Don Quixote and Henry David Thoreau are woven throughout, positioning the artist not as conqueror but as companion to the forces that shape him. Giants in the Wind examines what it means to be moved-literally and metaphorically-by the world around us. The project blurs the boundary between performance and play, sculpture and weather, intention and accident. It offers a compelling, lyrical case for an artistic practice rooted in humility, failure and responsiveness, where beauty emerges not from mastery, but from the willingness to be transformed by encounter.
Developing interpretive skills for understanding artworks is one of the thrusts of art education. Thus, the content of art education should primarily support aesthetic experiences through reflective studio practices. This study sought to explore pedagogical strategies for the interpretation of artworks by art and design specialist students from two purposively selected teacher's colleges. The study adopted a qualitative research method nested in the interpretive research design. Data were generated using in-depth interviews with four art and design lecturers, focus group discussions with students and analysis of artworks. The findings of the study showed that participants had conceptualized the term visual metaphors as well as the interpretation of western visual metaphors. Findings also showed that students created representational art with limited symbolism and showed over-reliance on traditional art criticism model of analysing artworks. The study proposes the use of postmodern approaches to analysis and interpretation of African artworks and visual art-based instructional pedagogy.
This article explores the use of visual journaling as a pedagogical tool to promote educator well-being and foster connections in art education and educators' creative processes. The authors, members of the National Art Education Association share their perspectives on the application of visual journaling practices and its potential to support self-reflection, learning and creative care. The visual journal is defined as a hybrid space for visual and written collection, critical reflective practices and creation, supporting varied processes and frameworks for art educators at any level, pre-service to veteran. Through personal experiences and examples, the authors highlight the impact that visual journaling had on their individual creative connections, teaching practices, museum experiences and community engagement. The article emphasizes the importance of incorporating arts-based research tools such as visual journaling in art education to promote lifelong learning and support the overall well-being of art educators.
With the widespread popularity of AI image generation tools, we have entered a creative landscape that is increasingly automated. In this new era, it is important to recognize that images that are created through AI tools can only reflect back the visual content they are trained on. In a way, the images we receive back from AI generation tools serve as aggregates of all it 'knows' of the visual world. Importantly, these mirrors of our visual world can include and reinforce tropes of visual style and subjects, as well as latent biases present in the art historical canon. Instead of passively consuming these AI reflections, we may instead approach them with a critical eye to better understand how visual meanings of art and media are produced, circulated and codified in AI systems. This visual essay illustrates and critiques how AI tools 'learn' and reproduce collective understandings about visual art and media worlds by presenting an exhibition of artificially generated 'artworks' derived from a set of fictionalized artist statements that represent common movements, issues, media and practices of historical and contemporary visual art. In this visual essay, the images produced act not only as artworks but also as sites of inquiry. By critically investigating and analysing how the AI generator constructs each image to represent these fictional artists, new insights may be revealed on how these technologies visualize the visual art world itself, and our knowledge of the art world may be advanced.
This qualitative study explores the use of art as a tool for discussing mental health topics with teenagers, focusing on the perspectives of high school art teachers and counsellors. Through interviews, the research examines the benefits and challenges of integrating art-based interventions in mental health programmes for students. The findings suggest that art can serve as a non-verbal outlet for emotional expression, promote self-reflection and help reduce stigma surrounding mental health. However, barriers such as limited resources, time constraints and a lack of specialized training for educators were identified as significant challenges to implementation. The study also highlights the critical role of external resources, such as partnerships with mental health organizations and funding opportunities, in overcoming these obstacles. Overall, the research underscores the potential of art to foster open conversations about mental health in schools and calls for greater investment in art-based programmes to support adolescent well-being.
This manuscript presents a visual arts study exploring seven art educators' professional aspirations to transform pedagogy into culturally sustaining praxis as part of a series of studies. Study participants are art teachers engaged in online training that integrated culturally relevant teaching with prints from the Artura.org database constructed by the Brandywine Workshop and Archives. Brandywine is a Philadelphia-based, BIPOC printmaking institute and gallery devoted to the proliferation of works of art produced by culturally diverse artists. Participants practised critically analysing and raising awareness about their identities to transform instructional practices. We used Ladson-Billings framework stating that culturally relevant teaching begins with the teacher, not with the curriculum and a hermeneutical process to analyse fourteen visual arts journals.
A statewide professional art education organization sought to increase member engagement and strengthen its community. The organization conceptualized and implemented a living archive through arts-based activities that allowed members to explore and interact with its extensive archives. The organization's archives moved from a repository of materials to a participatory, living archive through collective art making experiences that enhance knowledge-sharing, transparency and accessibility. The involvement of participants directly impacted new board directions and policies while pointing the way towards future democratized decision-making for the organization.
Inspired by the student-centred, experiential, affective and sensory approaches of recent art history, this article discusses the integration of drawing activities in the classroom as an important part of the multimodal art historical pedagogy. It presents as its case study a module on Raphael and His Reception, which incor-porates a practice-based seminar entitled 'Drawing like Raphael'. The discussion considers this pedagogical method in theory and practice and reflects on its bene-fits, challenges and students' feedback. Incorporating drawing in the classroom develops students' sensitivity to the variety of media, grounds and their combina-tions, giving them an experiential understanding of the meaning of materiality. This article argues that drawing is a creative and fun way to build skills in visual expression and interpretation, but also one that brings affects and emotions to art historical inquiries and encourages students to bring their own thoughts and lived experiences to their art historical studies.
Teachers of historical and critical studies within an arts practice context have consistently been faced with the perception from students that academic reading and writing does not correspond to their interests as artists. Historically 'theory' and 'practice' have been framed as binaries that compete with one another in the context of learning and teaching arts students. These students are accustomed to researching practitioners and art works that help develop their own practice in the studio environment. What are needed in art historical and critical studies modules, then, are approaches to learning that allow art students to learn in similar ways to how they learn in the studio - like artists. Just as more traditional 'older' academic approaches to assessment do not necessarily facilitate achievement amongst arts students, neither do traditional approaches to teaching. Established approaches to teaching art history are typically passive (the lecturer speaks, the student receives information), and are not conducive to deep learning. Indeed, such approaches often lean to student disengagement. In the fine art undergraduate degrees at Bath Spa University, three new modules have been introduced for the academic year 2023/24. These modules combine innovative approaches to teaching and learning, with accessible assessment items that 'dethrone the essay' in favour of authentic assessment items that prepare artists for the kinds of art historical and critical writing that will more likely form part of an artist's portfolio of approaches to research
The analysis of art has an important critical function within an interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities foundation year. Assessment activities focused on the anal-ysis of art and visual culture are undertaken by all students regardless of their future degree progression route. This introduces students with diverse subject specialist interests to theories and practices of art history and related disciplines. Writing from the perspective of a university foundation year educator, this arti-cle will explore a case study of how art is activated in this distinct educational context. A focus on a 'writing for an online museum' assessment within an Arts and Humanities foundation year in a Lifelong Learning Centre at a UK univer-sity forms the basis of this case study. It will discuss how the application of the mode of a 'virtual' museum, utilized specifically to denote an online setting, can support foundation-year learners to communicate academic concepts and critical thinking.
The aim of this article is to present the experience of an educational innovation project supported by the University of M & aacute;laga, which seeks to develop the profes-sional skills of our undergraduate and postgraduate students in a city with a rich cultural scene. The students are directly involved with the cultural sector, apply-ing what they have learned in the classroom, as well as through specific workshops. When necessary, the signing of agreements with museum institutions ensures the proper functioning of these collaborations. The communication strategies devel-oped by the university journal Apuntes de Arte, which was founded in 2019 as part of this project, on the social media platforms X and Instagram are presented and analysed. These strategies are understood as part of the students' learning process, as they manage the platforms both as recipients and as collaborators of the project. The analysis carried out in this article reflects the impact of using these social networks on the dissemination and positioning of the journal within the M & aacute;laga exhibition ecosystem.
This article was submitted and presented for the 2022 SECAC Conference held in Baltimore, Maryland, from 26 October to 29 October 2022. It inquires about and seeks to challenge several key questions. Provoking thoughtful discussion and delivering new insights into the brave new world of Web3. This article aspires to contribute meaningfully to the academic and professional discourse through analysis and investigation of these topics in the field and how colleagues and stakeholders' behaviours adhere to or reject them. What is a system? How does the system benefit its participants? How do their actions help the system thrive? Throughout humanity, we have searched for newer and more efficient ways of improving our current systems by adopting new methods. Although the methods of approach change, the behaviour of the participants ultimately shapes the effectiveness of the system. In navigating our art world, understanding the systems of operation is crucial to the decision-making process. This behaviour allows for former systems to have new life through educated forms of physical code (humans) that regenerate those ideals into actions that ultimately reshape the new system into something familiar. That familiarity seems like comfort - but it is the quiet before the storm. Herd collecting will crush the confidence in collecting new artwork because of volatility in the art market. Because once the herd leaves, will the work have any demand?
