Abstract Design thinking has firmly established itself as a foundational pedagogy in art and design education, providing novice learners with a structured scaffold to navigate complex, ill‐defined creative problems. Although established design process models already incorporate iteration, feedback loops and reflective movement, novice learners may still struggle to operationalise these principles when navigating multiple UX domains in studio‐based projects. This difficulty may constrain the development of reflective practice, nonlinear reasoning and interdisciplinary synthesis—competencies that are increasingly critical in the complex, data‐driven landscape of contemporary design. This study responds to this pedagogical‐operational challenge by introducing Constellation Design Thinking as a metacognitive scaffold that complements existing iterative design process models and helps students visualise, negotiate and justify relationships among complex UX domains. The study was implemented across three consecutive semesters with 54 undergraduate students in an advanced UX/UI design studio course in South Korea. The curriculum employed a hybrid structure, combining theoretical lectures, constellation mapping workshops and structured reflective journaling. A mixed‐methods evaluation strategy was adopted, utilising pre–post surveys to measure cognitive flexibility, rubric‐based project assessments to evaluate synthesis and combined deductive and inductive coding of 285 reflective journals to track developmental trajectories in student reasoning. Results indicated statistically significant within‐group improvements in cognitive flexibility (d_z = 1.39), reflective practice (d_z = 1.50) and integrative capacity (d_z = 1.45), which are interpreted as observed improvements within the studied course context rather than as causal validation. Two in‐depth practice‐based case studies—a mobile banking ‘Auto‐Save’ feature and an online shopping checkout redesign—further illustrated how constellation pathways supported students in balancing creativity, inclusivity and strategy. The findings suggest that constellation‐based pedagogy can support students' relational, reflective and strategic reasoning by making complex UX domain relationships visible, negotiable and defensible in studio‐based learning.
Abstract This article explores how artist‐teacher practice in English Further Education is shaped by institutional cultures of visibility, in which value is closely tied to what can be measured and evidenced. To explore these conditions, Wild's theorisation of entanglement provides a conceptual lens through which artist‐teacher practice is understood as a tensioned, relational condition shaped by everyday institutional pressures. The article responds to these ideas by presenting a self‐situated arts‐based inquiry through zineing, approaching the resulting zine as an interpretive artefact through which understandings generated during making are revisited and extended through reflection and writing. Rose's sites and modalities are used as interpretive tools to sensitise a situated reading of the zine's visual and material form and the institutional conditions of its production. The analysis shows how the maker–artefact dialogue made perceptible the stop‐start rhythms and negotiations of artist‐teacher practice, bringing creative practice, pedagogy, care and institutional constraint into material relation. The article argues that zineing can support inquiry from within the conditions of practice, revealing how institutional visibility often depends upon relational, affective and creative labour that formal systems of evidence insufficiently recognise.
Abstract This article explores the complexities and tensions of artist‐teacher identity through a performative autoethnographic project centred on the creation and performance of a marionette self‐portrait. The marionette becomes a proxy through which the identities of artist and teacher can be enacted, interrogated and held in dynamic tension. Drawing on a tradition of performative inquiry in art education, the project embraces theatricality as a method for critically engaging with the self and for staging pedagogical reflection where the performed self‐portrait serves as a distancing device between me and my teaching persona. The marionette is an attempt to make the embodied knowledge and experience of these identities visible and symbolically and theatrically malleable. Grounded in contemporary discourse on artist‐teacher practice, this research aligns with the view of classroom teaching as a creative, situated and reflexive act. It responds to the concept of a pedagogy of care, particularly its call for classrooms to function as open‐ended studio environments that prioritise process, risk‐taking and relationality. During the project, the school classroom became a shared making space between artist‐teacher and students, creating a space for reflection and relational practice. In this context, the marionette becomes a reflexive object, a tangible metaphor for the ways identities are constructed, rehearsed and performed in educational spaces. In this shared space, artist‐teacher and student identities are examined with sensitivity, side by side, in order to explore shared experiences of risk‐taking and not knowing.
This study explores the emotional support of 'left-behind children' in rural China by integrating Participatory Design (PD) methods into art education to foster emotional expression and self-care. Drawing on an eight-year longitudinal case study involving questionnaires (n = 189 children), multiple workshops, semi-structured interviews and the development of pedagogical tools, this paper focuses on two PD practices: 'A Cup of Story Time' and 'My Parents in My Mind' and one collaborative art education toolkit. Findings indicate that PD-based teaching can disrupt the traditional technique-oriented paradigm of rural art education, transforming the classroom into a space for emotional exchange between children and their absent parents. Children were encouraged to express love in their creations, cultivating a sense of self-care and peer support. Moreover, the art classroom functioned as a trust-building environment that strengthened children's subjectivity and emotional identity. As a low-cost, participatory, and emotionally restorative intervention, this model reshapes relational dynamics in rural education, positioning children as collaborators and active agents in teaching and learning.
This paper presents a new live art methodology for secondary education art classrooms, designed and tested through action research. This research investigated how pedagogical elements of live art, an embodied art practice not yet included in the secondary art curriculum, contribute to young people's development. It emerged in the context of the globalised crisis in education that instrumentalises and marginalises arts subjects. In contrast, I developed an approach that frames art as a process-based pedagogy that uses disruptions as productive tensions, inspired by agonism (a political concept that emerged in the 1960s). I present DARE (Disruptive, Artistic, Reflexive, Exploration), a methodology that uses disruption and critical reflexivity identified as elements of live art that can transform education. DARE builds on a radical constructivist educational theory that embraces discomfort as dialogic knowledge production. Through examples of students' actions, I examine how tensions inherent in the formation of identity in adolescents become moments of learning through performance, often unravelling on the edge of chaos. The use of reflection-in-action defines how learning emerges from this methodology. DARE plays a complementary and transformative role in the art classroom as a pedagogy that disrupts the curriculum with liveness. It contrasts with traditional pedagogy by redefining art as research into the self, using the flow of students' lives, and bringing them into the world. Such a contrast highlights issues of institutional and existential power to foster new modes of becoming across educational practice.
