Art Education Commons^™

Food For Thought: Rituals In Place Based Learning, Natalia Pilato

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

In my mother’s kitchen lasting bonds among family, friends, and newcomers are created. Using that space as a point of departure, I explore the significance of pedagogical places outside of classrooms that serve as flavorful ingredients for performative and participatory learning. This article articulates ways in which rituals associated with Sicilian cultural traditions are interwoven and complicit in establishing dispositions for socially engaged learning and teaching in the arts, showing how an ethic of care can transcend generations. With a focus on place-based learning, making art and enjoying food are investigated to show how healthy productive relationships, appreciation for beauty, …

Our Magnitude And Bond: An Ethics Of Care For Art Museum Education, Dana Carlisle Kletchka

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This work responds to contemporary concerns about the future of art museum education and public practice and art museums more broadly in the wake of a global pandemic that has, at present, killed more than a million people in the United States and sickened millions more. I respond to questions posed by the board of the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education in relation to the theme of Inclusion Invasion, expand upon the relations between art museums and communities posited by a post-critical, socially responsive museological framework, and explore the potential for a feminist philosophical Ethics of Care …

Whose Art Museum? Immersive Gaming As Irruption, Jason M. Cox, Lillian Lewis

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This paper introduces Mantles in the Museum, an immersive game that helps ameliorate student discomfort in art museums and to support discourse in, through, and around art museums. Within the game the students take on the roles of critics who use one of five interpretive frameworks, often differing from the student’s own, to select works from a real museum to go to an international exhibition. Assuming these roles empowers students to be in the museum and to assess the works, students are given leave to engage in a vigorous critique process and to examine the art-world from a new perspective.

Creating Commons: Photovoice Philosophy In A Third Space, Jason M. Cox, Lynne Hamer

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Teach Toledo is a program that the authors co-coordinate using community assets to create a third space to confront systemic racism’s impact on teacher education programs and facilitate hybridity (Bhaba, 1994). Diverse student cohort members use their lived experience as the base for their individual and shared urban educational philosophies, coordinated in a first-year horizontally and vertically integrated curriculum including written compositions and a PhotoVoice project. “Creating commons” refers not only to provision of a third space as a common space where private experiences can be combined to create a hybrid, new understanding, but also to the creative act of …

Lola's Story: Love And Resiliency, Susan R. Whiteland

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

Lola, a hand puppet, tells her story of being constructed in a university’s special topics class for the purpose of encouraging older adults who may be experiencing loneliness and isolation. Lola is introduced to an elderly woman who bonds with the puppet. Engagement with the puppet encourages positive emotions that contribute toward resilience and subjective well-being. Lola’s story supports the idea that feelings of happiness and positivity attributed to puppetry may be instrumental in memory retention and overall socio-emotional health.

An Exploration Of Restorative Artmaking During Covid-19, Linda J. Helmick

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

This research explores a curriculum, delivered on Zoom, that blended art education with art therapy to support educators’ well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand the restorative aspects of collective artmaking and reflection, I established a series of artmaking workshops for educators via Zoom. As an artist/researcher/teacher, I made collages as an arts-based inquiry method. I found that participants needed a safe place to express, create, and share in a community of others who have similar needs, desires, and experiences, a respite from the early, terrifying days of the pandemic. Meditation, blended artmaking experiences, and reflection encouraged everyone to feel …

Relational Ecologies: Artistic Engagement And Mentorship Of Adults In Community Spaces, Rebecca Bourgault

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

In this article, I share insights from research and experience working as a teaching artist and mentor inside and outside traditional institutions. I investigate how relational and contemplative pedagogies promote and sustain authentic relationships of reciprocity. Narrating recent experiments with mentoring practices that emerged from the cultural landscapes of adults engaged in arts learning, the paper highlights new connections discovered through a research model borrowed from intuitive inquiry. Findings are presented as reflective stories, journal entries, or field notes gathered while mentoring graduate art education students and participating in a community of practice in the visual arts. The article demonstrates …

Intergenerational And Intragenerational Connections Within A University Art Museum Program For People With Dementia, Sujal Manohar, Jessica Kay Ruhle

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

This visual essay highlights the impacts of the Nasher Museum of Art’s Reflections program, which engages people with dementia (PWD) and their care partners through interactive art museum tours. This program’s conversation-based tours with built-in time to socialize are designed to foster intergenerational and intragenerational connections between PWD and museum gallery guides, PWD and care partners, and between PWD. Discussions about artwork are visitor-driven and encourage lifelong learning among participants. Anecdotal feedback from Reflections participants and gallery guides confirms the value of relationship building, improving quality of life for PWD.

By fostering community and strong connections, Reflections programs help reduce …

“Press Charges”: The Intersection Of Art Class, White Feelings, And The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Albert Stabler

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

I reflect on the decade I spent as an art teacher in a Chicago high school where so-called "behavioral issues" are rampant, as well on my experience working with incarcerated adults, in order to explain the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline with the aid of recent research on discipline and policing. I go on to talk about a September 2019 thread in an art teacher group on Facebook. On this thread, predominantly white teachers overwhelmingly called for a teacher who was hit while breaking up a fight to press charges against the student who struck him, purportedly for the student’s …

Critical Hermeneutics And The Counter Narrative Of Ledger Art, Katie Fuller

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Too often historical artworks in schools, textbooks, cultural institutions, and public spaces share a narrative that bolsters white-centered histories, but when an historical artwork is studied as text it creates room for multiple perspectives (Newfield, 2011) expanding the narrative to include subjugated histories. Looking at art through the philosophy of hermeneutics opens up questions and conflicts that arise within texts based on interpretations of those texts (Leonardo, 2003). This paper will apply the philosophy of hermeneutics to critique historical memory, and it will present ledger art as a visual text and counter narrative to dominant white narratives. Ledger art emerged …

Typographic Interventions: Disruptive Letterforms In Public Space, Clark A. Goldsberry

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

We are surrounded by typography—on billboards, aluminum cans, pill bottles, and pixelated screens—but artists and art teachers, seeking out the materiality of their lived environments, should be able to look at text in different ways. Many artists utilize letterforms as a medium of juxtaposition and recontextualization (Gude, 2004) by placing text in places we don’t expect to see it, or they subvert the messages we expect to read. Typographic interventions can be seen everywhere, by all types of artists, makers, activists, and dissidents. These interruptions could be framed as forms of socially engaged art (Helguera, 2011; Mueller, 2020) that “suspend …

Index Of Dirt: Composing And Composting In Art And Education, Circa 2020, Carol N. Padberg

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This photo essay presents an abridged version of a performative lecture addressing strategies for regenerative art education and arts-based research. Using an alphabetized compilation of stories, texts, objects and lessons, the index provides examples of how embodied, field-based art education can provide appropriate learning methods for art students of the Anthropocene who bear the burden of the economic, environmental, and emotional precarities of our times.

Cissexism And Precarity Perform Trans Subjectivities, Kevin Jenkins

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Precarity is not experienced by all. Rather, as Judith Butler (2009) notes, it is the extreme state of precariousness—a heightened exposure to institutional and social violence imposed on marginalized populations such as people of color, non-white immigrants, people of non-Christian faiths, and LGBTQ+ people. Nor does precarity impact the people in these groups evenly.

The three digital artworks in this series highlight some of the ways in which trans people navigate precarity and are performed by it. The lifetime suicide attempt rate for trans and gender non-conforming people averages at 41% with the highest rate at 46% reported by trans …

Stickiness As Methodological Condition, Cala Coats

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Stickiness is introduced as a cultural concept, affective condition, and performative practice. The author suggests a process of methodological conditioning rooted in responsiveness and attunement in response to shared vulnerability embedded in precarity. Drawing from Felix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm, new materialisms, and affect theory, the author invites readers to engage with a narrative score as an aesthetic pedagogical exercise. The score and additional provocations act as creative material for connective and collective performances tracing and creating encounters across time and space.

Precarity In Feminism And Feminist Art Education: Decentering Whiteness Through Reproductive Justice Activism, Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, Olga Ivashkevich

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The article addresses precarity in mainstream feminism and feminist art education as a systemic dismissal and exclusion of the critical concerns and voices by disenfranchised women of color from its narratives and agendas. It draws on a case of the reproductive justice feminist activism to illustrate how the mainstream pro-choice feminist movement neglected the urgent and often life threatening reproductive concerns by Black, Brown, Indigenous and immigrant women, which led to an establishment of the reproductive justice coalitions by activists of color. The reproductive justice movement is an important call to action to challenge and decenter Whiteness in mainstream feminism …

Prosthetic Ontology Into Pedagogy: Applying Garoian’S Theory To The Performing Arts, Elise Lael Kieffer

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

Prosthetic pedagogy, as developed by Charles Garoian, provides a framework for using artificial-real worlds created by the arts to influence and impact teaching practice. The prosthetic space is artificial, separate, from the artist and audience, yet it is felt authentically, as if it were part of their being. Garoian explored prosthetic pedagogy through visual arts and museum experiences. This research further examines prosthetic pedagogy by applying it the Theatre. The art of theatre builds worlds onstage and through performance that allow performers to be and exist apart from their physical selves in the realm of prosthetic reality. The artist and …

Stories Of Community Practice, Artistic Ambivalence, And Emergent Pedagogies, Rebecca Bourgault

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

The reflections and questions discussed in the paper emerged from a teaching artist experience in community-art that led to the examination of the contrasting values between the disciplinary paradigms of social practices, community-based and participatory arts and that of the contemporary artworld aesthetics. As goals of art for social justice often contradict the perception of artistic merit based on aesthetic quality, working at the intersection of artistic creation and community development demands a shift in perspectives. The position demands going beyond one’s artistic ambivalences, to include participants in a reciprocal relationship, attentive to the fact that any goals of empowerment …

Editorial: Journeys, Susan R. Whiteland

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

No abstract provided.

Building Relationships: Art Making And Empty Bowls, Susan R. Whiteland

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

How can collaborative art making foster relationship building for those involved? A Problem Based Learning project that investigated food insecurity and the creation of clay soup bowls provided an answer for a number of students, and various community members. This article follows the story of a university professor’s involvement with her students in a partnership with a local intermediate school when they pursued an initiative to include art in their STEAM based curriculum dedicated to meeting a local need. Older adults, elementary students, and a variety of other interested individuals joined the effort and demonstrated how art can build relationships.

Troubling The “We” In Art Education: Slam Poetry As Subversive Duoethnography, Gloria J. Wilson, Sara Scott Shields

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Scholarly dialogues are filled with discussions of teacher’s personal perspectives, experiences, and challenges - but rarely do these dialogues include the narratives that lie beneath the surface. The subversive tales confronting stories of microagressions, alternate histories, and institutionalized norms that shape the educational landscape we navigate daily. This paper is focused on bringing to the surface a call and response lament of two social justice-oriented art educators--one Black, the other White. Using the dialogic methodology of duoethnography and the performative aspects of slam poetry, we share our racialized-teaching accounts as a multisensory experience, where text and performative orality share a …

Public School Art Teacher Autonomy In A Segregated City: Affordances And Contradictions, Albert Stabler, Jorge R. Lucero

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Over the past two decades, the Chicago Public Schools have seen a lot of change. First there was the opening of magnet schools, and other gestures at reform, followed by school closures and the flourishing of charter schools. In this essay, two former Chicago art teachers, one who taught in a prominent college prep magnet high school on the north side, and one who taught in an under-resourced neighborhood high school on the south side, examine the commonalities of their otherwise divergent experiences, particularly with regard to the freedom allotted to both them and their students by the administrative affordances …

The Unity Mural: Bridging Communities Through Artmaking, Margaret A. Walker

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

A visual essay of a community based art education mural between two universities and a local community, following a tragic hate crime.

Older Artists And Acknowledging Ageism, Liz Langdon

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

Intergenerational (IG) learning has the potential to reinforce ageist ideas, through the culturally produced binary of old and young which often describes IG learning. This research with older artists revealed implicit age bias associated with a modernist tradition in art education which minimized the value of art production viewed as feminine. Language associated with ageism shares the descriptors of the feminine and seep into our perceptions. Cooperative action research with multi-age participants facilitated personal growth and through critical reflection, implicit ageism revealed in the researcher’s prior perspective is revealed.

Leaf-Ing A Legacy, Susan R. Whiteland

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

Leaf-ing a Legacy is the story of a university art education class that joined with an elementary classroom and residents in a long term health/rehabilitative center through a service-learning project that utilized digital technology and art making in a problem-based learning format to explore the concept of legacy. Evidence was found that the experience promoted socio-emotional learning and fostered the building of socio-emotional capital for the participants involved.

Editorial, Pamela H. Lawton

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

No abstract provided.

International Journal Of Lifelong Learning In Art Education 2018 Full Issue, Pamela H. Lawton

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

No abstract provided.

Earthquakes + Tsunamis (A Poetic Diptych), Mindi Rhoades

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

What follows is pair of found poems created by the practice of mining the writings of other authors to form a new work, a piece of language art. This process shares similarities with postmodern artistic practices including collage, appropriation, sampling, remixing, and repurposing. Source materials for found poems can include other poems, novels, newspaper articles, magazine stories, obituaries, letters—almost anything.

For these particular poems, the source materials are academic educational research articles about geological fault zones and earthquakes. The majority of the text in these poems is taken ver- batim from their original articles and used in the order of …

Battling The Big One: Lgbtq Inclusive Art Education During The Trump Era, Mark J. Villalpando

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Recently, because of our new political atmosphere, there have been many attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, or LGBTQ+, individuals and communities. Even though there have been positive developments in the past few years, homophobia is still a major concern for many people in the Unit- ed States. These issues often manifest themselves to a greater degree within the microcosm of public schools where LGBTQ+ students are forced to deal with hateful speech, heteronorma- tive environments, and rampant homophobia. These strugglescan have harmful e ects on the social and emotional develop- ment of queer youth. Progressive and inclusive …

Materialized Practices Of Food As Borderlands Performing As Pedagogy, Christen Sperry García

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this paper, I examine the interrelationship between borderlands, food, and ways in which they perform as pedagogy. First, I define borderlands in relation to art. Second, I discuss food and borderlands as authenticity, hybridity, and race/body. Lastly, I examine various fields of pedagogy including public, border, and food pedagogy and consider how they relate to food. I suggest that the interrelationship between borderlands and food can be used as a pedagogical tool to teach and learn about liminality, tension, contradiction, and hybridity. The hybrid spaces of consumable borderlands challenge food purity and yield unexpected foods such as carne asada …

Fictive Kinship In The Aspirations, Agency, And (Im)Possible Selves Of The Black American Art Teacher, Gloria Wilson

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this paper, I explore the pairing of the concepts of fictive kinship and agency in order to explore racial identity narratives of the Black American art teacher. Expanding on the anthropological concept of fictive kinship, where bonds of connectedness between people help to shape selfhood, I consider the powerful impact that visual culture has on shaping identity narratives and the professional aspirations of Black American art teachers. I identify fictive kinship connections as salient in creating spaces which affect agency in the conceptualization and achievement of the self as an artist. I further use the concept of fictive kinship …