Art Education Commons^™

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 …

Journal Of Social Theory In Art Education (2018) Full Issue, Jstae Editor

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

No abstract provided.

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 …

In The Folds: Transforming A City’S Identity Through Art And Social Purposes, Yichien Cooper

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This autoethnographic narrative retraces my four-year journey as an art commissioner for a city that is transforming beyond the stigma associated with a significant role in early nuclear weapons to a growing agritourism industry. The looming pressure for change is just like when tectonic plates push against each other until there is a quick release, causing earthquakes and eruptions. In the midst of the changing forces, I consider how the arts fold in. There are two purposes in this article that investigates the complexity between civic development and art. First, I will (re)define and (re)frame (Short & Turner, 2013) the …

Journal Of Social Theory In Art Education (2017) Full Issue, Jstae Editor

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

No abstract provided.

Independence As An Ableist Fiction In Art Education, Claire L. Penketh

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Achieving independence appears to be a significant concern for education. This is particularly evident in discourses pertaining to art education in England where the aspiration to become independent appears to be synonymous with successful learning. Drawing on disability studies, and more specifically crip theory, this paper offers a Critical crip Discourse Analysis of documents reporting on the quality of art education in England. Here the independent learner emerges as a desirable norm and pupils with special educational needs are made visible through their apparent dependency. As a consequence of this emphasis on independence, dependency is framed as exceptional, undesirable, burdensome …

Dressing Up: Exploring The Fictions And Frictions Of Professional Identity In Art Educational Settings, Amy L. Pfeiler-Wunder

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

What fictions do we tell ourselves in order to teach? How do our stories as educators impact how we see our learners? Building from auto-ethnography research I begin with the personal and then invite co-participants to further illuminate a shared experience (Chang, 2008). In this example, I highlight the self-reflective work toward revealing and concealing identities associated with “teacher.” Using collage pedagogy (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008), students in a pre-service art education class, created paper doll narratives marking and unmarking themselves through collaged backdrops and clothing choices which performed identities that would impact their role of teacher. Future teachers also …

Exploring Art Student Teachers’ Fictions Of Teaching: Strategies For Teacher Educators, Laura J. Hetrick

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Using portions of my research involving three art student teachers, I provide suggestions for strategies to examine preservice art student teachers’ fictions about teaching (art). First, I begin by briefly introducing my three participants and listing my research methods. Next, I describe three of the most common teaching fictions I found through analyzation of the data. I discuss the productive usefulness, as well as a few procedures, of employing visual culture as a catalyst for unfolding student teachers’ (un)conscious pedagogical fictions. Then, I describe how creating illustrations of the self as art teacher can further help explore fictions of teaching. …

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 …

Professional Friction: Racialized Discourse And The Practice Of Teaching Art, Jessica Kirker

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Language is crucial in situating our selves and others. Discursive patterns create alliances or factions, establish hierarchies, and subjugate individuals or groups. In this autoethnographic study, I consider how I, as a White woman teaching art, participate in, maneuver, and manipulate spoken and unspoken racialized discourses within the context of a high school with a diverse population of students. Through the data collection process of journaling over one school year, I recorded reflections on conversations, speeches, and written communication with, between, and regarding teachers, students, parents, and school administrators.

I employed discourse analysis on these texts and draw upon Critical …

#Mobilephotonow: Two Art Worlds, One Hashtag, Jodi Kushins

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In the winter of 2015, the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) co-curated an exhibition with the loose-knit mobile photography collective known as JJ Community. #MobilePhotoNow included images created in response to a series of prompts and shared on the photo sharing and social networking application Instagram®. The exhibition reflected a community-based curatorial practice (Keys & Ballengee-Morris, 2001) demonstrating new possibilities for participatory art and culture in the age of social media. This portrait of how the project came to be is presented as an example of how art world factions might be brought together, in both virtual and real spaces, …

All The F Words We Used To Know, Mindi J. Rhoades

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Photos of handwritten list of the 2,000+ F words listed in the 1996 version of Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (Deluxe Edition), published by Gramercy Books of Random House Press in Avenal, New Jersey. Verb tense conjugations and plural nouns are omitted.

An analysis briefly contextualizes this artwork in relation to semiotic theory, contemporary text-based and word-based art and arts practices, social theory, and art education.

Editorial: All The F Words, Melanie L. Buffington

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

No abstract provided.

Untangling Gender Divides Through Girly And Gendered Visual Culture, Alice Lai, Yichien Cooper

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The rise of girly culture has brought new dimensions and challenges to art education. As art educators, we are concerned about what we can do to meaningfully understand and educate children—girls and boys—growing up with girly culture. To this end, this paper presents our exploratory study, utilizing the methods of literature review, focus group discussion, and classroom observation, and findings on the following: (1) discourses of girly (visual) culture specifically related to age metaphor, visual representations of sexuality, and girly aesthetics; (2) postfeminist conceptualizations, critiques, and justifications of gender divides manifested through girly visual culture; (3) preadolescent children’s perceptions of …

Art Education As Potential Space: A Conversation About Navigating Divides In The Process Of Becoming An Art Teacher, Karyn Sandlos, Miriam Dolnick

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The authors reflect on some challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned in the process of planning and implementing an artistic investigation of physical space in a public high school in Chicago. This article is the result of conversations between a student teacher and a preservice teacher educator working in collaboration. Our definition of ‘divides’ includes both the sense in which divides function as obstacles, barriers, and/or forms of constraint, and also productively as opportunities to navigate and work through tensions between opposites. Working with the psychoanalytic concept of potential space, we suggest how students, art teachers, and teacher educators might make …

The Ceiling Is The Sky: Affective Constructs, Event, And Community In The Marginal Spaces Of Art Education, Kristopher J. Holland, Nandita Baxi Sheth

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This article sketches philosophical concepts of affect and event within the canvas of lived experience in a university art education teacher preparation course. We claim that by embracing architectural and metaphorically marginal spaces the course manifested transformative experiences for students, instructors, and community. We position and celebrate the often marginalized spaces of art education as potential sites of becoming through curricular rich environments and as thresholds of event for the educator of art within the community at large. Specifically, we describe the deconstructed space of the “classroom,” the curricular arc of learning, and the occurrence of an unplanned, emergent, student …

Artitudes: Mapping Lines Of Demarcation In Art Education, Pamela Harris Lawton

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This essay explores the conscious and un-conscious divides art educators create as they map their careers as art educators. It begins with a discussion of possible causes for lines of demarcation to develop through examination of how art educators self-identify, the structure of teacher preparation programs at institutions of higher education, degrees in art education, and a visual and written narrative of my own journey navigating lines of demarcation within the profession. It closes with suggestions for strategies to diminish or erase the dividing lines that contribute to negative perceptions, attitudes (artitudes), low professional self-esteem, and teacher burnout.

Test Anxiety, Jennifer K. Combe

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

No abstract provided.

The (In)Visible Display: Reconstituting Museum Experience Through Performance Pedagogy, Eunjung Choi

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this article, I reconceptualize my understanding of Korean objects in terms of how they perform pedagogically within a context of an art museum in the United States. A pedagogical performance occurs when a contextual shift initiates a process of learning that exposes, examines, and critiques the conventional, pre-existing discourse of objects and cultures. Understanding the museum as a performative site, I describe my experiences in the Arts of Korea gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. By juxtaposing past and present and visible and invisible cultural elements, I play with the standards and assumptions of cultural display. Based …

Avatar|Avatar: Reflections In/On The Virtual, Aaron D. Knochel

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Utilizing a documentary I created involving Dr. Christine Ballengee Morris, called Avatar|Avatar, I reflect on the concept of the virtual to understand the site of agency in art education. The documentary focuses on Ballengee Morris’s work with her avatar Rain Winkler and explores the inter-relations of identity construction in both online (virtual) and offline (physical) spaces. In revisiting our encounter in the documentary, I extend the concept of the virtual through the simultaneous conditions of actuality and potentiality using the work of Manual DeLanda and assemblage theory. My reflection in/on the virtual explores a broader actualization of the avatar …

Desirable Difficulties: Toward A Critical Postmodern Arts-Based Practice, Gloria J. Wilson, Sara Scott Shields, Kelly W. Guyotte, Brooke A. Hofsess

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Prior scholarship on collaborative writing projects by women in the academy acknowledges sustained attempts of intraracial and interracial collaboration/divides. Interracial collaborative scholarship, while noble in effort, may result in unacknowledged tensions surrounding racial identity politics. In these collaborative environments the problematics of race cannot be denied, with Black women often drawing upon their racialized identities, while White women emphasize their gendered identities. An unawareness and/or invisibility of Whiteness as a racial construct of privilege further problematizes feminist postmodern discourse. This polyvocal text focuses on responding to and working within the tensions of identity politics encountered in interracial scholarship among four …

Re-Imagining Inclusion/Exclusion: Unpacking Assumptions And Contradictions In Arts And Special Education From A Critical Disability Studies Perspective, Alice J. Wexler

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Inclusion is usually defined “as a student with an identified disability, spending greater than 80% of his or her school day in a general education classroom in proximity to nondisabled peers” (Baglieri et al., 2011, p. 2125). This term, although seemingly benign and even beneficial, is nevertheless the outcome of polarized and divided terminologies. As a result, inclusion within the public school system can suggest not belonging. In this article I examine the invisible barriers to children’s full inclusion and participation hidden within the terminology and practices of special education, and suggest how the arts might be a natural ally …

Disrupting The Tourist Paradigm In Teacher Education: The Urban Art Classroom As A Globalized Site Of Travel, Transience, And Transaction, Justin P. Sutters

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Employing Bauman’s scholarship on globalization, the author theorizes teacher candidates as tourists in order to critically examine current field observation practices in art education. The study follows preservice students as they participate in collecting narratives during field observations in an urban/inner-city school. The visual representations of their experiences are analyzed to isolate and address emergent themes that reveal the consumerist nature of field practices through instances of (trans)action. Recent national studies give credence to the shifting landscape of public education in the United States and the author suggests that the changing demographics of both teachers and students necessitate a reconceptualization …

Art Integration: A Turning Point In Becoming, R. Darden Bradshaw

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This article uses personal narrative to articulate one art educator’s journey through the first year of teaching middle school. Highlighting the tensions that accompany navigating the liminal spaces between pre-service teaching and in-service teaching, the author articulates the potential of visual culture art integration as a site for meaningful student engagement and teacher empowerment. The article concludes with a call for the intentional inclusion of art integration pedagogy within pre-service art educator preparation programs.

(Re)Constructing Erased Narratives: Unearthing Strange Fruit, Maria D. Leake

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This article focuses on the artistic practices of Vincent Valdez, who (re)constructs hidden narratives regarding the lynching of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in South Texas from 1848 until 1928. Valdez counters the historical gaps and omissions of Latino history from textbooks as a form of failure which he addresses not as a historian, but as an artist looking at the past through a contemporary lens. The conceptual framework of this research references critical race theory and its relationship with culturally sustaining pedagogies to challenge exclusionary practices that selectively privilege the histories of some groups over others. Implications for confronting the master …

On Being Naïve: A Queer Aesthete In Art Education, Adam Greteman

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this article, the author utilizes the work of Quentin Crisp to explore the possibility of cultivating the naïve as a way to reframe failure. To be “naïve” is perhaps a form of failure; a failure to be worldly or knowledgeable in one’s doing and becoming. Accusations of naïveté are used, after all, to distinguish the work one is doing from others that have not “gotten it right” or fail to see what you as a scholar see in a more critical, less naïve, vein. What I ponder here then is this thing called “naïveté?” How might the “naïf” help …

Reframing New Art Teacher Support: From Failure To Freedom, Christina Hanawalt

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In order to support new art teachers and encourage them as leaders of contemporary art education curricula, those invested in the preparation and development of beginning art teachers must examine the forces at play in new teachers’ professional lives, as well as the problems with existing support structures. In this article, I present seven perspectives on the new art teacher experience, ranging from feelings of failure, to problems inherent in preparation and induction practices, to issues of teacher identity and socialization, to the pursuit of professional agency within school cultures. I suggest readers view these perspectives as seven artworks hanging …

The Failure Of Whiteness In Art Education: A Personal Narrative Informed By Critical Race Theory, Sunny Spillane

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This article explores failure from the perspective of a white art educator interested in social justice and educational equity. Interconnected notions of failure are explored, including: the author’s learning from personal failure as a process of professional growth over the course of her career; the specter of “school failure” and its impact on K-12 students’ educational opportunities and experiences; entrenched, systemic inequities in public schools and their failure to serve marginalized students and communities; and the potential complicity of the author’s individual professional failures – if left unaddressed – in perpetuating racialized inequities in art education. Whiteness, or white power, …

My Failure With An Ojibwe Artist: Reflections On Initial Intercultural Relationships, Kevin Slivka

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this article, I examine a first meeting with Ojibwe artist, Terry Kemper, during which I failed to initiate our meeting with the gift of tobacco. I explore failure in a relational event with Kemper and discuss the intentions of my ethnographic research, my researcher-identity, and my mistake of initially neglecting Ojibwe protocol during my first meeting with the artist, in addition to the role of tobacco in Ojibwe communities. Through aesthetic inquiry I reframe failure in an installation entitled, "Toward Reconciliation” that has potential pedagogical implications, with hope that it avoids a static and impotent result. I intend the …