Art Education

Leaf Map: Environmental Art Museum Program

by Stacey Marie Garcia

Arts Practice as Agency: The Right to Represent and Reinterpret Personal and Social Significance

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2011). Arts practice as agency: The right to represent and reinterpret personal and social significance. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 29, 11-24.

In this article, I reframe arts practice as agency, the right to represent and reinterpret personal and social... more In this article, I reframe arts practice as agency, the right to represent and reinterpret personal and social significance in a way that contributes a positive self-valuation. A positive self-valuation in turn becomes a berth for the beneficial habitus of the individual. Bourdieu (1990/1999) describes habitus as the locus of the capacity to generate reasonable, common sense behaviors that are beneficial to others. Arts practices are herein theorized as a stock of reasonable, common sense behaviors—making marks, making models, and making “special” aesthetic interventions that signal a person, object, artifact, action, event or phenomenon as uniquely valuable, sacred or life-sustaining. These are behaviors that human agents commonly and continually employ in response to social needs, causes, and the imperative to signify. Given the social significance of arts practice, there is also great potential in a broader application of arts education pedagogy as a force for social transformation. Brent Wilson (2005) sketches out a fundamentally democratic and transactional pedagogical framework that socially responsive and responsible educators can make use of in the cultivation of social justice, the ethical imagination, and the transformation of the systems that ill-define us.

More Seminal Ethics Implications

by Mark Singer

Tandem works include: "Seminal Ethics," "Kant Concept Art," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.

These implications are: moral, epistemology, love, happiness, time and space, psychological, art, education, medical, economic, war, capital punishment, and abortion.

"Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" includes additional categories.

2008 Marking Time in Pacific Schools: Arts Education in the Islands

by Cresantia (Frances) Koya Vaka'uta

This essay reflects on the state of Arts in Education in the Pacific island classroom with an emphasis on the general... more This essay reflects on the state of Arts in Education in the Pacific island classroom with an emphasis on the general devaluation of creative thinking and the value-based approach to the art experience in schools.

Video art practices in the new Cyprus Visual Arts Program of Study

by Nicoleta Avgousti

Reflections of Navajo Culture and Educational Philosophy in Two Fourth-Grade Art Education Classrooms in the Gallup-McKinley School System

by Mara Pierce

Kant Concept Art

by Mark Singer

Tandem works include: "Seminal Ethics," "More Seminal Ethics Implications," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.

The artist is P. Patten (USA).

Seminal Ethics

by Mark Singer

Tandem works include: "Kant Concept Art," "More Seminal Ethics Implications," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.

Additional implications include: moral, epistemology, love, happiness, time and space, psychological, art, education, medical, economic, war, capital punishment, abortion, and possibility.

Art Education as a Network for Curriculum Innovation and Adaptable Learning

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2011). Art education as a network for curriculum innovation and adaptable learning. In "Advocacy White Papers for Art Education, Section 1: What High-Quality Art Education Provides." Reston, VA: National Art Education Association. Retrieved November 19, 2011 from http://www.arteducators.org/advocacy/whitepapers.

This white paper reconceptualizes the potential of models of arts practice in generating new curriculum approaches for... more This white paper reconceptualizes the potential of models of arts practice in generating new curriculum approaches for general education and aiding the development of the learner in our contemporary visual age. High-quality art education is argued to provide art educators with an adaptable and dynamic framework for curriculum-making and theorizing. Visual arts theoretical models—or art for scholarship’s sake—offer the promise of divergent and yet synergistic pedagogical pathways through which learners may become adept at thinking empirically through a material medium, thinking expressively in a language, thinking iconoclastically within a context—or in doing each simultaneously. Flexible and dynamic thinking is a key to jump-starting the ability of learners to innovate, inform, and network across the artificial divides of disciplinary content. (My paper is the third in the attached bundle of essays).

Time for New Thinking and Being In Our Business Schools

by Thomas Tresser

This is a blog entry written for the Americans for the Arts Private Sector Initiative salon on the future of arts and... more This is a blog entry written for the Americans for the Arts Private Sector Initiative salon on the future of arts and business collaboration.

M-learning: texting (SMS) as a teaching & learning tool in higher arts education

by Christopher Buckingham

Co-authored with Dr. Loykie Lomine.
Presented at: ELIA Teachers' Academy 2009, Sofia

To text or not to text...

Text messaging has become a mainstream form of communication. Few students are... more To text or not to text...

Text messaging has become a mainstream form of communication. Few students are not avid texters – but how can we use SMS (Short Message Service) to support teaching and learning in higher arts education?

This paper outlines key aspects, both conceptually and pedagogically. It suggests a range of opportunities for us to integrate texting into our teaching and learning strategies. It also answers frequently asked questions in order to demystify the use of SMS in an educational context.

Art, Craft, and Assimilation: Curriculum for Native students during the Boarding School Era

by Kevin Slivka

Marginalia and Meaning: Off-site/sight/cite Points of Reference for Extended Trajectories in Learning

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2006). Marginalia and meaning: Off-site/sight/cite points of reference for extended trajectories in learning. Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 26, 219-240.

This study argues that drawing upon off-site/sight/cite points of reference affords a space for extended trajectories... more This study argues that drawing upon off-site/sight/cite points of reference affords a space for extended trajectories of learning and the cultivation of rich and atypical personal meaning unavailable within the terrain and climes of typical schooling frameworks. This paper continues the author’s effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.

Searching Self-Image: Identities to Be Self-Evident

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2004). Searching self-image: Identities to be self-evident. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (6), 869-884.

Naming can alternatively be a definition of identity or a source of stigma.  Un-naming can alter a story and... more Naming can alternatively be a definition of identity or a source of stigma.  Un-naming can alter a story and serve to unhinge fixed definitions, initiating a democratic discourse that finds its own way of escaping the thrall of hegemony and dominating canons.  Can qualitative research serve to un-name axiomatic frameworks of identity?  This paper is written to follow up to Messing Around With Identity Constructs (Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 10, Number 4, pp. 548-557) and continues the author’s effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in research writing.

Exploring Foshay’s Theorem for Curriculum-making in Education: An Elementary School Art Studio Project.

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2007). Exploring Foshay’s theorem for curriculum-making in education: An elementary school art studio project. Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, 4 (1), 136-159.

This study explores the question of “why we teach as we do” through the self-reflexive lens described by several noted... more This study explores the question of “why we teach as we do” through the self-reflexive lens described by several noted curriculum theorists, but perhaps best exemplified in a simple theorem for a reflexive curriculum-making praxis first proposed by aesthetics educator Arthur W. Foshay in his aphorism, “Who is to encounter what, why, how, in what circumstances, under what governance, at what cost?” The efficacy in Foshay’s postulation is not self-evident, but must be revealed in an alternating sequence of engagements with the constituent elements of its syntax. The method for this presentation of living inquiry in curriculum-making is twofold, involving the intersection of an art studio project involving 3rd and 4th grade students in a new elementary school; along with accompanying mixed genre writing that draws upon the artist/teacher/researcher’s autobiographical narrative and poetry. This study argues that Foshay has proposed a qualitative theorem inviting ongoing interpretation in curriculum-making. An alternating sequence of conceptualizing events constitutes a living inquiry, offering the possibility of greater innovation in learning than the more formulaic unit structures designed by mandate.

Figuring Myself Out: Certainty, Injury, and the Poststructuralist Repositioning of Bodies of Identity

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2004). Figuring myself out: Certainty, injury, and the poststructuralist repositioning of bodies of identity. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 38 (4), 46-58.

How does the named body refigure itself?  Bodies are evidentiary. They are documentary. We position our bodies... more How does the named body refigure itself?  Bodies are evidentiary. They are documentary. We position our bodies and juxtapose them in foreground to a tableau other bodies; self-images are traced against other images of identity. We position our bodies to tell stories—to tell self-histories, sometimes false, sometimes true, always incomplete. For each of us, our thinking—our image of self—tends to cohere around an identifiable, repeatable pattern of discursive meanings that we first inherit and then overwrite with newly experienced and refreshed meanings. Life stories are structures in flux, deconstructions. The source of injurious self-image appears to be wound up in the cultural construction of “abnormality.” The reconstitution of a spoiled identity is effected in the presentation of extra-normative figures of self, selves outside the boundaries of a normalizing frame, selves less traveled. The author makes the argument that a body tells its own life in spite of all manner of stereotyping and propaganda, offering glimpses of humanity, poetry overcoming monstrosity.

Rethinking Relevance in Art Education: Paradigm Shifts and Policy Problematics in the Wake of the Information Age

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2008). Rethinking relevance in art education: Paradigm shifts and policy problematics in the wake of the Information age. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 9 (Interlude 1). Retrieved May 11, 2008 from http://www.ijea.org/v9i1/.

This article addresses the advocacy of organizations like the National Art Education Association that seek greater... more This article addresses the advocacy of organizations like the National Art Education Association that seek greater legislative support, funding and time allocations to be devoted to arts instruction and the development of arts practices in the arena of public education.  The author argues the timeliness of a reconceived paradigm for understanding and advocating the relevancy of arts practices in the wake of the Information Age. This article seeks to rethink the semiotics defining art in an era of shifting paradigms and as contextualized in contemporary educational policy.

Visual Culture Archaeology: A Criti/Politi/cal Methodology of Image and Identity

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2007). Visual culture archaeology: A criti/politi/cal methodology of image and identity. Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies. 7 (1), 3-25.

This study argues the efficacy of the phenomenological cultural work of a visual culture archaeology that liberates a... more This study argues the efficacy of the phenomenological cultural work of a visual culture archaeology that liberates a political and critical identity, resistant to domination, authoring social change and its own agency through multiple and incommensurable positions. Built upon Foucauldian premises, visual culture archaeology is developed as a methodology for discursive un-naming and re-naming, and emerges from the inherence and attenuation of inscripted meanings in the reinterpretation of identity during a postmodern confluence of ideas and images. The hybridized representation of the African American in Western visual culture has been unique in the effort by some to define us over significant periods as less than human, less than American, or less than statistically significant in the purpose to maintain an unequal relation of economic and political power. This paper continues the author’s effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.

Secular Blasphemy: Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2008). Secular blasphemy: Utter(ed) transgressions against names and fathers in the postmodern era. Qualitative Inquiry, 14 (6), 926-948.

Un-naming the axiomatic constructs of a named identity—that which is thought to be fitting within a given regime of... more Un-naming the axiomatic constructs of a named identity—that which is thought to be fitting within a given regime of definition—becomes then an act of secular blasphemy, a performance of decanonizing translation that discursively relocates and reinscribes communicated meaning from power, prefix, and prefigurement to perpetual movement. Departing from Homi Bhabha’s description of blasphemy as a transgressive act, this paper blasphemes the certainty of definition in research writing, illuminating the performance of blasphemy as a source of new social names and the migration of norms and meaning. This paper is the third in a trilogy of research forays exploring the intersection of autoethnography, critical race theory, and performance studies. This new research, written to follow up Messing Around With Identity Constructs (Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (4), pp. 548-557) and Searching Self-Image (Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (6), pp. 869-884), is a continuation of the author’s effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.

Sites of Contention and Critical Thinking in the Elementary Art Classroom: A Political Cartooning Project

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2008). Sites of contention and critical thinking in the elementary art classroom: A political  cartooning project. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 9 (4). Retrieved June 16, 2008 from http://www.ijea.org/v9n7/.

In this paper, the author explores the concept of childhood as a social category that impedes the perception of... more In this paper, the author explores the concept of childhood as a social category that impedes the perception of youngsters as critical thinkers in a visual culture. The author interrogates regularities within contemporary public schooling that work to represent the intellectual and cultural development of youngsters as the project of adult industry. Contrary to this representation, the author recounts the critical awareness and personal agency exercised by a group of 4th graders who engaged in a political cartooning exercise while examining the theme of social justice. The article includes an examination of the social construction of the concept of childhood as it intersects the discourse of Western socio-cultural superiority and the opening of sites of contention as a pedagogical strategy.