Australian Art Education
Volume 35, numbers 1 & 2, 2012

Paul Duncum
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA

The paper focuses on the intersection between remix culture, youth culture, and educational challenges. Remix culture is defined as one that facilitates the production of derivative works. As such, it is not new, and examples are offered from the author’s childhood and previous studies of prolific drawers, but today, enabled by digital, networked technology, youth are engaging in creative activities that are changing the nature of learning in society in the direction of affinity-based, socially networked peer participation. Examples are offered from socially transgressive videos by youth on YouTube. Implications for art education follow.

pp 10 - 23

Dr Karen Maras
Australian Catholic University
                        
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority promised that a national Arts curriculum would enhance learning entitlements in Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts for Australian students. Visual Arts educators have argued that the content proposed in the draft curriculum lacks conceptual coherence. Using an evaluation model by Clark & Zimmerman (1983), I examine the alignment of concepts and theoretical orientations in draft proposals for Visual Arts. The evaluation, together with empirical support drawn from selected research on conceptual development in Visual Arts, provides a rationale for justifying Visual Arts as a domain of study. I contend that a conceptual framework aligned with appropriate theoretical orientations should be adopted to improve the quality of the proposed curriculum.

pp 24 - 37

Janette Grenfell
Deakin University,
Geelong, Australia

A narrative interpretative research methodology was used to investigate collaboration between higher education students and an art educator with the aim of establishing a community of learners. Located, Cloud based and graphically built 3D virtual, socially networked, e-learning environments were used to encourage synchronous and asynchronous student participation in authentic learning and collaborative art practice. Discussion focuses on art educator observations, student visual journal entries, their virtual exhibition of artworks on Deakin Art Education Island in Second Life and student evaluations of the unit Navigating the Visual World. It was concluded that immersion in an e-technology rich blended learning environment resulted in the establishment of an effective e-learning community of art.

pp 38 - 53

Donna Mathewson Mitchell
Charles Sturt University,
Australia

This paper reports on a research forum for secondary visual arts teachers working in rural and regional areas of New South Wales. Teachers attended from a range of schools, and the focus was on understanding, articulating, and researching teaching practice. The program drew on the skills and knowledge of university academics, arts practitioners, and visual arts teachers and involved research presentations, art making, and focus group discussion with the aim of repositioning and developing knowledge in the nexus of these experiences. The outcomes included data about teaching practice in rural and regional areas; the development of professional relationships; and capacity building for research collaboration.

pp 54 - 67

Kathryn Grushka & Nicole Goodlad
The University of Newcastle

Inhabiting the territory between being a pre-service teacher and becoming a new teacher is difficult. This paper describes a potentially useful methodology for pre-service teacher education in a course titled: New Learning, Visual Narrative and Wellbeing. The approach aims to highlight the potential of working with the concept of perzines as an arts-based method and transdisciplinary book art form. The narrative voices of two visual art educators describe the perzine pedagogies that facilitated pre-service teachers’ critical reflective capacities. Through deconstructing examples of student work the authors discuss how the visual narrative methods nurtured emotive learner/teacher memories and experiences about identity(s).

pp 68 - 80

Wesley Imms and Purnima Ruanglertbutr
University of Melbourne

Pre-service visual art teachers in one university identified nine issues within available literature that addressed their concerns about their future artistic practice. These can be summarised into three common themes; a perceived conflict of identities, whereby neither the artist nor teacher identity sits comfortably in their respective worlds; questions concerning art education pedagogy and whether artistic or educational priorities drive good art education; and fears about systemic disadvantages that purportedly exist within schools to the detriment of art teaching and making. This paper presents a summary of these students’ immersion in the literature, in the process exploring the nature of fears they have concerning their capacity to combine teaching and art making in one career. The paper identifies a need for practitioner/teacher issues to be included in teacher training programs, and for schools to better support graduating teachers’ artistic practices.

pp 81 - 92

Lisa Terreni
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand

Children, like adults, have the right to enjoy cultural citizenship by having access to a range of opportunities for leisure, education, arts, and cultural experiences. This is supported by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which argues that children need to be able to participate in the cultural and artistic life of their communities. This article examines issues of access that impact on museum visiting and explores whether children who attend early childhood centres in New Zealand have easy and equitable access to art museums and galleries. Real and potential barriers that exist for these young art museum visitors are identified.

pp 93 - 107

Mary Keeffe, Valerie Lovejoy, Deborah Spencer-Jones, Vaughan Prain
La Trobe University

The arguments to move to a more student-centred approach to learning are convincing (Pykett, 2009; Paludan, 2006). One concern raised about the implementation of personalised learning is that the relationships required to enhance learning are contrary to those in the traditional, teacher-centred curriculum. This paper proposes that relational agency within a personalised learning context enhances creativity, engagement, and effort in Visual Arts Studio classes. The findings in this case study, from a Junior Secondary College in central Victoria, Australia, clarify the nature of the relational agency in a Visual Arts Studio and lead to the claim that negotiated interactions between participants build each student’s self-determination and confidence in their own abilities.

pp 108 - 125

Download Volume 35 ns 1&2 as a single file