International Journal of Education Through Art - Volume 18, Issue 3, 2022

This editorial articulates the hope art educators might find in the radical belief of futural possibilities. Co-authors embrace the editorial process and our journey through it as an editorial team for this journal as the nurturing and coalescing of potential. The journal and its contents manifest the hope that even dire situations could be otherwise.

Body mapping refers to the process of representing a person’s lived experience and sociocultural contexts by creating a visualization of the person’s body, with accompanying texts and symbols. Despite the history of disembodiment in the western context, the wide use of body mapping as a visual methodology in various fields attests to the potential of body mapping in promoting embodiment and witnessing. By analysing three body maps that were created at three distinct teaching sites in community-based and preservice art education settings, I examine how body mapping can evoke embodied witnessing and explore its implication for art education.

In this visual essay, I render my journey up the Tower of Experience. The tower has four levels – physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual – and each level expresses a different way of knowing and experiencing. These levels express a deep and broad interpretation of reality, and thus a way through which to understand artistic experience and inquiry. The tower illustrates perennialism’s hierarchical stages of ascent towards wholeness of Being, which inspire me to create integral and holistic arts learning experiences for my visual arts education students. The purpose of this essay was to visualize my felt-sense of the tower and connect this to my teaching concerns. In subsequent investigations, I will analyse the symbolism and phenomenological response to the tower artworks.

Over the preceding half century, ecological and environmental art pedagogies have been put forth within the field of art education. In this study, we sought to understand their contemporary emphasis in US art teacher education and how that emphasis compares with other educational approaches. Through surveying art teacher educators and pre-service art teachers, we found the emphasis of ecological/environmental art education was the lowest of the educational approaches surveyed. In contrast, multicultural education, visual culture and social justice were some of the highest-ranked approaches. The gap in emphasis, between these approaches and ecological/environmental education, represents an opportunity to draw attention to their shared characteristics. We recommend art teacher education adopt an ecofeminist orientation to facilitate its transition towards intersectionality in pedagogy, so it can effectively prepare pre-service teachers to engage with social, cultural and ecological content and issues through art curriculum and pedagogy.

After witnessing my home country suffering through a vicious civil war, this inquiry initially intended to represent Syria in a positive light, as a place of civilization, differently to what we have been constantly seeing in the news in recent years. However, the research led me to more meaningful discoveries. With the help of Syrian participants, I discovered not only a way to promote the country as a place of peace and prosperity, but also a way to invite the viewer to reconcile with grief and adversity they have experienced by embracing the word ‘hope’. In this visual essay, I share an invitation to reconcile with one’s self, past and hardship through the Ugaritic alphabet.

In this article, I revisit an art student-teacher observation in an elementary school in which I encountered unsettling approaches to discipline practices. Using process philosophy as a theoretical guide, I describe my arts-based inquiry into what transpired in the school that day as events that were produced in a field of relations. Sensing that there was something I was not initially able to recognize about the field of relations from which the events were catalysed, I pursued an alternate tracing of the events as juxtaposed with texts relevant to the history of schooling in the United States. This process brought to the fore the role of Whiteness – past and present – in the disciplinary norms around which schooling in the United States is centred. I further explore the role of Whiteness in the disciplining of bodies, sounds, affects and emotions in schools – all of which affect students’ and teachers’ ways of being in art classrooms.

Review of: Art as Inquiry: https://www.artasinquiry.art

Review of: Popular Pleasures: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture, Paul Duncum (2021)

London and New York: Bloomsbury, 229 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35019-339-0, p/bk, $28.84/£26.97