International Journal of Education Through Art - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2006

Lourdes Portillo's Seorita Extraviada (2000) is a riveting investigation that tells the story of the hundreds of raped, murdered, and missing young women of Jurez - a Mexican-US border city. This subversive documentary unravels binational and bicultural hegemonic power that, by omission or complicity, licenses and tolerates violence against women, including massive homicide (femicide/feminicidio). I argue that this film is a significant lens through which to pose important questions about transnational neocolonial encounters, gender discrimination, and patriarchal discourses in the Mexican-US borderlands. Moreover, it functions pedagogically to forge participatory relationships between the artists and the community. In so doing, it opens up spaces for educators who seek to counter subordination of peoples and support critical, feminist, and decolonizing perspectives to develop art content. This film can be used to engage students in a form of critical pedagogy that mobilizes their participation in social change.

In China today, various images that feature in research into visual culture such as cartoons, TV, films, network games and advertisements are exerting a multifaceted influence on teenagers. Art education in primary and secondary schools is meeting new challenges therefore arising from conflicts between classical art and popular visual images, foreign culture and local culture, and between traditional art education and visual culture art education. As a result, active measures are being taken in primary and secondary art education to meet the challenges of visual culture.

This practitioner inquiry set out to help pre-service art teachers recognize and go beyond the constraints placed on them by pervasive curriculum patterns in conventional Korean teacher preparation. A series of assignments were designed to determine the nature of those constraints and pre-service teachers' strengths and to facilitate their reflective thinking during an art education course. Whereas the student responses to a preliminary questionnaire reflected limited views of art and art teaching, analysis of a sample of assignments at the end of the course indicated significant changes of beliefs and attitudes and potential for further growth; and highlighted potential curriculum content for inclusion in Korean art education.

This paper describes the author's role as an artist/art educator-in-residence at three peace and human rights education summer camps for Israeli and Palestinian teenagers. More specifically, it discusses how the camps' collaborative art making activity, the creation of a large-scale mural, contributed to the larger goal of teaching the students about human rights and facilitating interaction in a supportive environment. The paper also provides a context for the camps by briefly outlining approaches to peace and human rights education, with an emphasis on Allport's (1954) contact theory. The concluding discussion elaborates upon future directions for the camp murals and mural-related activities regarding their potential for further integrating human rights education with collaborative art making.

The potential of manipulated photographic images for synthesizing and integrating creative responses is enormous. Issues of truth and non-truth in lens based arts practice resonate strongly with students and the coexistence of visual, semiotic and technological literacies provides new challenges for upper secondary and tertiary educators in photography, art, film and television. This visual text by two Australian secondary school arts educators explores some of these issues in relation to the work of an Australian photo-media artist. It is underpinned by Sontag and Feury's theories of the photographic gaze.

Learning to look at Modern Art, Mary Acton (2004) London: Taylor and Francis, 384 pp., ISBN 0-415-23811-0 (hbk), 55.00; ISBN 0-415-23812-9 (pbk), 15.99

Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Graeme Sullivan (2005) Thousand Oaks, CA/London: Sage Publications, 265 pp., ISBN 1412905362 (pbk), 42.95/33.00