International Journal of Education Through Art - Celebrating 20 years of IJETA, Mar 2024

Collaboration continues to be a growing focus of teaching, learning and research in university art departments. We are also witnessing a turn towards ecological and multispecies approaches in contemporary arts practice and education across the university sector and creative industries. In this revisitation of our earlier work, we ask how the transition into ecological understandings of collaboration might disrupt and reorientate humanist ontologies of visual arts education in the university. We draw on posthumanist and new materialist theories to reconceptualize collaboration in ways that are responsive to the ecological entanglements that comprise a work of art under current climatological and biodiversity crises. From there we develop a cartographic analysis of collaborative works of art in the making, drawing on a year-long participatory study with third-year undergraduate art students. In the final section we revisit our proposition for ‘becoming a work of art’ through more-than-human collaboration and explore the implications of this concept for speculative pedagogic practice and curriculum making in arts education.

The ‘Berry Tours’ art project brought together artists, activists and scholars from the fields of art education, political science and environmental sociology to engage in discussions about berry-picking and the conflict between the berry industry and the rights of foreign berry pickers in Finland. The project was a practical part of art-based action research that aimed to promote the involvement of artists in environmental politics and science communication. Art-based research methods were used to examine berry-picking culture, communicate the reasons for the conflict through installations and spread awareness of the issue. The exhibition received visibility, and artists actively participated in political events and discussions. The findings shed light on activist art and the integration of art into science centres. Challenges related to different practices in naming the author, the heterogeneity of the target group and expectations regarding entertainment and interaction were faced when art was shown in the science centre.

Since its original publication, this article has received tremendous interest on the Intellect website as well as through other platforms. Attending to a/r/tography as practice-based research through stories in motion, the authors explore becoming-artist, becoming-researcher and becoming-teacher as a métissage approach of weaving layered stories alongside and through one another. Together, as co-labourers, the authors enact coming to understand their own as well as their collective learning through processes of practising, theorizing and materializing their work. Permeating these practices is a commitment to emergence as evidenced through a/r/tographic states of intensity, events and movement. The result is an exemplar of a/r/tography with an appeal to many a/r/tographers desiring to experience becoming-a/r/tography and who wish to deeply impact their own art education practices.

We, teachers of art and visual culture, direct our classroom assignments towards the things we want our students to do, make, perform, think, know, value, feel and interpret – in our classrooms. And should not we assume that there is a strong link between what we direct students to make and think and know and feel in our classrooms and the behaviours and attitudes that they will exhibit beyond the spaces for teaching? But what are our classrooms like? The typical art room worktables and easels are inadequate models for the many art worlds that exist beyond. (The multitude of art worlds, actual and potential, in which students might live would be the subject for another article.) The outcome I desire for an education in art is that it will prepare students to live their lives beyond schooling productively and actively in various art worlds – if that is their desire.

A broad range of community art projects and programmes have been documented around the world since I first reported on this project in 2012. However, it still remains that lack of time and/or funding means that most art teachers are unable to engage in community arts or generate resources and opportunities to teach community arts. This means that unless community art projects directly engage schools and teachers in their projects and time is put aside for students and teachers to go on excursions, visit sites and engage with these communities, there are few opportunities for students to engage in community arts-based learning. This article reports on an innovative community art project that engaged narrative, and sculptural form, as a way of learning about community, place and identity. The project is explained from the perspective of an art educator, researcher and artist who was employed in the project both as community artist and as facilitator. This ‘insider’s perspective’ aims to afford some context to relevant theories through which such projects can be understood as potentially beneficial to art education – particularly in the way people have used narrative to communicate issues of place and the ways in which artists have translated community narratives into sculptural form. The author’s insider perspective offers insight into this project to share how a community art project could be designed and facilitated for students to engage in their local region and therefore a way forward for teachers and students to engage in something similar, to learn about how community stories can be translated into contemporary art, and the important role of place and identity in this work.

This article has its origins in the work of an International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) focus group formed in 2020 to respond to a UNESCO consultation on the ‘future(s)’ of education. The membership of the group spanned four continents and we met online during 2020, a period when most of the world was in lockdown due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The group reflected and envisioned possible social, cultural, economic and environmental challenges in future and focused on how the visual arts can meet these challenges. Our focus group looked into the crystal ball and tried to imagine the circumstances in which education through art may take place in future. We imagined how knowledge, learning and education might shape the future of humanity. In short, we addressed how the collective purposes of education may change including what, how and where we learn.