International Journal of Education Through Art - Volume 20, Issue 3, 2024

Education is undergoing much change post a global pandemic in response to inequitable access, the pervasiveness of technology and in preparation for future challenges. Principal Editor Tara Winters observes how many of the pedagogies and practices present in art education and research align with future-oriented transformations of education. Articles in this issue reveal and envision pedagogical design and action that parallel many themes occurring in contemporary discourses on thinking differently about learning, teaching, knowing and being in the world.

The use of comics in education presents significant promise as a tool for enhancing comprehension of educational concepts and advancing scientific literacy. Our research is centred on the development of comics to introduce socioscientific issues (SSI) content to elementary school students, recognizing SSI as a complex societal concern intertwined with science, encompassing diverse scientific and social perspectives. This study adopts a case study approach and places a substantial focus on assessing the challenges faced by students in their utilization. We probed the obstacles experienced by elementary school students when engaging with SSI-laden comics through semi-structured interviews with ten participants. Thematic analysis was applied to scrutinize the collected data, leading to the identification of three primary challenge-related themes: technical complexities of reading comics, unfamiliarity with genre conventions and difficulties in grasping SSIs. Most of our findings were rooted in both the structural aspects of comics (including technical reading and genre) and the complexity of SSI content. These insights offer valuable guidance for our future endeavours and for researchers venturing into the creation of comics for similar educational content.

Duchamp & Sons are the Whitechapel Gallery youth collective, a group of young people aged 15–24 that meet regularly to develop collaborative art projects. I worked with them as a participant researcher in the six-month project De/construct (2013–14), co-developed with architect Nick Wood (United Kingdom) and artist Steven Morgana (United Kingdom). In this visual essay, I present my diagrammatic drawings of their encounters, including research, discussion, experimentation and decision-making moments. The latter create visual cartographies of the youth collective’s encounters and speak to their performativity. I use a selection of Duchamp & Sons tweets, which are posted by a different member of the group in each session, to create a timeline of the project. My reflections on collaborative art projects and the pedagogies that come together in these practices draw on notions of experimentation and proto-performance, emphasizing the processes rather than the outcome, in this case, an exhibition presented at the Gallery.

This article outlines three dominant ways in which the concept of potentiality is discussed in art educational literature, and in particular the connections between actualizing potentialities and creation. It then pivots to the works of Giorgio Agamben in order to problematize some of the basic ontological assumptions embedded within the three dominant views of the potentiality–actuality–creativity relationship. Agamben focuses his analysis on the (im)potential remnant of potentiality that remains within any given actualization and highlights the role of such (im)potentiality in creative acts. To illustrate this role, the article offers four ways that (im)potentiality exhibits itself in various art forms before concluding with implications for imagining the artist’s studio as a space and time for (im)potential acts of creation.

Increasingly, contemporary artists have turned to data as a source of inspiration, artistic medium and site for enquiry, experimentation and discourse in ways that have blurred, complicated and transcended disciplinary boundaries. Research suggests that when arts-based data visualization is integrated into K-12 curricula, these approaches can support students’ art learning and creative data literacies. Despite the burgeoning interest in literature surrounding the benefits of data visualization for K-12 students, less attention has been directed towards the ways in which teachers can be supported in designing and implementing data-visualization integrated curricula. This visual essay explores a science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM), arts-based data visualization professional development programme that was centred on socially and ecologically engaged storytelling in the Appalachian region of the United States. Throughout this programme, teachers told stories of relevance to themselves and their communities – a fundamental undertaking for teachers interested in empowering their students as data storytellers.

In this article, we advocate for the incorporation of a novel pedagogical approach in educational practice to mitigate the effects of standardized and decontextualized neo-liberal curricula. Conscious knowledge of our physical surroundings ensures a collective sense of belonging, transfers learning through so-called imaginaries of proximity and promotes an arts education sensitive to daily life. This Creative Place-Based Education research incorporates place-based education studies with a creative approach inspired by the design of workshops for children. As artists and teachers in a teacher training faculty, our research primarily focuses on designing workshops and pedagogical materials, which emphasize the importance of incorporating ideas, methods, techniques and processes from the arts as fundamental tools for exploring, analysing and questioning our immediate reality. We exemplify this approach by analysing the proposal Inhabiting a Common Place, which was designed and carried out with different groups in primary and preschool education in L’Alcora, Valencian Community, Spain.

This essay offers educator insights from a video project entitled ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’. I use videos, still images and text to suggest pedagogical methods for developing historical empathy among 12–17-year-olds through cross-curricular trans mediation. In what ways can instructors engage students’ imaginations to consider historical artists, art educators and community figures who have impacted our cultural landscape? I suggest a morphing with the archive in artmaking, treating artefacts as living objects with stories to share.

In this article, I revisit and re-analyse the visual journals that two graduate preservice art teachers and I created during my arts-based dissertation study. Through this re-search study, I sought to better understand the connections between how I used my visual journal to enhance my arts-based research process and how my preservice art teachers used their visual journals to enhance their development as future art teachers. Re-analysis of these visual journals revealed a set of three common, productive visual journaling strategies: (1) noticing and documenting, (2) mapping and (3) discovering a personally relevant practice. Collectively, these strategies demonstrate how visual journaling can support dialogue, creative inquiry and knowledge generation in art education research and art teacher preparation courses.

Review of: Slow Wonder: Letters on Imagination and Education, Peter O’Connor and Claudia Rozas Gomez (2022), Series: Cambridge Elements in Creativity and Imagination (ed. A. Abraham)

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 155 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-00912-439-3, p/bk, £17.00