International Journal of Education Through Art - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2008

Museums, especially the larger urban visual arts institutions established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries serve as repositories of global history, Empire and cultural memory, even as they shape identity. When students of colour come to museums, they frequently only see their ancestors depicted in classic portrayals of pre-twentieth century figuration framed by the white imagination and often without any mediated interpretation that confronts racialized visual texts and unpleasant histories. How should scholars and teachers interpret and mediate this space for all students one that confronts our deepest fears about cultural authenticity, hegemony, self-representation, narratives and story telling, prejudice and the passage of time? This article shares excerpts from an educational game the author has used at secondary and college level for over a decade. In Colorquest students explore the cultural and intellectual space that museum collections and accessioning practices provide for interpreting how people of colour are represented in their artefacts; and the xenophobic gaze shaping their representation. The pedagogical site for Colorquest is the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Visual narrative construction plays a key role in how children develop their understanding of the world and communicate ideas and meanings. In this visual text I examine how a small sample of 8-year-old children from Greece employed narrative structures to represent unfolding actions and processes of change in narrative drawings. Aided by a set of categories developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), I discuss the four main types of narrative structure the children employed and the difficulties they experienced drawing characters in action.

The Art Lunch Project is a pilot study involving international collaboration of art educators and teachers. The main aim was to compare approaches to teaching the common theme of an art lunch. Lessons organized around this theme took place in both art and interdisciplinary lessons in schools in nine countries. The majority of children recreated traditional food and meals in a range of art media and materials and only a few created fantastic art meals. This project is still under way and the participant teachers are discussing the issues that arise. They understand this international project as positive in that it functions as advocacy for the subject of art in their school curricula as well as facilitating pupils' creative skills.

This article discusses societal attitudes to images, concentrating on photographs. What may or may not be photographed communicates a lot about a society. As the ability to take photographs increases, with ever more digital devices capable of capturing images, so do various restrictions. These restrictions are connected with the deep fears images can engender. Using examples from Estonia, this article demonstrates that while photographic images continue to have the power to shock, the way and extent to which this happens depends on the particular contexts in which they are created and interpreted.

Finland is among those countries leading research into the creative economy and co-configuration. A new economy preoccupied with intangible values and cultural meaning-making is being promoted in Finnish business and industry. This article argues that traditions of mentoring in business and education have much to offer in creating the necessary conditions for the new forms of work needed in this context. Mentoring as an area is ripe for development in art education also where attempts are under way to break down existing boundaries between the economy, society and the arts.

Artes Visuais: Da Exposio Sala de Aula (Visual Arts: From Exhibition To Classroom), Ana Mae Barbosa, Rejane Galvo Coutinho and Helosa Margarida Sales, (2005) So Paulo: Edusp-principlesEditora da Universidade de So Paulo, 216 pp. ISBN 85-314-0935-7 (pbk), Real(Bzl)62.00

Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays, Mervyn Romans (ed), (2005) Bristol, UK and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, for the National Society for Education in Art and Design. 243 pp. ISBN 1- 84150-131-X (hbk), 24.95