International Journal of Education Through Art - Current Issue

Viewing sustainability as a process rather than a goal places artists, designers and art educators in a key position to contribute to sustainability. Following Anthony Giddens’s theories of structuration and socialization, we can see that established values, world-views, structures, rules and norms influence human behaviour. However, as individuals begin to recognize the potential of reflexivity and ask themselves how change is possible, they learn to modify their behaviour. Art education needs to promote reflexivity in order to contribute to a sustainable process of change. Artistic practices and art education stress the value of shaping the self and our relations with others, and can lead learners to transcend common boundaries through creative thinking and imagining alternative realities. Partnerships forged by art educators amongst themselves and with other stakeholders can create new spaces of experience and empower individuals to achieve change. This Special Issue explores how art educators, activists and artists engage with processes of educational, cultural and political change and embrace sustainability inside and outside school.

Moviment Graffitti has, for the last 25 years, been active against the oppression and exploitation of people, animals and the environment with a vision of freedom, justice and radical democracy. Traversing different media, genres and styles, Moviment Graffitti has a dynamic, symbiotic and powerful relationship with art. This article will look at Graffitti’s passionate use of art as a pedagogical tool to create awareness and bring forth social change through the aesthetics of activism and the art of dissent. It explores the role, meaning and paradox of political art through the movement’s artistic sub-groups and the main artistic initiatives embarked upon. Deliberately eschewing the elitism of the art establishment, the commodification of education and culture and depoliticized notions of sustainability and development through art edu/activism (eduvism), Graffitti reappropriates art to agitate educators in revolutionary pedagogy to become pivotal actors in the promotion of progressive social change.

In this participatory land art workshop, nature was used as a play material to represent the motif of metamorphosis while participants role-played herrings for empathy. The aim was to shift the perspective from our materials – which are agentic in co-constituting conditions evocative of empathy – to observing the outcome from a bird’s-eye view. The workshop sought to demonstrate the power of collaboration, by presenting an allegory of the collaboration of herd species such as herrings. Alone they/we are nothing but, with determination and a clear goal, we can create visible change in the environment and in emotions and attitudes like environmental empathy. Earlier research and this case demonstrate how ecological paradigms can be stimulated with the use of place-based art.

This article examines the environmental implications of ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICT) manufacturing, operations and usage, using the theories of new materialism and digital materialism, and offers an interactive video installation as a case study for contemporary digital art’s pedagogical potential in response to such environmental issues. Contrary to the imageries of the cloud and the notion of immateriality as promoted by the tech industry, digital media systems are grounded in the material world and operate at the expense of the material substrate. Such a sociopolitical landscape warrants an exploration of potential counter tactics in the fields of digital art and art education. Being informed by digital materialism and hinged on the notion that encounters with contemporary art can cultivate critical and different ways of knowing, this article proposes that a focus on the material can function as an antithesis to the abstracting act of information/data and its purported immateriality.

This visual essay is a reflective interdisciplinary encounter between three undergraduate students in a Bachelor of Elementary Education participating in a final year degree project narrated by two educators, one from art education and the other from science education. It applies a situated art intervention to sensory land walking methodologies to raise awareness about the loss of biodiversity in the Canary Islands. Walking as a pedagogical inquiry method supports the humanities in the post-human era for a new relationship between science and art. Art connects to science through the facilitation of sensate and kinaesthetic experiences that interweave the knowledge and methodologies of the educators, connecting lived experiences and memories of all participants in reshaping our teaching and learning culture. Our interdisciplinary approach broadens the perspectives of future educators towards an artistic practice engaged with nature, building civic commitment that pursues a holistic vision of a sustainable education that begins with the care of our immediate environment.

Este ensayo visual reflexiona sobre una experiencia interdisciplinar entre tres estudiantes del Grado de Maestro en Educación Primaria que realizan conjuntamente su proyecto fin de grado narrado por sus dos educadoras de Educación Artística y Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales. La sensibilización sobre la pérdida de la biodiversidad de las Islas Canarias se materializa a través de la creación de una intervención artística situada inspirada en el caminar como deriva estética. El caminar como indagación pedagógica ofrece una innovadora vía de conexión entre el arte y la ciencia en una era post-humanista. El arte conecta con la ciencia a través de la mediación de experiencias sensoriales y cinestésicas que conectan con las experiencias y memorias vividas del alumnado y se entrelazan con los conocimientos y metodologías de las educadoras, configurando una cultura propia de enseñanza y aprendizaje. Nuestro enfoque interdisciplinar de arte y ciencia amplía así las perspectivas de nuestras futuras educadoras hacia una práctica artística comprometida con la naturaleza, impulsando su compromiso cívico y persiguiendo una visión interdisciplinar de una educación sostenible que comienza por el cuidado de nuestro entorno más cercano.

Art educators teach visual literacy, criticism, multiple art media and technical skills representing many pupils’ only exposure to visual communication in school. Given curricular flexibility, art teachers redesign lessons to include important conceptual learning to accommodate department of education guidance addressing potentially controversial issues. Authentic art-integrative approaches provide opportunities for students and communities to interrogate serious issues like global warming and the impact of anthropogenic climate change. While not all teachers embrace this and other difficult conceptual learning, professional development and a supportive community of stakeholders are key for those who do. The following article presents a theoretical framework supporting a unit on an art-based inquiry into environmental justice from a recent course on social justice art education. Graduate student artist inspirations, art exemplars and learning activities are shared to inspire others towards art actionism.