Visual Inquiry - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012

Against the backdrop of the metric-driven discourse dominating the educational landscape today, the unquantifiable benefits of arts education offer prime examples of vital aspects of teaching and learning that defy standardized measurement. This article outlines the particular features of the arts and the learning they provide that make them essential parts of the core curriculum, and particularly crucial at the high school level. Drawing on recent research into reasons for dropping out of school and the relationship between arts education and student retention, the author argues that an increase in arts education will help fight the daunting dropout rate that challenges educational reformers today.

Acknowledging that many art teachers have difficulties with the concept of visual culture, the author offers some guidelines for considering the playing field of an art education that embraces the rhizomic nature of visual culture. The guidelines include distinguishing between Visual Culture Studies as a field and what part of it legitimately concerns art education. In turn, this involves distinguishing between different functions of images and artefacts – when they concern data and utility and when they constitute beliefs and values, as well as when they support a status quo and when they resist and/or offer alternatives. Examples of rhizomic curriculum are offered that serve for both clarification and as exemplars of practice.

This participant observation study explores visual literacy and concentrates on the illustrations of third graders in Gold Canyon, Arizona, which they made in response to writing about their context that included favourite local desert animals and its habitat under the directions of their classroom teachers. Contextual knowledge about the ecological interrelation of desert animals and their habitats was highlighted. The teachers focused students’ attention on geologic formations, details, textural marks and meanings relating local creatures and their environment. Visual literacy findings include how students represent and communicate visual forms, including different spatial grounds, mountain formations, colour blends, vertical and diagonal stroking to suggest rock direction and striations, and different textures (e.g. spiky cacti and animal fur). Such visual literacy learning in context entailed interrelationships of desert ecological configurations interspersed with a fascination with unusual words (hoodoo and haboob), concern or care for desert creatures (screaming, hungry and sadness), persistent problem solving and search for meaning.

This reflective piece considers how one art professor describes the potential for a balance in the distinct roles of artist and educator that are embedded in her practice as an art professor. It is a compilation of the descriptions of a professor who was interviewed for the dissertation research of Harrigan McMahon Bowman of Columbia University in 2010. Four professors of art who were all publicly recognized for their accomplishments in teaching were interviewed regarding the relationship between these two roles (among others) within their practice. The four models of negotiation found in the qualitative case-studies were those of Complete Separation, Complete Integration, See-Saw: A Fragile Balance, and Total Commitment: A Sacrificial Balance. Presented in this first writing in a series of four, Danielle Bauer represents the model of Complete Separation. In her own words, extracted from her interviews, she describes her understanding of herself and how she came to be an art professor. This reflection will be followed by similar reflective representations of the three further found models of negotiation.

WHY PHOTOGRAPHS WORK, 52 GREAT IMAGES: WHO MADE THEM, WHAT MAKES THEM SPECIAL AND WHY, GEORGE BARR (2011) Santa Barbara, CA: Rocky Nook Inc., 220 pp., ISBN: 978-1-933952-70-3, Paperback, $39.9511 COURSE LEADERS 20 QUESTIONS, SARAH ROWLE S (2011) London: Q-Art, 243 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9564355-1-4, Paperback £9.95 /£5.95 e-bookTHE STUDIO READER: ON THE SPACE OF ARTISTS, MARY JANE JACOB AND MICHELLE GRABNER (EDS) (2010) Chicago and London: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 328pp., 75 mono illustrations, ISBN: 0-226-38961-8, Paperback, £16.00/$25.00EDUCATION, FELICITY ALLEN (ED.) (2011) London: Whitechapel/MIT, 240 pp., ISBN: 0-262-51636-5, Paperback, $24.95ART SCHOOL (PROPOSITIONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY), STEVEN HENRY MADOFF(2009) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 268 pp., ISBN-10: 0262134934, Paperback, $32.95ART AND DISABILITY: THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL STRUGGLES FACING ACING EDUCATION, ALICE J. WEXLER (2011) New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 266 pp. (11 mono illustrations), ISBN: 978-0-230-11485-2, Paperback, $28.00/£18.0033RD IN SEA WORLD CONGRESS, BUDAPEST, HUNGARY, 24–30 JUNE 2011