Visual Inquiry - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2021

Teaching virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic presented myriad challenges for teachers and students around the globe. For art museum educators, the pandemic also forced consideration of questions about the core activities of art museums, the value of museum experiences and why we come together to look at and discuss art together in these public spaces. The physical spaces of museums and direct encounters with objects that were once regarded as essentials of museum education, were now inaccessible or had limited access due to pandemic restrictions. This article presents a collaborative project between two art museum education courses and two universities developed during the pandemic as a way to explore some of these questions, design methods of engaging audiences with art and ideas from respective university collections and build new collegial relationships.

This is a work-in-progress attempt to analyse, digest and ultimately develop a toolkit of methods for using archives in art and design pedagogy. We are interested in strategies that deploy archives in an active way – moving beyond notions of static collections and including an analysis of embedded power and authority. We provide examples from our own teaching practices, discuss them, and frame their elements into a broader approach to archives that may teach our students to be effective re-seers: critical and disruptive thinkers, reflective practitioners, with a sense of agency about their practice. We explore the factors at stake and notice different threads emerging from teaching. We promote an approach to teaching that celebrates an interweaving and intermingling of life, art and education in ways that constantly challenge the status quo.

Representation is a tool that facilitates the transfer of an idea. Architectural representations not only help differentiate the thoughts that the designer has in his mind, but also create a space where he can simplify what he has in mind when uploading it. This article makes a study on developing visual perception ability by including architecture students in the education process. Representation has become a necessary tool, especially in conveying thoughts. In this study, representation was analysed by architecture students through the five structures designed by Louis Kahn, one of the famous architects of the twentieth century. Students were asked to discover the remarkable features of buildings and produced 15 × 15 cm² architectural representations. As a result, the student’s perception of these buildings increased significantly and provided lesson hours to be more productive while creating architectural representations.

Landscape architecture has been transformed in recent decades by technological applications which have displaced a long-established tradition of manual graphic expression. Although advantageous for private enterprise, this development has not been entirely salutary in academia, as the discarding of manual graphics also eliminated an invaluable medium of teaching design thinking, creative exploration and ideological values. This article summarizes the results of an experimental course on advanced hand graphics taught within a technology-dominated landscape curriculum. Intended to cultivate cognitive and analytical abilities vital for successful design practice, it was simultaneously foreseen as a template for future applications to reinforce design education’s connection to manual graphics. An overview of philosophical objectives, structure and implementation is supplemented with student feedback and work specimens, parameters which were collectively evaluated to assess course performance, success and future viability.

The emergent culture of COVID-19 underscored a gap among generations with regard to their responses to new innovations in the education field. This article explores the educational potential of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) for the secondary art curriculum through the perspectives and responses of undergraduate art students. The article examines the writing outcomes of a discussion board forum activity that I created to invite the students to share their responses to and reflections on the use of VR/AR technologies in visual art and art education. I share the students’ perspectives on VR/AR use for studio art making under the following three themes: (1) excitement about the new art medium, (2) strengths and risks and (3) educational potential for K–12 curriculum integration. In discussing the students’ reflections, contemporary artists’ use of VR/AR is also explored as a resource for art educators. I end the article by providing suggestions for art educators interested in incorporating VA/AR into their art lessons.

We studied methods to help people visualize and deepen their thoughts through art appreciation and how to apply these methods. First, we present the concept of appreciation skills as a scheme to promote thought visualization during the art appreciation process. Then, we propose a model of metacognition using appreciation skills as a theoretical framework for monitoring and controlling thoughts during art appreciation, and we offer tools to help viewers metacognize their thoughts. Additionally, we present and analyse creative approaches for appreciating art physically through multiple senses (sight, touch, sound, smell) as well as practices for visualizing and deepening thoughts through collaborative visual representations. We found that supporting metacognition during the art appreciation process from the perspective of appreciation skills can be particularly effective for novice viewers. In addition, the collaborative creation of short videos may encourage non-art major students to visualize their thoughts and have more varied interpretations of artwork.

Review of: Routledge Handbook of Street Culture, Jeffrey Ian Ross (ed.) (2022)

London and New York: Routledge,

ISBN 978-0-36755-953-3, 422 p., p/bk, £31.99