Visual Inquiry - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2015

Despite the availability of iPads in a large number of school districts, as well as the popularity of teaching with iPads in art classrooms, evidenced by presentations that featured iPad teaching methods at National Art Education Association annual conventions during recent years, little research has been conducted to explore the practicability and effectiveness of the utilization of mobile tablet technology such as iPads in actual art teaching scenarios for kindergarten to middle school students. I hereby present an exploratory study about how the mobile tablet technology including iPads and artistic applications (mainly Sketchbook pro) can assist in a specific art education teaching and learning practice. Results of this study suggested that through using iPads, students achieved the expected comprehension and performance of artistic skills and knowledge, gained more interest in artistic learning, aroused creative abilities, and generated innovative forms of artistic practices.

While there is some interest in the use of social media applications in university teaching contexts, there is also a significant amount of hesitation about their inclusion in curricula. A key benefit is the way social media allows students opportunities to explore and connect with professional communities of practice to which they aspire to join. In this article the potential to access professional communities of practice in new ways is illustrated through the case of Instagram in university art classes. The possibilities afforded by this medium are made explicit through the example of one artist using Instagram. Through the lens of practice-based professional learning theory I argue that social media such as Instagram create the possibility of altering social relations to connect people in faster, more intimate and professionally significant ways than we have previously known. Following that, implications for university curricula design are explored.

Recording and representing movement is becoming as much a feature of daily life as recording and representing talk and sound, and the digital technologies available to us for capturing movement are becoming increasingly powerful. However an interdisciplinary review of movement capture catering to an arts education audience has not been done. In this article, I theoretically examine the concepts of movement and capture before considering how methodologies and technologies used in movement capture has been historically significant in the arts. Through this interdisciplinary review, I will demonstrate how movement capture is a rich site of interdisciplinary convergence for the art education classroom and as a research methodology. It introduces new complex affordances for moving human bodies, affordances that have the possibility to extend means of human expression and understanding. But as movement capture becomes a richer and more complex feature of our visual material landscape, art educators must prepare our students to engage critically with how and what it means to move and why, and if, movement should be captured.

Is the critique relevant? Art and design education is changing as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. This article will describe and investigate the critique from three vantage points: The first is a common sense narrative, the mythical ideal of critique presented in stories of how art should be taught. The second works to take apart this ideal, looking at how this formalized assessment is experienced by students and the symbolic ‘violence’ of authority-driven educational practices. The third perspective unpacks how we, as practitioners and educators in the field of art and design, understand meaning in artworks and what is described as valuable in assessment. The focus here is on the presentation of originality and the problem with a lingering adherence to Modernist notions of linear progress. ‘The function of critique in a studio art classroom’ re-examines critique and asks us to reframe classroom conversations of student artwork.

This article aims to address a number of interrelated issues concerning criteria for arts-based research. We start by responding to current discussions and debates over criteria, with a tacit goal of redefining the nature and goal of emerging visions of doing qualitative-oriented research. After reviewing some emerging frameworks for judging qualitative-oriented research and arts-based studies, we explore the prospect of integrating poetic elements into visual inquiry. This feeds into our suggestion of poetic-visual inquiry as a form of arts-based research, which we elaborate through three existing studies. In relation to this, we raise tension and care as two keys for thinking through researchers’ consciousness when carrying out arts-based research.

This article focuses on the importance of developing young adult media literacy skills in relation to Instagram use. Millions of young adults use image-based communication to connect with others on social networking sites. This form of ubiquitous connection has consequences for young adults' online, offline and parasocial relationships. Social media literacy results from understanding Instagram’s utility, the downfalls of social comparisons made between online relationships and how to better define genuine belongingness as it relates to mediated communication.

The contemporary form of the community mural is street art and is a continuation of the urban art movement that has grown substantially in the city of Los Angeles. The characteristics of street art involve a mix of graffiti subculture and the scale of Mexican muralism. Yet, ephemeral street art may have found an apposite home in Las Vegas, the land of blow up and tear down, a destination for a transient population. In Los Angeles, street art is part of a long history of murals on walls, a mix of styles trying to coexist as separate communities of thought. In Las Vegas, street art is a visiting voice in a town filled with temporary residents. This visual essay highlights the importance of visual inquiry for engaging these complicated landscapes.