Visual Inquiry - Current Issue

This text reflects on the archive that compiles the learning experiences resulting from Resistències Artístiques, a programme of artists-in-residence in schools in the Valencian Community, Spain, from 2017 to 2023. The coordination of this programme required the collaboration of educational, governmental and museum institutions. The programme generated new, shared understandings through a mediation process among artists, learning communities and institutions, and provided professional development opportunities for artists and teachers. During the various stages of the programme, the museum’s education department compiled documentation from the projects, as well as the participants’ engagement, to create an archive of the projects. This archive, conceived as an accessible knowledge resource, could support future understandings. The projects included in the archive utilize contemporary art practices as an instrument for learning, considering art not only as an expressive medium but also as a tool for understanding and reflection. This archive was an effort towards providing transparent access to the knowledge and resources produced through the programme. However, the archive, though completed, was never made public because the programme was interrupted after a change in the government. With this article, the authors sought to highlight how the archive articulated the artistic practices that unfolded in the programme, thereby meeting an educational need that existed in this context, so that others could utilize the learning from these experiences in new iterations.

A statewide professional art education organization sought to increase member engagement and strengthen its community. The organization conceptualized and implemented a living archive through arts-based activities that allowed members to explore and interact with its extensive archives. The organization’s archives moved from a repository of materials to a participatory, living archive through collective art making experiences that enhance knowledge-sharing, transparency and accessibility. The involvement of participants directly impacted new board directions and policies while pointing the way towards future democratized decision-making for the organization.

This manuscript presents a visual arts study exploring seven art educators’ professional aspirations to transform pedagogy into culturally sustaining praxis as part of a series of studies. Study participants are art teachers engaged in online training that integrated culturally relevant teaching with prints from the Artura.org database constructed by the Brandywine Workshop and Archives. Brandywine is a Philadelphia-based, BIPOC printmaking institute and gallery devoted to the proliferation of works of art produced by culturally diverse artists. Participants practised critically analysing and raising awareness about their identities to transform instructional practices. We used Ladson-Billings framework stating that culturally relevant teaching begins with the teacher, not with the curriculum and a hermeneutical process to analyse fourteen visual arts journals.

Developing interpretive skills for understanding artworks is one of the thrusts of art education. Thus, the content of art education should primarily support aesthetic experiences through reflective studio practices. This study sought to explore pedagogical strategies for the interpretation of artworks by art and design specialist students from two purposively selected teacher’s colleges. The study adopted a qualitative research method nested in the interpretive research design. Data were generated using in-depth interviews with four art and design lecturers, focus group discussions with students and analysis of artworks. The findings of the study showed that participants had conceptualized the term visual metaphors as well as the interpretation of western visual metaphors. Findings also showed that students created representational art with limited symbolism and showed over-reliance on traditional art criticism model of analysing artworks. The study proposes the use of postmodern approaches to analysis and interpretation of African artworks and visual art-based instructional pedagogy.

This qualitative study explores the use of art as a tool for discussing mental health topics with teenagers, focusing on the perspectives of high school art teachers and counsellors. Through interviews, the research examines the benefits and challenges of integrating art-based interventions in mental health programmes for students. The findings suggest that art can serve as a non-verbal outlet for emotional expression, promote self-reflection and help reduce stigma surrounding mental health. However, barriers such as limited resources, time constraints and a lack of specialized training for educators were identified as significant challenges to implementation. The study also highlights the critical role of external resources, such as partnerships with mental health organizations and funding opportunities, in overcoming these obstacles. Overall, the research underscores the potential of art to foster open conversations about mental health in schools and calls for greater investment in art-based programmes to support adolescent well-being.

This article explores the use of visual journaling as a pedagogical tool to promote educator well-being and foster connections in art education and educators’ creative processes. The authors, members of the National Art Education Association Research Commission, Professional Learning through Research Working Group, share their perspectives on the application of visual journaling practices and its potential to support self-reflection, learning and creative care. The visual journal is defined as a hybrid space for visual and written collection, critical reflective practices and creation, supporting varied processes and frameworks for art educators at any level, pre-service to veteran. Through personal experiences and examples, the authors highlight the impact that visual journaling had on their individual creative connections, teaching practices, museum experiences and community engagement. The article emphasizes the importance of incorporating arts-based research tools such as visual journaling in art education to promote lifelong learning and support the overall well-being of art educators.

Between 1908 and 1917, Chicago city administrators and Chicago Public School (CPS) educators were rethinking how to best train workers for the city’s rapid expansion of manufacturing and industry. Following Murphy’s theory of social closure, which states that inequality is created by monopoly and exclusion, this article discusses how high-school students were differentiated and sorted according to their ability. This meant tracking working-class students primarily to vocational programmes, which also excluded from training that would advance them socially. Consequently, working-class students engaged in forms of art education based on ‘manual training’, while more privileged students entered commercial high school programmes where they often studied commercial and fine art, which were regarded as signifiers of prosperity. This article is developed in three aspects, as follows: (1) school buildings were designed to support curricula of social efficiency and social assimilation; (2) curricula differentiated and sorted students by ability; and (3) school administrators restricted social and recreational activities in high schools (including the fine arts and popular art forms), which resulted in student life going underground to create what came to be known as ‘the extracurricular’. These practices and social trends across the twentieth century were an informal art education in high-school popular culture; these extracurricular activities were also part of a culture of adolescence in public high schools, with art education and popular culture at the centre.

Arts-based research, as a hybrid of theories and methods, is an ambivalent field of research. Embracing the subjective challenges as possibilities can lead to the growth of fresh new sprouts of research questions, knowledge production and works of art with additional layers of multiple truths. Artists and researchers might learn more from paying attention to the internal and external ambivalences than from a faithful choir of fixed traditions. In the field of art and in research, the quest for knowledge and development is essential; thus to step out of the comfort zone should be embraced as both useful and necessary. Increased reflections about interdisciplinary research ethics and theories, can reinforce the integrity of arts-based research – not as a field beside other fields but as a functional hybrid of methods within qualitative research – hence provide mutual understanding in our common world.