International Journal of Education & the Arts

The aim of this study was to investigate the ways in which textile materials and techniques are expressed in contemporary art in Finland. The first phase of data collection was to identify a population of Finnish artists who use textile craft-based forms in their art and who produce their works themselves. After that, six discretionary selected artists’ works were analyzed using essence analysis based on photographs and artists’ statements. The analysis brought out the reciprocal and complementary dialogue between art and craft, contributing to an ongoing debate about topical issues and the valuation of everyday relationships and objects. Artists are viewing their work from an artistic perspective but also basing their process in the appreciation of craft. The works of art portray mental associations with the help of craft techniques and materials. This article argues that the dialogue between art and craft helped these artists cross over borders and traditions.

The aim of this study was to investigate the ways in which textile materials and techniques are expressed in contemporary art in Finland. The first phase of data collection was to identify a population of Finnish artists who use textile craft-based forms in their art and who produce their works themselves. After that, six discretionary selected artists’ works were analyzed using essence analysis based on photographs and artists’ statements. The analysis brought out the reciprocal and complementary dialogue between art and craft, contributing to an ongoing debate about topical issues and the valuation of everyday relationships and objects. Artists are viewing their work from an artistic perspective but also basing their process in the appreciation of craft. The works of art portray mental associations with the help of craft techniques and materials. This article argues that the dialogue between art and craft helped these artists cross over borders and traditions.

Music and arts programs have increasingly been utilized to promote school engagement. Despite the fact that school engagement and music programs can be understood in myriad ways, little attention has been paid to potential distinctions between the types of music programs that underpin engagement. This article describes an investigation of how and when different types of school engagement were promoted through participation in a range of tailored music programs in four diverse school contexts. Four types of engagement were identified, including individuals’ engagement in learning, peer engagement, connections with different members of the community, and community engagement. The characteristics of each type of program differed according to leadership approach, expectation of students, degree of student engagement, and structure. The benefits of tailoring each music program to meet the unique needs and interests of each school community are illustrated through these findings. Understandings of the relationship between music and school engagement are articulated.

This article examines generalist primary (elementary) school teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching music. Five teachers, each with five years teaching experience, were interviewed for the study. Using this interview data narratives were constructed for each of the five teachers. These narratives focused on what factors contributed to the level of self-efficacy each teacher experienced in teaching music. The five narratives are presented, structured using the five elements of narrative - character, setting, a problem (or problems) faced, actions taken to address the problem/s, and resolution – outlined by Ollerenshaw & Creswell (2002). Each narrative is followed by a brief discussion of the impact of the four key aspects that contribute to self-efficacy – mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological arousal.

In this paper we examine digital storytelling as a mode of arts-inspired inquiry: in particular we consider digital storytelling as a powerful arts-inspired approach that can help researchers, practitioners, and communities understand and support indigenous and marginalized youth. Our two-fold focus is on: (1) a digital storytelling initiative that engaged hundreds of Alaska Native youth in the production of digital stories; and, (2) on findings from a subsequent pilot study which assessed the value of analyzing the young people’s digital stories produced through this initiative, as windows into the worlds, identities, struggles and concerns of these particular youth. Overall, we aim to use the findings from this pilot study, and impressions from the young people’s digital media productions, to demonstrate the potential of digital storytelling as a transformative arts-inspired inquiry which engages young people in processes of identity making, aesthetics, and voice.

Understanding, encouraging and developing creativity in the classroom is an international priority (Craft, 2011). This article outlines the findings of research into playwriting pedagogy. It interrogates the conceptual assumptions that surround teaching and learning for creativity, and how these ideas influence teacher practice and student experience. It argues that student engagement and creativity are fundamentally and reciprocally linked. To better understand how to teach and foster creativity in a classroom, teachers’ views on creativity and creative processes are explored through Csikszentmihalyi’s (2008) theory of ‘flow’ and the lessons this provides for understanding engagement. The article argues that the teachers’ views of creativity and creative processes are of fundamental importance to understanding the teaching and learning experience and that student disengagement can be addressed by increasing student’s skills and knowledge both in creativity processes and playwriting proficiency.

This work of critical social theory explores how formal music education in modern capitalist societies mirrors the hierarchical, means-ends, one-dimensional structures of capitalism. So, rather than consistently or reliably empowering and emancipating children musically, school music can tend to marginalize, exploit, repress, and alienate. The paper begins with a review of critical theories of social class, with emphasis on the roots of social class in historical beliefs about sociocultural evolution. Then, after considering in general terms how social class is overtly and covertly framed in music education, this framing is discussed in more detail within extant conceptualizations of musical taste, musical performance, and musical experience.

Arts education are understood and implemented by ways of different discourses. Following critical discourse theory, discourses are part of power strategies and they predominantly fight for dominance. What this means is that certain discourses and accompanying practices of arts education may rule and others may be subordinated or neglected. A review of current Norwegian publicly funded arrangements on arts and education shows competing discourses, which seem subordinate to a dominant Eurocentric arts institutional discourse. The general use of high art ‘quality’ as a nodal point in most arrangements supports the argument. Through contemporary practices of social circus outside Europe, such as Circus du Monde, and by an exemplar project, The Circus Lab, a collaboration between Norway and Portugal, a different discourse of cultural democracy and education (formation) is seen and expressed. This discourse seems to be less visible in the European context of publicly funded arrangements, where professional training, exposition to the cultural canons and audience participation still seem to monitor the comprehension and act as discursive triggers by which policies are governed. Among the consequences are lost opportunities of collaborative practices between the competent adult and the competent child.

While artist-researchers have been productive within the domains of the literary arts, visual arts, dance and drama, there is little musical arts-based educational research reported in the literature. This article introduces a research methodology to address this deficit: musically enhanced narrative inquiry (MENI). The article describes the methodology and its foundation in narrative inquiry, enhanced by arts-informed research processes. It provides an example of a MENI research project, Teaching Lives, that employs narrative and musical processes to explore and represent the personal, practical knowledge embedded within the stories of an experienced schoolteacher. The article is accompanied by three short audio files: musical representations of the data that integrate the recorded words of the participant with music, composed by the researcher, to illuminate the teacher knowledge within the narratives.

In this article, researchers discuss how relational theory (Bourriaud, 2002) can be used to understand the experiences of five migrant women participating in a museum art program called Learning ART Together. We posit that museums and art centers, like many institutions, are constantly working in tension with rigid institutional structures, financial demands, and formalized curricula as they strive to provide programming for migrants. Such structures challenge possibilities for relationship building and transformative practices. Findings reveal that by using a relational lens, we are better able to understand how dialogue creates alternative social exchanges which honor and challenge “everydayness” and shape new ways of being in the world. Our research revealed that relational theory offers insights into the ways participants create alternative sites of sociability suggesting implications for pedagogy that aims to create equitable and just experiences.

This article reviews and analyses educational policies and curricula for general education in Australian and Spanish systems, in relation to their concerns for arts education to contribute to values education and the acquisition of peaceful, social and civic competences in schools. The use of the arts to shape individual and community identities, to enhance relationships between people, to promote positive conflict transformation, development and, in general, contribute to peacebuilding, has been acknowledged worldwide. Curriculum helps to legitimise what is considered to be important to learn within a society and therefore determines what is included to be understood as good artistic knowledge and practices. The documentary analysis of both Australian and Spanish educational documents in relation to teaching and learning of the arts gives responses on the extent the arts are expected to contribute to build peaceful and sustainable societies, and faces some current challenges of the role of the arts in schools.

A study of former participants in high and middle school playwriting programs investigated students’ perceptions of their experiences. After 20+ years of partnerships in a wide range of schools, Washington D.C.’s Young Playwrights’ Theater examined how and why playwriting works and for whom. How does the form and process of writing plays motivate students, including some who don’t like to write or struggle in English class? The results offer intriguing insights about the nature of playwriting and the impact of relationships with mentors, peers, and audiences to influence students’ skills, motivation and self-perceptions as writers.

This article presents the story of one elementary school teacher’s shift in art praxis through her involvement in a research project aimed at facilitating participatory arts-based communities of practice. Qualitative methods and social constructivism informed Professional Learning Interventions (PLIs) involving: (1) a visual arts workshop, (2) facilitations with academics within the teacher’s classroom context, and (3) semi-structured discussions to study and curate the teacher’s lived experiences. A teacher-facilitator-interviewer triad co-researched the meaning of ‘quality’ in relation to: Learning, Pedagogy, Environment, and Community Dynamics (L-PEC). Adapted from Seidel et. al (2009) L-PEC was a theoretical lens to guide inquiry and action specific to the teacher’s (i.e., Ali’s) classroom. Ali’s evolving praxis served as a source of inspiration for the other Grade 3-4 teachers in her school who formed their own community of practice to support student learning through the visual arts.

Globally, teachers are trained to educate and assess children through matrices based on comparative competition, a practice that thrives on ranking. In an era of glocalization, how might educational systems cultivate classroom connections embracing diverse student gifts? This arts-based narrative inquiry explores fatherly life lessons of 17 undergraduate and six graduate students enrolled in an introductory qualitative research course at a large urban Chinese university. Building on the course instructor’s model, students engaged in arts-based narrative inquiry to develop children’s books on treasured fatherly life lessons that they then shared with second grade students at a local Chinese school. Drawing upon the Confucian Analects and Laozi’s Tao Te Ching, this study evidences empathy as rooted across cultures and ecologies, and that many fatherly life lessons take place in natural settings. This study encourages teacher education practice and research to engage arts-based autobiographical inquiry, and to explore empathy conceptualizations and expressions across cultures and ecologies. As glocalization brings together diverse groups, this work is important to create shared spaces for international connection and meaningful inter-institutional explorations.

In the field of education, there has been an increased emphasis on evidence-based practice. Yet, traditional dissemination methods continue to be used. Using more creative and innovative strategies to disseminate research are needed. Theatre is one such method. Stemming from the research on knowledge mobilization and theatre as a method for social change, this study aimed to understand educator’s perceptions and attitudes about using theatre to disseminate research. The study’s method included a Likert-scale survey with the option to add open-ended responses. Responses from the 110 educators who viewed the research-based play indicated that the use of theatre has the ability to increase the impact of research use on practitioners in education.

This qualitative study employed grounded theory to explore how a university-based summer practicum experience with community children (N=55) revealed and shaped pre-service teachers' (N=24) understanding of young children and their musical skills and dispositions; how early childhood music curriculum is designed; and supports and barriers to music instruction. We learned that a collaborative professional setting, training and mentoring, and access to developmentally appropriate music curriculum resources scaffolded pre-service teachers’ abilities to develop a music unit within the curriculum. These university students gained understanding and appreciation for the music theme’s connection to academic content and how music bridged cultural boundaries. We also observed contrasts in students’ musical self-efficacy that seemed to be related to their perceptions of the children’s musical interests. Continued teacher education research is needed to discern the pre-service preparation that yields curriculum and teaching suffused with rich and joyous music learning experiences for young children.

The aim of this case study was to discover how three Sami artist present their culture in their arts and how their art grows from Sami traditions. Our first purpose was to find out how they use their art forms’ roots to create new ideas. The other purpose of this study was to bring into discussion the importance of a minority culture’s arts in teacher education programmes. The data was collected from the writings of and interviews with three Sami artists for whom Sami tradition is strongly present. Sami artists can be seen as an open space for challenging preoccupations and prejudices in which traditions and artistic practices work as playful means of questioning the ways in which subjects, social interactions, and practices are constructed. In these artistic processes, subjects and cultures become hybrid and a changing force for interaction among cultural traditions, other cultural ideas, and the environment to generate new arts.

This article examines the relationships between the embodiment of dramatic characters, gender, and identity. It draws on ethnographic data based on observations and interviews with 24 drama teachers and senior secondary drama students in Western Australia. We explore how student becomings in year 12 drama classrooms are mediated and constituted through socially overcoded gender binaries in a dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. We ask the questions: What constructions of femininity and masculinity are students embodying from popular dramatic texts in the drama classroom at a critical time in their social and emotional development? Are these constructions empowering? Or disempowering? What factors are influencing teachers’ choices of texts for their predominantly female students? Our research shows that what is delimiting about this potentiality in a time of identity exploration and formation are the constraining gender-binary roles available to young women particularly, and the performative pressures teachers are experiencing.

Inspired by the affective and sensory turns in the paradigm of art history, this article discusses making pictures as a method of teaching art history in Finnish Upper Secondary Vocational Education and Training (Qualification in Visual Expression, Study Programmes in Visual and Media Arts and Photography). A total of 25 students majoring in visual and media arts and photography participated in the research, studying art history by visual means and reflecting on their learning experiences. This article follows the principles of contextual subject-related didactics, where contemporary conceptions of the discipline and the objectives of the curriculum direct the choice of instructional approaches. The study shows that making pictures motivated the students to study art history and develop practical skills within the discipline in accordance with the curriculum objectives. In visual terms, the kinesthetic and haptic qualities associated with making pictures brought affects and emotions to art historical inquiries, which built bridges between art history and the students’ life-worlds.

This is an autoethnographic reflection of teaching Aboriginal art as a non-Aboriginal person. Over a period of ten months, a class of grade seven students was led through an inquiry into Aboriginal art including research and the creation of individual and group art pieces. The evolving curriculum was shaped by considerations of respect for individuals or groups, working with partial knowledge, as well as personal stories and histories. New perspectives emerge through re-examination of this experience through a metaphor of walking and wandering. This a/r/tographic treatment explores approaches for teaching in unfamiliar territories of cultural difference and acknowledges complicated conversations along the way.

Maxine Greene championed that teachers and students can discover openings providing space for the development of wide-awakeness through art and aesthetic education. Wide-awakeness is a heightened sense of consciousness encouraging critical awareness and deep engagement with one’s world. As individuals come alive in this way, their open-minded exploration is fueled by their development of personal agency and self-worth through their pursuit of presentness and possibility. Through a case study of the college art education course, Pedagogy as Art Practice, I sought to gain a better understanding of what ways the teacher and students’ engendered wide-awakeness, how the structure of the course supported this development, and how this impacted the participants. With this paper I narrate the story of how the participants’ being with and being there, or their relational and intellectual engagement, facilitated their enactment of wide-awakeness.

In this paper, co-musicking in teaching is discussed on the basis of findings from a study on pop band and piano teaching. We understand co-musicking as collaboration between music-makers, including pupils. For this study, we chose to focus on the actions that teachers and student teachers take during pupils’ performance of a piece of music in a teaching session. The data was gathered using stimulated recall interviews. The findings include the use of different modes: teachers playing along with students, using their voice, or using gestures and body language. The purposes of these actions included scaffolding performances and experiences, recognizing pupils’ effort, and opening up a space for reflection. We suggest that the teaching practices studied can be interpreted as improvisational because the teachers and student teachers respond instantly, flexibly, and creatively to the pupils’ performances and expressions.

Drawing on theories and practices in literacy education and in particular, the concepts of semiotics and transmediation, we explored the possibility of arts-based experiences such as Augusto Boal’s Image Theatre in facilitating transformation of thinking in the context of global citizenship education. The objectives of this research were twofold. The first was to concretize the notion of an image-based, multimodal pedagogy into a practice-based instructional model, while the second was to provide case-study examples of how our pedagogy was enacted in two undergraduate-level courses with a global focus. We adopted a participatory-action research design and analyzed data using a grounded theory approach. The data sources for this research included videotaped performing sessions, observation notes, written reflections, end-of-course surveys, photos, artwork, and other student constructed artifacts. The results indicate that Image Theatre and arts-based experiences can expand and deepen student thinking on issues of global citizenship. Implications for pedagogy include increasing the use of arts and theatre for class interactions on traditional readings and themes.

During this inquiry, I describe my journey as a beginning arts-based researcher, using this methodological approach to explore the “peak experiences” of five, second-grade gifted students in a general classroom. Concerned with collecting valid data from young children through traditional interviewing techniques, I turned to Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) and had the students create self-portraits with captions to illustrate peak experience. After converting the visual data into language and serving as a bricoleur, I engaged in thematic coding (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The following themes emerged: students perceived the teacher having a direct impact on their peak experiences; students experienced peak experiences when being praised or recognized; students experienced peak states when engaging in intellectually challenging curriculum as well as creative activities such as drawing. I discuss the importance of training for those working with gifted students, and based on Foucault’s (1980) ideas on power, address the notion the classroom teacher might possess much power over the conditions that contribute to the students’ peak experiences. Finally, I note the potential of considering arts-based educational research to inform the field of gifted education.

The arts have long been known as a central medium for nurturing artistic expression and aesthetic responses. Notions of arts-based teaching are combined with concepts of literacy and composition, focusing on the fact that these separate fields have the potential for relational meaning making. In this article, three arts-based, qualitative research inquiries are featured within a larger, one-year Community Arts Zone (CAZ) research project involving eight projects across four international sites. Findings from the three inquiries in music, visual arts, and drama highlight that responsive meaning making foregrounds aesthetics to create agentive learning environments. By providing students agency in their artistic expressions, there is the hopeful prospect of working in and across various modes to cultivate meaningful learning experiences.

By exploring changemaker principles as a component of social justice art education this research informed article exemplifies how moral consciousness and responsibility can be developed when training artist teachers. It embeds changemaker philosophy in the higher education art curriculum and demonstrates how this can create ruptures and ripples into educational pedagogy at the school level. A sociocultural qualitative methodology, that employs questionnaires, the visual and a focus group as methods, is used to reveal three lenses on student perceptions of the changemaker principle. The dissemination of these perceptions and sharing of active art experiences communicate how engagement with the concept of changemaker in art education can deepen the cognitive growth of learners, whilst facilitating an understanding of and involvement in interculturality.

These two pieces represent a new approach to the presentation of ABER inquiry projects. They are part ABER writing and presentation mixed with more conventionally scholarly voiced writing. Trois Chaises is all at once a theoretical examination of ABER practice, a presentation of one ABER practitioner’s practice and a presentation of the actual ABER work. Dr. Carlson’s work is a poetic, personal and scholarly response to both the manuscript and a public, live performance of the work. The accompanying video is an artistically rendered version of the ABER piece. This scholarship is meant to honor the humanness of inquiry and, yet, not give up the more formal voice of thinking through ideas and issues, both with method and, in our case, thinking through schools as places for the pursuit of a self.

This article reports a study on an encounter between preschoolers and contemporary photography. The article has two aims: first, it elucidates preschoolers’ meaning- making when viewing photographs, and second, it investigates the possible benefits of using contemporary photography as a forum for prompting children’s aesthetic agency in early childhood education. This article is based on a qualitative case study that draws on childhood studies, research in art education and visual cultural studies. The data was produced in a photography workshop in a Finnish daycare center in autumn 2014 during which children both viewed contemporary photographic art and took photographs themselves. The article reports on preschoolers’ accounts of contemporary photography studied by applying discourse analytic thinking. In contrast to earlier research findings, the article elucidates diversity and flexibility in the preschoolers’ accounts and their aesthetic agency expressed in both individual and collective meaning-making.

This study explores how a variety of music alumni perceive the skills that they learned at their institutions in comparison to their diverse career outcomes using data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP). Focusing on alumni with music education, music theory, and music performance majors (16,317 respondents from 105 different arts undergraduate and graduate colleges or arts programs within larger universities), the study demonstrates how a survey of skills learned and career outcomes is a meaningful way of measuring student achievement and skill. Similarities and differences between these three majors are further investigated using inferential statistical analyses. There is also further discussion suggesting that equating “value” in education solely with alumni income may not be the most appropriate for the arts, and that value instead could be expanded to include various skills and components of job satisfaction in understanding alumni success.

This study investigates young children’s responses to viewing artworks in a preschool setting. Based on the responses of 15 children aged five to six years during five art viewing sessions in a preschool in Singapore, the study examines features of what young children see, think and feel when they view artworks. These sessions were facilitated by their class teacher using techniques from Visual Thinking Strategies. The data obtained from the children’s responses were analysed qualitatively using Grounded Theory. The findings revealed that children respond to artworks visually, cognitively and somatically, in that they talk about what they see, think and feel. The children’s comments featured content, formal art elements, personal connections, creativity and imagination, affect and vocalisms, with personal connections making up two-thirds of their responses. This study highlights the rich experiences that young children gain from viewing artworks and the importance of including art viewing into the early childhood art curriculum.

As art teacher educators, we want our students to be passionate, informed advocates for art education and capable of conducting action research as artist/teacher/researchers. Students are constantly in the process of understanding what it means to teach with and through the arts. In our art education program, we work to exemplify this complex process through a curricular structure built around encouraging a new generation of art teachers to conduct thoughtful, digitally relevant research centered on improving the field of art education through examination of their own context and understanding. We describe this process here through specific projects and processes, aligned throughout an art teacher education program and how it leads to a final product with the digital teaching portfolio. Connections are made to the action research cycle and a/r/tographic processes that encourage advocacy and professionalism within an evolving, digitally relevant, process-product experience for pre-service art teachers.

This article examines how dress fashion in outdoor sculptures of the 1990s in the Accra cityscape accentuated feminist activism, sensitised child right campaigns, and encouraged girl-child education in support of governmental efforts and activism of civil society organisations in Ghana. It gives attention to how dress fashion of the time was used in the social construction of feminist identities and the promotion of child rights through outdoor public cement sculptures. The study takes a multidisciplinary dimension of looking into the synergy of using public sculpture for multiple attention-seeking constructs: dress fashion, feminism, child right and education. Simple narrative analysis was used in the presentation of data gathered through observation and photographic documentation of selected public sculptures of the 1990s in the Accra Metropolis. The study revealed that ‘kaba’ fashion and precolonial feminine wraparound dress styles, contributed to the creation of feminist identities and intensified feminist activism in Ghana in the 1990s.

Informed by the results of a collaborative project carried out with six secondary school students, this paper reflects on the methodological and epistemological issues related to the representation of informal learning practices. Borrowing a concept from the arts, I suggest that a representationalist logic in both schooling and educational research contexts can produce a negative space, a data site composed of practices, gestures and experiences that are rendered invisible within dominant narratives on learning. In an attempt to revisit and resignify the negative space of my fieldwork, I use Michel de Certeau’s theory on tactics in an attempt to rethink youth participation. Finally, I explore how an arts-informed approach to educational ethnography can account for learning that falls outside the realm of assessment, tracing a connection between artistic modes of knowing, research practice, and the performance of learning as gesture.

This case study explores the application of interpretive strategies as tools to facilitate transformative learning and advance young adults’ abilities in various learning contexts. While much of the literature on adult museum program education focuses on older adults’ learning, this study emphasizes the impact of interpretive skills training at a Southwestern university photography center on student tour guides’ personal and professional learning. The findings reveal that the training allowed these student tour guides to transform their notions of learning and teaching through interpretive dialogues, cogenerative learning, and critical reflections. The interpretive skills training enhanced the participants’ abilities to become better public speakers, interpretive writers, thoughtful educators, and efficient learners. Based upon the findings, the research suggests that interpretive strategies are useful to develop future teachers to be open to different perspectives, willing to consider new ideas, and create a two-way transformative learning loop with their students.

This autoethnography traces the author’s shifting masculine identities as they have evolved across time and contexts. This piece splices journals and blogs from the author’s past with prevailing masculinities theory, spectral data (Nordstrom, 2013), post-structural feminist theory and the author’s present gender identity to investigate what can be learned about gender flexibility within one person’s lived experience. The paper offers a special glimpse into the masculine narratives the author performed during one phase of his early adulthood and opens possibilities for alternative discourses. By closely analyzing his gender expressions and identity, the autoethnography reveals moments when his masculinities intersect with and diverge from dominant narratives in masculinities, which fractures notions of a monolithic masculine experience. Ultimately, it suggests fractured masculinities that destabilizes gender and suggests masculinity is an always ongoing, incomplete, flexible, process of becoming.

In this article, the authors (then two doctoral students) describe their methodology of engaging in an interdisciplinary, collaborative doctoral arts-based research (ABR) project. Education and the arts were integrated utilizing dance methods of bodily writing and performative inquiry to strengthen the analysis of dissertation findings in the field of teacher education. We share our theoretical stance based on somatics, embodiment, and rhizomatics, followed by a thick description of our rhizomatic actions of becoming collaborative arts-based researchers. We advocate, argue, and fight for the right to introduce and encourage interdisciplinary and collaborative research with the arts in doctoral students’ studies and highlight the implications our project had on accessibility to research and engagement with broader audiences as well as our entrant-audience. We argue that ultimately, combining efforts to bring collaborative interdisciplinary ABR into doctoral students’ work will foster benefits for both doctoral students and the research produced.

This qualitative research discusses a Finnish community music project aimed at school pupils with disabilities. The practices of this project define community music as community-driven, goal-oriented participatory music-making with a musician as a facilitator. Instead of the effects on pupils, this research investigates the project’s impacts on school employees. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with special class teachers and special needs assistants (n = 8) to examine their experiences and perceptions of the project’s influences on their work and work environment. The project’s impacts were related to teachers’ learning of new skills, positive feelings and increased sense of community within and between the classes of pupils with special needs. The research is linked to the discussion on artist-teacher collaboration in schools, on artistic interventions at work, and on artistic initiatives in the public sector more generally.

This paper presents a three-year participatory action research project focusing on the graduate level course entitled Visual Learning in 3D Animated Virtual Worlds. The purpose of this research was to understand How the virtual world processes of observing and creating can best help students learn visual theories. The first cycle of this research revealed that hands-on virtual world experiences do help students perceive the real world environment and learn visual theories. The second cycle of the research showed that a teacher-free learning environment was well perceived by students. The third cycle of the research showed that the intensive course did not allow students to have time to reflect or form the deeper understanding necessary for making connections between theory and practice. Therefore, this research suggests that the best way to help students learn visual theories is through creating a teacher-free visual learning environment within the span of a regular course.

Drawing from both narrative research and Joe Kincheloe’s work of research bricolage this study inquired into how textiles have served as educator throughout my life. Weaving, as the earliest and most integral of textile fabrications, is particularly featured in this narrative inquiry. A loom, in its most basic form, consists of three components; a rigid weaving structure (the frame), cording to weave onto (the warp), and materials to weave with (the weft). This three-part weaving structure also acted as the metaphorical and physical writing structure throughout my work. Structurally, my work views narrative methods, supported by bricolage, as its research frame. This acts as the main frame for the analytic weaving of the study. The warp of my work were the textiles themselves, serving as the material educator I returned to as anchors for my woven stories. By understanding our own history of clothing, we might unclothe our relationship to textiles. This “unclothing” can act as a basis for grounding curriculum that is largely ignored in schools today.

The landscape of tertiary education has significantly changed in recent years with increasing pressure on universities to “globalize” and expand their reach internationally. In this context, there are a range of pedagogical and cultural issues to consider when designing curriculum to address the needs of students taking courses in different geographical locations. In addition to ensuring equivalence and quality, developing context-specific learning resources is a critical part of international delivery. Providing flexibility and autonomy to meet specific geo-cultural teaching and learning needs is vital. Programs and courses benefit from collaboration and connectivity between students and staff in all locations to ensure meaningful global learning environments. This paper focuses on a case study from an Australian University and examines how curriculum and delivery modes can be adapted to address the changing needs of transnational education a global context. The case study involves the renewal of a core undergraduate art history and theory subject that is offered in art and design programs across three different locations (Melbourne, Hong Kong and Vietnam). A series of learning materials and assessment tasks were designed to maximize a blended learning environment comprising face-to-face workshops, lectures, and online components. The result is a technology-enabled, common curriculum framework designed to allow for content to be adapted for local delivery.