International Dialogues about Visual Culture, Education and Art

International Dialogues about Visual Culture, Education and Art

Edited by Rachel Mason and Teresa Torres Pereira de Eça

First Published in the UK in 2008 by

Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2008 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2008 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover Photographs: Nelson Hoedekie

Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons

Copy Editor: Holly Spradling

Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-167-3/EISBN 978-1-84150-227-4

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

CONTENTS

Preface: The Politics of International Art Education

Ana Mae Barbosa

Introduction

Rachel Mason & Teresa Eça

PART 1: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

Creativity and Culture: Redefining Knowledge Through the Arts in Education for the Local in a Globalized World

Elizabeth Grierson

Folk Arts and Traditional Media in Environmental Education

Durgadas Mukhopadhyay

Leading to Creativity: Responding to Policy in Art Education

Kerry Freedman

Post-colonization and Art Education: Standards, Aesthetics and the Place of the Art Museum

Nancy Barnard

PART 2: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

Between Circumstances and Controversies: Proposals for a Visual Arts Critical Pedagogy

Irene Tourinho & Raimundo Martins

Cultural Literacy: An Arts-based Interdisciplinary Pedagogy for the Creation of Democratic Multicultural Societies

Dan Baron Cohen & Manoela Souza

Social Justice Through Curriculum: Investigating Issues of Diversity

Patricia L. Stuhr, Christine Ballengee-Morris, Vesta A. H. Daniel

Contemporary Artworks as Sites for Identity Research

Rachel Mason

Face (in) the Mirror

Nelson Hoedekie

PART 3: NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Blended Learning in Art Education: New Ways of Improving Visual Literacy

Dolores Alvarez-Rodriguez

Developing a Learning Environment for Drama with Hypermedia

Daniela Reimann

Implications of Media Technology-based Workshops for Art Education

Kaziju Mogi, Kinichi Fukomoto, Nagamori Motoki, Toshifumi Abe, Toshio Naoe & Yuuka Sato

Creating, Developing and Maintaining a Digital Magazine: Revista Digital Art&

Jurema Luzia De Freitas Sampaio-Ralha, Martha Prata-Linhares, Anna Rita Araújo & Gisele Torres Martini

PART 4: COMMUNITY AND ENVIRONMENT

Sementinha: School Under the Mango Tree

Ana Angélica Albano

Cultural Brokerage and Regional Arts: Developing an Enabler Model for Cultural and Economic Sustainability

Robyn Stewart & Christine Campbell

Art, Ecology and the Giant Sequoia Project

Elizabeth Kenneday

The Visual Arts and Development of Marine Ecological Values: The WorldFish Center Project

Lindsay Broughton, Jane Quon & Peter Hay

Environmental Art and Community Art Learning in Northern Places

Timo Jokela & Maria Huhmarniemi

PART 5: ART EDUCATION FOR PEACE

The Iraqi War Through Our Eyes

Bitte Fossbo

Art Educators’ Positions on Violent Conflict in Israel

Nurit Cohen-Evron

Fostering Community Cohesion Through Visual Arts: An ‘Art for Peace’ Project with Young British-Muslim Girls

Mousumi De, Alan Hunter & Andree Woodcock

Children’s Pictures in the Aftermath of War. What do they Tell Us?

Victoria Pavlou

POSTSCRIPT: CHILDREN'S DRAWINGS

The Ethiopian Village in Jewish Children’s Drawings

Rachel Kroupp

Young Adults’ Constructions of Meaning in Child Art

Lourdes K. Samson

About the Contributors

Index

PREFACE: THE POLITICS OF INTERNATIONAL ART EDUCATION

Ana Mae Barbosa

University of São Paulo, Brazil

Warm congratulations to Rachel Mason and Teresa Eça for proposing a book about art education so heavily embedded in political thinking. Since the beginning of my professional life in art education, politics has been my main concern. I remember a publisher questioned my first article in a North American publication because he said art education has nothing to do with politics. Robert Ott, who defended the text, told him that whereas this might be the situation in the USA it was probably different in my country. Indeed it was. My text showed how the dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1984) attempted to detach art education from its social context and promoted teacher training that resulted in incompetent teachers. It wasn’t translated into Portuguese because this would have caused more damage to my family and me. By that time the army had invaded the house in Recife where I lived with my husband (a professor of literature) on two occasions and we had moved to Brasilia and been fired from very good jobs at the university there. We finally gained internal asylum in São Paulo, a big city where young people like us were invisible.

A few years later when I was invited to contribute to a book about art education and democracy published in the USA, my text was refused because, for the people concerned, democracy signified the politics of gender and multiculturalism, not presidential elections or the direct vote. I was influential in the participation of art teachers in the movement in favour of elections in Brazil (Diretas Ja), the strongest movement for democracy we had, in which millions of people took to the streets with meaningful posters and beautiful images.

This book reinforces my experience of the close relationship of art with real-life politics; and my belief that it is only possible to develop art in education in truly democratic and free societies. It explores many ways in which art education can promote equality of opportunity and work towards survival of the human race. It includes articles, for example, about: regional arts in the globalized economy, taking responsibility for the environment, learning in the community, the dialectics of multiple identities, public policy and democratization of knowledge. It even demonstrates a concern to put new technologies in the service of marginalized peoples. Among the topics discussed, creativity, multiculturalism and postcolonialism are my long-term cultural concerns.

The movement back to creativity we are witnessing today is not a return to the ideas of the 1960s. In the 1960s fluency was understood as the most valuable mental process in creative thinking. Today only neo-liberal and capitalist pedagogues subscribe to this view with the aim of producing a workforce that generates numerous novel ideas for the marketplace. Art educators who are concerned about social and political problems agree with Kerry Freedman that

Creative teaching is teaching for meaning, that emphasizes concepts as well as skills of analysis, critique, and synthesis in expressive art making, writing, and speaking. It helps students to understand the importance of art in their lives and relates this knowledge to other modes of communication.

(p. 43)

Creativity today is linked with mental processes like flexibility and elaboration implicated in reconstruction and transformation. Moreover, the development of creativity is not confined to making art as in modernist times. Reading and understanding the meaning of art and visual culture are understood to stimulate the creative process. One task for politicized art educators is to mobilize creativity to question cultural stereotypes and build multicultural knowledge.

Multiculturalism or ‘interculturalism’ centers on searching out questions rather than providing ready-made answers (Geyer 1993). The questions have to be organized in ways that clarify national race relations and global conditions at one and the same time. I am not concerned here with the insidious process of legitimizing the global by reversing it into the local, but with capturing the new perceptions and sensations that result from connecting global and local cultures in the process of building new knowledge.

Interest in such topics in neo-colonialist central countries is fairly recent. In the 1960s and 1970s concepts like cultural identity and diversity were popular only in culturally colonised Third World countries; or with the minority groups in the United States and Europe. The Cultural Revolution that took place in Europe and United States in 1968 was strongly influenced by the liberation movements in colonized countries. Central countries only became interested in multiculturalism after the 1980s. When large numbers of dominated peoples (immigrants) started to knock on European doors, and black Americans, protected by law, demanded visibility and participation, members of the dominant system experienced a kind of penitence. They were moved by social guilt and began to identify the need to respect the previously undervalued cultures they had repressed in the past.

Researchers in the developed world who are committed to solving social problems today are focusing their attention on concepts like multiculturalism, cultural diversity and cultural history. However, their studies are not very helpful for the Third World because the answers pertain to their own societies. They do not pay much attention to social prejudice, for example, a variable that is very significant in the Third World. The educational systems in many Third World countries have promoted knowledge of European cultural codes as a means to increasing the efficiency of domination. Where the colonizers were unable to dominate a nation through education, they did so culturally by withholding erudite knowledge. This is the case with the Cayman Islands as this book explains – they still do not have visual arts or art education at university level. The strategy of denying colonized countries university level education is intended to weaken the ‘intelligensia’. It is also a way of attracting them to study in the central country and of selling education directly to the colonized. Some colonizer countries have free university education for nationals but charge very high fees for citizens of ex- colonies. Poor countries are paying for education of nationals in many rich countries, therefore.

Building dominant country codes into multicultural education programmes is crucial. It is important to know them so as to access power. Today the Third World is in a position to reclaim the multiculturality of multiculturalism or meta-multiculturalism. This is why we must produce our own research, analyses and actions in order to overcome class prejudice and persistent intellectual boycotting. Finding a balance between configurations of cultural identity and diversity is the objective. It is a utopian quest that will most likely put art education in a constant state of flux, because neither identity nor cultural environments are fixed. This is clear after reading Rachel Mason’s excellent text.

We know that cultural identity is constructed around ‘difference’. When cultural differences are fudged, the cultural ‘ego’ disappears. So, searching for cultural identity is not a linear operation, it relies on a complex, dialectic inter-relationship. Each imbalance threatens to reduce multicultural education to a simple co-option of minority strengths, leading to neo-colonialist forms of education. However, strengthening cultural diversity is the only way to attain truly democratic education. A search for equity that fails to take difference into account results in the homogenization that makes societies easy targets for the pervasive effects of globalization. Democracy needs art educators who concentrate on reconfiguring earlier forms of domination. This is the function of postcolonial intellectuals, especially in the Third World. It is only through reconsidering the problems of domination and hegemony that the poor of the world will effect transformation in the context of contemporary global relations.

Besides social and political concerns, this book balances visual and verbal discourse wonderfully well. This is characteristic of Rachel’s work as editor of the International Journal of Education through Art. Teresa is involved in this balancing act also in her work for the Portuguese journal Imaginar.

I am very grateful to Rachel and Teresa for the invitation to write this preface. In asking a Third World art educator to do this they have proved their commitment to international equity. International democracy is utopia. The postmodernists proclaimed the death of utopia. It never died but was transformed from HOPE into an exercise of IMAGINATION. Art Educators of the World, do not give up Utopia as an exercise of Imagination.

Reference

Geyer, M. (1993), Multiculturalism. In Critical Inquiry, 19 (3) Spring, p. 502.

INTRODUCTION

Rachel Mason & Teresa Eça

The Congress

This book originated in an international congress for teachers, museum educators, curators and others involved in arts education held in Viseu-Portugal between the 1st and 5th of March 2006. It was intended to provide a platform for dialogue about arts education and society for questioning and evaluating ways in which arts are produced and taught.

Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Art Education was one of the most historically significant congresses hosted by the International Society for Education Through Art (InSEA). It was scheduled strategically to occur immediately prior to a UNESCO World Arts Education Conference and facilitate interdisciplinary exchange through joint participation by representatives of the International Society for Education Through Art (Inseam); The International Society for Music Education (ISME) and The International Drama/Theatre and Education Association (IDEA). The convenors hoped it would facilitate meaningful debate about policy issues of mutual international concern

InSEA was founded in 1954 as a non-governmental organization in consultative relations with UNESCO. Its mission is sharing experience on a worldwide basis, improving practice and strengthening the position of visual arts education and the cultural life of communities. Today InSEA promotes cross-cultural understanding and acts as a catalyst for joint research and curriculum development among specialists from different cultures. Likewise ISME serves as the voice of music educators and aspires to advance music education throughout the world. IDEA was founded in 1992 and members are united by the guiding principle that ‘all human beings have the capacity and the right to learn the creative languages and skills needed to be human and to create a just and peaceful world’.

InSEA, ISME and IDEA have a relationship with UNESCO as recognized Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) committed to improving education through arts internationally. Each organization boasts a remarkable history of contributing to the enrichment of intercultural understanding and improving arts education around the world. The outcomes of their meeting at Viseu were summarized in an InSEA/ISME/IDEA Joint Declaration creating a World Alliance for Arts Education. This document calls for new, more appropriate paradigms of education that transmit and transform culture through the humanizing languages of the arts.

We believe that today’s knowledge-based, post-industrial societies require citizens with confident flexible intelligences, creative verbal and non-verbal communication skills, abilities to think critically and imaginatively, intercultural understandings and an empathic commitment to cultural diversity.

(Joint declaration, Viseu/Portugal, March 4, 2006)¹

The UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education took place in Lisbon between 6–9 March 2006. The recommendations of the World Alliance for Arts Education provided valuable insights and viewpoints for discussion of UNESCO’s ‘Road Map for Arts Education – Building Creative Capacities for the 21st Century’² (UNESCO 2006).

The main themes of the Viseu congress were: Arts Education and Contemporary Societies; Arts Education and Peace; and Arts and New Technologies. Educators from a wide range of disciplines were invited to explore the role of the arts in fostering social inclusion, group identity and greater tolerance of cultural diversity. Congress presentations confirmed that they communicate important socio-economic issues and are a powerful means to cultural preservation and to developing critical awareness of globalization and cultural bias. Where arts pedagogies are informed by consideration of community and the goal of social justice, they have enormous potential to enrich young people’s lives.

The founders of InSEA believed international co-operation and improved understanding between peoples can be furthered by education through art. They wanted the right of individuals to participate freely in the cultural life of their community, enjoy the arts and create beauty for themselves in a reciprocal relationship with the environment, to become a living reality. Their emphasis on a dialectic between culture and arts is crucial in the current political climate and global context. The Viseu congress also posed the question, ‘What contribution are arts educators making to world peace?’ Another question was ‘How are they responding to the huge possibilities for extended forms of communication that digital technology has opened up?’ Throughout history artists have always been at the forefront using and adapting current technologies and contributions that explored innovative and interdisciplinary applications of technologies in international projects were invited. Overall, the congress offered fantastic opportunities for arts educators to listen and learn from constructive responses to the so-called crisis of society. It was an effective channel for intercultural debate, cross-cultural communication and exchanges of innovative educational policies and practice. Hopefully, it has fostered further critical investigation into the educational, socio-economic and cultural impacts of the arts.

Although some drama, music, dance and multimedia experts attended, visual arts specialists predominated. The congress convenors wanted to attract delegates from countries not typically represented at InSEA congresses which are dominated by English language. Although this problem was not resolved (only one room in the congress had simultaneous translation for financial reasons), there was strong participation from non-Anglo-speaking countries. From a total of 479 participants, 72 were from South America, 25 from Australia and New Zealand, 16 from North America, 56 from Asia, 72 from northern Europe, 42 from eastern Europe and 196 from southern Europe. The percentage of papers by Iberian-language speakers was encouraging. Brazilian delegates submitted 61 papers and Spanish delegates submitted 42. There were fewer communications from Portugal, which is not surprising given the lack of support there for art education research.

The work and ideas delegates shared demonstrated such a strong commitment to teaching and research that the organizers felt it was important to disseminate them more widely. They had no previous experience of publishing and are grateful to Rachel Mason for accepting their challenge to collaborate with Teresa Eça on preparing this book.

The Book

The selection of papers was informed by three broad criteria: a desire to facilitate new voices in art education, ensure representation from different parts of the globe and reflect the congress aims. After due consideration they were organized under the following themes:

1. global perspectives on arts education policy;

2. discussion of theory and practice located in critical pedagogy;

3. exemplary projects involving new technologies;

4. projects targeted at community and environment; and

5. projects focusing on art education for peace. The positive experience of publishing visual essays in the InSEA journal led to a decision to try to effect a balance between images and words and include visual texts.

The four position papers that come first offer contrasting viewpoints on globalization, creativity and visual arts education policy. Authors are united in the conviction that art educators must strive to become more actively involved in arts policies directed towards strengthening cultural identity, knowledge and practice.

The first one from the South Pacific reports on policies and strategies for mobilizing culture and creativity in and through the arts in education and community settings. After examining policy struggles in the arts and creative knowledge fields, it details three initiatives by artists and arts educators in the region targeted at a reconstructing community responsibilities and sensibilities that took the form of a book, two conferences and a series of gatherings. The second paper argues for pedagogy that develops awareness of and prevents global environmental catastrophe. It reports how folk arts have been and are being harnessed to achieve environmental education aims in India and argues the case for their use as a means of communication, especially in rural areas, in development programmes throughout the Third World. The third paper addresses the resurgence of interest in creativity among policy-makers in post-industrial societies and the problem of conflicting positions in educational policymaking. Using the US example, it examines what art teachers can do to achieve participation and make art education meaningful for learners in the context of the global condition. The last paper in the section focuses on cultural identity in colonial and postcolonial nations and implications for museum policy and practice. It reports on some research into current arts practices in the Cayman Islands and the difficulties this overseas territory is experiencing determining its own aesthetic standards and goals.

Critical theory is a vital strand of arts education pedagogy. The papers in this section exemplify this with their emphasis on developing learners’ critical abilities and skills, transforming school art curricula and combating resistance to change. It includes two contributions from Brazil. The first proposes ‘nomadic consciousness’, assuming a qualitative stance on learning, teaching and research and radical educational practice in the public domain as strategies for effecting curriculum reform. The second explicates a pedagogy of cultural literacy two cultural workers developed through collaborating with the landless, indigenous and trade union movements in Brazil. Their image text details eight steps of an interdisciplinary arts project they applied in an agro-ecological school in Santa Catarina resulting in a community mosaic.

A third paper in the section focuses on multiculturalism and education for democracy in the United States. Specifically it argues a case for examining the personal and communal narratives controlling visual culture in everyday life and helping young people view images in ‘thoughtful ways’. In a curriculum example, learners explore how politicians and civic leaders use imagery to present themselves and influence peoples’ actions and views on issues such as terrorism and war. The last paper critiques British multicultural education policy in the school subjects of Citizenship and Art. After deconstructing the work of five culturally diverse women artists, it calls for a reduction in the emphasis on ‘ethnicity’ in curricula and proposes that lessons targeted at fostering national identity use artworks in which contemporary artists represent and construct their multiple identities as a multicultural educational resource.

It is clear from the next five papers that new technologies are enlarging the scope of tools available in art teaching and research. The first paper from Spain reports on experiments in blended learning, defined as a hybrid methodology that uses arts-based activities to incorporate computers into learning. It details a number of Web-based projects that created visual environments for teacher education courses in Spain and a visual arts network for European secondary schools. A third project from Germany is reported that integrated art with hypermedia storytelling with a view to supporting media literacy. Whereas the author advocates the use of digital media in schools, divisions between arts media design and computer science are blocking progress. The fourth project describes multimedia workshops for children implemented in a special needs school and museum in Japan. This collaborative team are committed to workshop-style teaching and artful, playful learning styles using information technology. The last paper, from Brazil, is living proof of the emancipatory potential of communication technologies. It tells the story of the creation and ongoing development of a digital magazine by a group of volunteer art educators. The group are motivated by the desire to create something new and different and provide access to theory and practice in a situation where few art education publications exit. This collective project is experimenting with facilitating access to art education for professionals living in a country of vast geographical scale.

The four community and ecologically arts-based initiatives included in the fifth section were targeted at community development and sustainability and/or environmental management/conservation. Securing partnerships and funding are crucial to the success of these kinds of ventures. Two were carried out in Australia and one each in Finland and the USA.

The first Australian project was set up to stimulate community development and sustainability in remote rural areas. The product of a partnership between a university and business-related enterprises, it is investigating ways in which creative arts activities can be instrumental in motivating industry and commerce. The university acts as a ‘cultural broker’ working with the partners to uncover socially relevant information from young people and address emerging community issues. In the second Australian project, the arts were used to address conservation of the marine ecosystem in developing nations. The partnership included the WorldFish Center, a research council and university. Artists/students designed non-narrative screen-based activities to assist the Centre’s sustainable development programme and their effectiveness as a communication medium was evaluated.

The partners in a small-scale environmental project in the USA were a university-based art educator and the Save the Redwood League. It was interdisciplinary but used the arts to foster learning about the ecology of the giant sequoia tree. Student teachers were involved in learning about the cultural history of California, conservation, scientific illustration and ecology of the tree and developed a mural. The last project in the section set out to support local livelihoods and strengthen communities in northern Scandinavia. The partners were a university strongly committed to delivering art and community programmes, cultural organizations and the Finnish travel and tourist industry. It took the form of a travelling cross-national workshop that moved from the Bode in Norway along the Atlantic coast through northern Sweden and Finland and onto Russia and Murmansk on the Barents Sea. Travelling artists and educators worked with community artists and other interested persons along the way to create site-specific artworks and community-based public art

The papers in the last section provide examples of peace initiatives carried out in Israel, Sweden and the UK. One offers an overview of how Israeli art educators position themselves and their teaching of school students experiencing continuous war. Another reports an art for peace project with British-born Muslim girls set up in the wake of the terrorist bombings of the London Underground. An image text of paintings by children in Sweden of the Iraqi war is included. A research paper reports the results of some research into drawings by children who experienced war in the former Yugoslavia who experienced war and the potential of the method for diagnosing post-traumatic stress. In these papers the overlap between art education and art therapy is clear.

Finally, five image-texts have been inserted throughout the book because we want to promote the use of visual images as a research tool both for reflecting on and challenging current practice. The student artworks they reveal are thought-provoking and imaginative and evidence of culturally diverse art education theory and practice. The second section has images from a portrait workshop that set out to empower learners culturally and improve their self-esteem. The image text in the fourth section documents and explains an informal arts education-based project for young children and unemployed adults in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The last section has images of the Iraqi war produced by children in Sweden, drawings by Israeli children that communicate cultural information about the Ethiopian villages where they were born and in the postscript drawings by college students and young children in the Philippines.

To end on a personal note we think the book contains new visions and ideas pertaining to educational roles and value of the arts. A significant number of the papers explore innovative interdisciplinary applications of new technologies, thereby, confirming that artists and arts educators are increasingly finding their place in this imaginative creative space. The papers are strong on ways in which arts can be used formally and informally to foster social inclusion; and share a concern to nurture creative skills in ways that enable learners to respect and construct intercultural identities and appreciate diverse cultural forms. In most cases the authors use arts-based pedagogies to nurture societies based not on individualism and competition but on cooperation and peace. We have learned a great deal from editing them and hope readers will too.

Notes

1. Available at http://www.insea.org/ (accessed 2006-10-24).

2. Available at http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=30335&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (accessed 07-10-2006).

PART 1: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

CREATIVITY AND CULTURE: REDEFINING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH THE ARTS IN EDUCATION FOR THE LOCAL IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

Elizabeth Grierson

RMIT Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Australia

Abstract

This paper focuses on strategies for mobilizing culture and creativity through the arts in education and community settings. It reflects on a UNESCO regional meeting on the arts in education and presents three projects in the Pacific region that go some way towards meeting the challenges of globalization: the first is a research publication on art education; the second, involves scholarly exchanges that enhance cultural capacity-building and knowledge transfer; the third is a networked project lasting several years aimed at establishing a mode of regional thinking. Each project involves a range of