Four Decades of Emerging Scholarship in Visual Arts Education

This issue of Visual Arts Research marks our 40th year of publication. These past 40 years, Visual Arts Research has provided a forum for historical, critical, cultural, psychological, educational, and conceptual research in visual arts and aesthetic education. Unusual in its length and breadth, VAR typically publishes 9–12 scholarly papers per issue and remains committed to its original mission to provide a venue for both long-standing research questions and traditions alongside emerging interests and methodologies. Our current issue of the journal showcases scholarly research and insights about emerging creative digital media and sites, studies of the art-making practices of young people, research on art teacher professional development, aspects of our history as a profession, and how our practice as art educators is informed by an ethics of care. “Why Should Computational Work and Aesthetics Be Taught in the Art Classroom?” by Wun-Ting Hsu and Wen-Shu Lai opens this issue of Visual Arts Research. In their philosophical treatise on contemporary digital art forms, Hsu and Lai explain the importance of understanding both social meanings and aesthetic qualities of computer-facilitated art. The following two essays give us intriguing examples. “Assembling Visuality: Social Media, Everyday Imaging, and Critical Thinking in Digital Visual Culture” by Aaron Knochel explores the nature of the confluence of digital imaging and social media. Knochel first describes how a university-level course he taught utilized the social media website Flickr, and then explores how notions of visuality and a participatory culture were exemplified in the work of one of his students. The nature of visual aesthetic experience is further explored in Mary Stokrocki’s “Youth-Created Avatars, Sites, and Role-Playing in the Virtual Game The Sims 2.” Through participant observation, Stokrocki examined participants’ visual preferences, learning strategies, and storytelling practices within the gaming site The Sims 2. For all three of these authors, digital media literacy education is critical to 21st-century art education programs of study.

Like Stokrocki’s essay, the next two essays look at the art practices of young people. In “Manga Drawing as Stereotyped Aesthetics,” Chung Yim Lau shares insights from a longitudinal phenomenological study conducted of manga drawings produced by adolescents in Hong Kong. Lau finds that although these adolescents have derived imagery from manga images they have seen in popular visual culture, they have also connected concepts, characterizations, and stories within popular published manga to their own aspirations and life experiences. Working with younger artists, Christopher Schulte closely examined drawing practices of a 4-year-old boy participating in a Saturday morning art program. In “Re-Articulating the Child-Adult Relationship: Verbalization as a Threshold in Children’s Drawing Performances,” Schulte considers how teachers’ and researchers’ understandings of young children’s art making are both challenged by and enriched through dialogue, listening, and what he refers to as “acts of mutuality” in which “young people and adults exchange images, experiences, knowledge, and culture.”

Interest in teachers’ practices and understandings continues in the following three essays. In “Rethinking an Elementary Art Methods Course: A Model of Three Visual Arts Integration Strategies,” Jaehan Bae asks how pre-service elementary teachers later applied what they learned in his art methods course that engaged varying strategies for art integration with other school content areas. Bae suggests how pre-service art education methods courses might be adapted to provide clearer models and activities that promote interdisciplinary learning through the visual arts. In “The Becoming Art Teacher: A Reconciliation of Teacher Identity and the Dance of Teaching Art,” Kathleen Unrath, Mark Anderson, and Mary Franco investigate themes of personal and professional development in the becoming art teacher. Through a series of phenomenological interviews and an interpretive biographical methodology of one first-year professional, they illuminate identity development challenges of this art teacher. Their findings resonate with beginning teachers across all disciplines. Jane Cera’s “Teacher Leadership in Art Education Preparation” also concerns teacher development. Cera sets forth both a rationale and strategies for including teacher leadership training in art teacher preparation in order to empower first-year teachers to engage contemporary and social-justice-oriented art education practices...