Common Threads: Formally Addressing Informal Spaces, Identity, and Blurring

Keeping with the precedent set by our former VAR Senior Editors, every year, we will continue to publish one open issue and one themed special issue that is guest edited. Typically, the open issue will include any article accepted by the review board that exemplifies our mission statement of providing a forum for historical, critical, cultural, psychological, educational, and conceptual research in visual arts and aesthetic education. The articles showcased in our open issues do not have to fit any particular theme. However, much to our surprise, most of the articles submitted recently, and nearly all that were blind-reviewed and accepted for this particular open issue, shared several common threads, often from different perspectives but with the same underlying aims. We believe this speaks to the current times that we are in with increased attention to those spaces where adolescent learning and identity construction takes place outside of the classroom, and to the different technologies that may be associated with such informal learning experiences, whether in the classroom, public spaces, online, in social networks, at home, or on a cellular phone. We begin by providing a synopsis of each article before offering a brief overview of a few of the common threads woven throughout the articles in this open edition of Visual Arts Research. Then we conclude by segueing into a description of the new specialized feature, aptly conceptualized as “Common Threads,” which we are excited to be offering to our readers in the near future.

Synopses and Order

The order of papers is very deliberate in that we organized them in a manner that would build on concepts as the authors unfolded them in text. Certain papers provided a much-needed foundational understanding and exploration of a concept where others built on this knowledge without necessarily grounding it within their writing. Therefore, we begin with an article that richly discusses the concept of informal or third spaces for learning that will help the reader in understanding papers that immediately follow. In Olson’s article, “Tensions in the Third Space: Examining the Digital Visual Culture of Teenagers,” he “traces the third space to its roots as a discourse of dissent and conflict, and examines the unique tensions that arise in this space and their implications for art education” (Olson, 2016, p. 8). Olson provides clarity by using an example of a workshop that was designed as a third space that “intended to facilitate a productive space for tech-savvy teens to meet, work on self-initiated projects, and forge a cooperative community of art makers. [His] report presents a survey of the digital visual culture of these teenagers, and discusses the various tensions that arise in the third space between teacher and student, formal and informal learning, and offline and online” (Olson, 2016, p. 8).

In direct relation to informal spaces of learning is the concept of informal learning. In Wu’s article, “Video Game Prosumers: Case Study of a Minecraft Affinity Space,” she suggests that it is important to examine the mechanisms that prompt youth into self-initiated making. Drawing from theories on informal learning, her “study looks at a Minecraft video game affinity space to understand the mechanisms that support and encourage youth video game players to move beyond being consumers of video games and into being producers of artifacts” (Wu, 2016, p. 22). With access to online affinity spaces that encourage sharing and technologies that assist content creation, she posits that many gamers begin producing unique cultural artifacts by appropriating content, modifying chosen elements, and then displaying and distributing the final product through affinity spaces.

Building on the concept of adolescents as both consumers and producers of online artifacts, in Lalonde, Castro, and Pariser’s article, “Identity Tableaux: Multimodal Contextual Constructions of Adolescent Identity,” the authors consider how

mobile and social media are blurring the social spaces in which teens construct and disseminate representations of identity to their peers. [They] refer to these representations as identity tableaux. In this paper, [they] present an unexpected finding from a long-term study investigating the use of mobile media...