Art Education (AED)

Examination of past and present research in art education, an introduction to general methods of research, and critical evaluation of research in art education.

An examination of classic theories in art education and their relevance to current developments.

A blended summer course with on-campus and online components and a focus on intersections among contemporary art, curriculum, and pedagogy. AED 513 Summer Institute on Contemporary Art (3) This course is a summer session offering with a focus on intersections between contemporary art and curriculum. A collaborative effort between the Palmer Museum of Art and the Art Education Program, the course employs an innovative instructional approach that combines an intensive one-week intensive on-campus experience followed by correspondence, discussion, and presentation of final student projects using an online course management system during the ensuing five weeks. The course is designed to appeal to practicing K-12 educators, art educators, art education graduate students, and interested students from other disciplines as a forum in which to strengthen their focus on interdisciplinary curriculum theory and design constructed from collaborative interpretations of contemporary works of art and visual culture. As a critically challenging learning experience, this course will prepare students to thrive in a global environment by providing principles of interpretation as the foundation for encounters with beliefs, issues, and practices informed by and evidenced in contemporary works of art and visual culture. Due to the interdisciplinary interpretations and curriculum projects that will result from meaningful engagement with contemporary works of art, the course will promote interdisciplinary teaching and program development. The innovative format: a one-week intensive experience followed by discussion and presentation of final projects supported by an online course management system; challenges conventional approaches to instruction and presentation of evidence of student learning, thereby responding to and requiring new ways to assess and improve student learning outcomes in and through contemporary visual art.

Theory and praxis seminar to consider contemporary practices of participartory inquiry and public action with an emphasis on visual methodologies. A ED 522 Participatory Visual Inquiry in the Public Sphere (3) Students will analyze practices of participatory inquiry in response to social and cultural issues, situations, and challenges taken up by visual artists and interdisciplinary collectives who intend their work to construct new knowledge and positive change through collective action. Students will discuss and identify societal situations and propose possible responses as sites for participatory inquiry. A key focus of the course is the exploration of theories and practices of collaborative inquiry in the public sphere with emphasis on visual methodologies. The course revolves around related and overlapping concepts such as participatory democracy, participatory culture, ideas to actions, collaborative inquiry, collaborative design, community-based research, public pedagogy, and action research. The course is intended to function as a discursive space to broaden perceptions about contemporary art and inquiry practices; informal and public pedagogies; the interdisciplinary roles of art and artists in society, community-based projects and inquiry; and ways collaborative artmaking and cultural production can function as forms of research. Course content focuses on community artworks, interdisciplinary creative projects, and other forms of cultural production created for and existing within the public sphere in response to specific issues, challenges, and conditions. Examples of such work include public murals, public performance interventions, environmental responses, community health and change interventions, and social media activism, among others.

Transdisciplinary creativity develops new knowledge, metaphors, visualizations, and insights through performative renderings from dialogue, collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. Transdisciplinary creativity is the coming together of two or more disciplines in order to create something more than the individual or the community by recognizing, combining, and utilizing knowledges of all participants. Moreover, transdisciplinary creativity is a social process that develops sense-abilities. Sense-ability is the capacity to attend to the sensory and sensation, as a collective affective awareness of the environment. Students in the course will explore how different methodologies enhance understanding of complex issues such as sustainability, climate change, climate diaspora, environmental racism, and resource depletion. The national and international scope of environmental conversations is forging alliances across disciplines around urgent matters such as climate change. Rather than STEAM being used as an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, STEAM is explored, in this course, in terms of collectives such as EcoArtTech, in which their work is eco-social justice action to create STEAM. Moreover, STEAM is considered as transdisciplinary creativity for eco-social justice. From a transdisciplinary view of STEAM, works of art are not an appendage or a singular discourse. STEAM is a transdisciplinary approach to environmental issues. STEAM as an action emphasizes ecology, transdisciplinary research, and creativity as a social process.

Critical examination of current and emerging arts education policies in the United States in relation to federal, state, and local education and cultural policies. AED 524 Arts Education Policy and Advocacy (3) Students who are going to become leaders in arts education should understand social and political forces that shape the landscape where they work. Although art educators were identifying policy needs and submitting resolutions with policy recommendations to national agencies during the interwar years, arts education policy gained importance during the 1960s with the founding of The National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts. Arts education "as opposed to art, dance, music, or theatre education" is a political construct forged in order to successfully advocate for inclusion of visual and performing arts in National Educational Goals during the late twentieth century. In this course, students will explore what counts as policy for arts education and how policy discourse is framed; who constitutes stakeholders and policy makers; contexts where policy is advocated and created; and how advocates develop and communicate proposals for needed policies. Working in small groups, students will examine recent issues related to arts education policy, presenting those issues in class.

Disability is normal. Ableness is temporary. However, social stigmas, misunderstandings, and notions of "normal" exclude students and adults with disabilities. How have artists with disabilities offered worldviews that decenter normal? To pursue decentering normal, students in the course explore the creative practice of contemporary artists labeled by society as disabled to understand how their viscerally empowered art can function pedagogically to decenter notions of normal. Decentering notions of normal begins with identifying and challenging social systems that-through visual, lingual, and technological cues-communicate which traits are considered normal and which are not. While the analysis of linguistic and visual representations is instructive for articulating identity construction and its relationship to power and privilege, these lines of inquiry within disability studies overlook the realities of embodied difference that are a part of many people who live with disabilities. Notions of a normalized body frame certain patterns of behavior, cognition, affect, and physicality from which bodies are measured as either within or outside of the frame of normalized learning spaces such as schools. The Feminist Disability Studies and Disability Justice readings in the course go beyond labeling difference and invest in articulating and understanding difference as interconnected relationships in which inclusion may be fostered.

Factors affecting art curriculum decisions, analysis, selection, organization, preparation of curriculum. Evaluation and sources of art curriculum improvement and innovation.

Study of current theories of child art; application of recent psychological and anthropological theories to understanding child art.

A thematically organized course that makes connections between art-making and art as a way of knowing and inquiry.

Historical development of philosophies in art education in the United States and abroad.

Continuing seminars which consist of a series of individual lectures by faculty, students, or outside speakers.

Supervised student activities on research projects identified on an individual or small-group basis.

Supervised off-campus, nongroup instruction, including field experiences, practicums, or internships. Written and oral critique of activity required.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, that are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

Formal courses given on a topical or special interest subject which may be offered infrequently; several different topics may be taught in one year or semester.

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Teaching of undergraduate art education classes under the supervision of two members of the graduate faculty.

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Exploration of relationships between communication technologies and beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the nature of art. AED 811 New Media and Pedagogy (3) Due, in part, to contemporary processes of globalization and the development of digital technologies and the Web; new issues, possibilities, and opportunities regarding media communities and art pedagogy emerge in the field of art education. This is the focus of this course. Course participants have the opportunity to explore the aesthetic communicative and pedagogical implications of intertextual Webs, hypertext and hypermedia, blogs, wikis, simulations, the body interfaced in virtual reality, threaded dialogue, WebQuests, online games, media communities, adaptive and assistive technologies, and media-rich essays. Learning activities will be in the form of explorations and creation with the links and resources provided, and focused discussions about these explorations and how to teach this content at participants' teaching sites. Following 5 thematic explorations, course participants write a capstone essay to construct a speculative fiction of a teaching scenario based on the content of the course imagined in a future teaching site. The main priorities in Exploration 1 are to imagine possibilities of human-technology interfaces for creating and critiquing art. In Exploration 2, participants select a social networking tool from the course's resources to conduct a collaborative mini-project concerning self-representation online and power relational networks of social, physical, technological, and discursive inscriptions or conditions. Exploration 3, involves using the Internet as a primary medium for art creation and involves developing criteria to critique interactive Net art. The focus of Exploration 4 is free, downloadable authoring programs outside of a commercial economy, which enables the creation of interactive experiences without the need for specialized programming knowledge or database support. Exploration 5 involves participants creating a socially responsive visual culture WebQuest, which is an inquiry-oriented activity in which learners construct knowledge through interacting with, evaluating, and connecting diverse, and sometimes contradictory, resources on the Internet in order to form new insights that they share in a tangible form intended to make a difference in the world. This is one of the required courses for the M.P.S. in Art Education. There is no prescribed sequence and no prerequisites for art education courses in the M.P.S. program.

Diversity issues in museum and K-12 art education contexts. AED 812 Diversity, Visual Culture, and Pedagogy (3) This course examines diversity, visual culture, and pedagogy in various settings: the artworld, popular media, and cultural settings such as schools and museums. Diversity pertains to gender, sexual identity, social class, ethnicity, ability, age, and other attributes that shape our identities. This course pays special attention to issues of power and privilege in relation to diversity and visual culture. It examines ways that various forms of visual culture, situated in various social contexts, teach us who we are, what is "normal" in our society, and how we might change oppressive social conditions that currently exist. As defined in the course, visual culture includes paintings, sculptures, prints, and other forms of fine art as well as advertisements, news images, scientific images, television programs, and films. It includes toys, comic books, children's art and more. Visual culture includes all manifestations of cultural life that are significant for their visual features. Pedagogy refers not only to formal methods of instruction, such as teaching and learning in classrooms. It also includes informal instruction through the arts, the media, popular forms of entertainment, and other social practices. Pedagogy includes being positioned by, or addressed in certain ways by various forms of visual culture. It includes the ways we actively interpret, use, and recreate forms of visual culture in our lives. Objectives of the course include understanding diversity as defined in relation to various forms of visual culture; understanding the complex interactions of ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity, and other aspects of diversity in visual culture; understanding issues of power and privilege in relation to visual culture; and understanding pedagogical issues related to visual culture, including forms of address and interpretation, as well as pedagogical practices such as teaching and learning in classrooms. By the end of the course, participants should be able to critically examine social constructions of race, class, gender, sexual identity, and other aspects of diversity in visual culture through both written and visual analyses. Participants should also be able to develop and implement units of instruction related to visual culture, and reflect on their own and others' teaching practices in schools and museums.This is one of the required courses for the M.P.S. in Art Education. It is offered every other year with a maximum enrollment of 15 students.

Inquiry into the public pedagogy of contemporary visual culture for relevancy to museum and K-12 art education contexts. AED 813 Public Pedagogy (3) This course prepares art teachers to become producers of a socially just world by becoming critical public art pedagogues who extend their teaching environment. As defined in the course, critical public pedagogy of art, as an educational and artistic practice, is a critical stance concerning socio-pervasive artifacts, processes, and interfaces that acculturate and assimilate values, beliefs, and sensitivities.Public pedagogy is the use of a public medium and/or space such as the Internet, films, television, magazines, shopping malls, and sports arenas to influence behaviors and beliefs. Public pedagogy enacts societal curricula that are easily consumed because of its ubiquitous nature. Awareness of consumption of public pedagogy is important because of its global reach. Educators need to be versed in how to facilitate investigations of public pedagogy and how to guide students to develop critical public pedagogical practices. From spheres of influence radiating from art to a multidirectional layered matrix of sensibility, this course explores contemporary art that addresses and enacts public pedagogy through (inter)actions of cultural interfaces such as humans, technologies, localities, and politics. Such artworks are performed networks of relations. Contemporary artists' praxis involving intertextuality, palimpsest, remix, code-switching,double-coding, subversion, and hypersignification is explored through video, installation, performance, and other contemporary art forms. Objectives of the course include understanding processes of consumption and production of public pedagogy, and understanding contemporary art practices. By the end of the course, participants should be able to develop and implement units of instruction related to contemporary art and public pedagogy, and reflect on their own and others' teaching practices in schools and museums.This is one of the required courses for the M.P.S. in Art Education. It is offered every other fall semester with a maximum enrollment of 15 students.

Pedagogy and contexts for learning in museums and other cultural institutions. AED 814 Informal Learning (3) The course introduces participants to theories and practices of informal learning, and to the possible contexts including museums, schools and other cultural institutions in which informal, free choice learning may occur. These provide a framework for participants to use in preparing, implementing, and evaluating a learning project or other intervention in their own institutions or communities. The course includes a strategic and policy analysis of the contexts in which free choice learning projects may occur, a review of the social and economic significance of informal, free choice learning in an information age and global economy, an introduction and critical discussion of constructivist theories of informal learning, a review of specific pedagogical practices that may be effective in implementing informal learning for school-age students, adults, and senior citizens, an introduction to tools for evaluating the effectiveness of these practices, and the development, implementation and assessment of an informal learning project or interventionby each participant using other participants as consultants in the process.This is one of the required courses for the M.P.S. in Art Education. It isoffered every other year with a maximum enrollment of 15 students.

Develop a reflective process to improve strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which art education is practiced. A ED 815 Action Research in Art Education (3)This course prepares M.P.S. in Art Education candidates to conduct action research in their teaching context as part of a community of practice by recognizing and sharing existing tacit knowledge about teaching and learning conceptualized in specific social and physical environments. Action research is a reflective and iterative inquiry process with the aim of improving strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which one teaches. Course participants will learn how to conduct research that develops, leads to, implements, and assesses a genuinely well-informed social action in the midst of an emerging teaching and learning landscape. The course uses a blend of Web technology, print, and other media to maximize flexibility without sacrificing professor and student interaction. Communication tools, including bulletin boards and e-mail, are used to foster a collaborative environment, providing participants with the opportunity to learn from one another about the unique schools and cultural institutions each comes from and as well as their varied professional experiences.A ED 815 will be offered via World Campus as an online course will be offered every spring semester. Enrollment will be limited to 15 students.