Rozprawy doktorskie na temat „Visual art education”

Visual art teachers, from beginning to veteran, often report experiencing feelings of professional isolation and a desire for content-specific support and collaborative professional learning experiences. Mentoring and Induction Programs (IPs) offered by schools and districts continue to fall short of meeting the needs of beginning visual art teachers in particular. There are a large number of visual art teachers in the state of California, especially in Los Angeles County, yet there are no visual art specific support networks for beginning visual art teachers to help them navigate their first years teaching. Collaborative learning groups, such as communities of practice (CoP), may offer visual art teachers opportunities to learn together and support one another in shared learning, yet none have been formally documented in Los Angeles County as a means of supporting novice art educators. The Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA has established a community of practice called the Teacher Induction Program (TIP) to support beginning science teachers with content-specific pedagogy during their first two years of teaching. Using the TIP as a framework, a visual art professional growth support community was outlined for this study based on the needs and concerns of visual art teachers reported throughout the literature. Beginning visual art teachers in Los Angeles County were interviewed to help the researcher better understand their existing and desired supports, as well as their individual needs and concerns as new teachers. The visual art CoP was proposed to them to elicit feedback about its anticipated values (immediate, potential, applied) based on their lived experiences as first or second year PK-12 public school visual art teachers in Los Angeles County.

Policy changes influence various aspects of art education such as K-12 art education curricula, state licensure systems, and contexts of art teacher preparation. Despite strong relationships between art education policy and practical fields, few studies have attempted to understand art education from the perspective of policy analysis. This study explores the connections between art education policy and the field of art education through a focus on art teacher preparation in Indiana. Additional attention was paid to perceptions of the appropriateness of alternative licensure routes in relation to policies of academic and quality standards and the extent to which visual art teachers’ sense of identity as teachers and artists is affected by appropriation of these standards.

The theoretical framework of this study is the need to understand policy appropriation of standards (including visual art and art teacher preparation standards) as an on-going process, that is continually influenced and changed by internal (human level) and external (institutional level) factors. The appropriation process is effectively expressed through practices, narratives, and texts of practitioners.

To understand the status and factors of the art education policy appropriation in art teacher preparation, I collected data as printed or digital documents, and as interviews with faculty members and pre-service art teachers in two traditional visual art teacher preparation programs in Indiana. I analyzed external (institutional level) and internal (human level) factors to adopt and work with state and national standards. While national standards for visual art education (were adopted by many states and presented as voluntary policy, in Indiana the national standards were built into the Indiana’s Academic Standards for Visual Art Standards for K-12 students. Visual art teachers were required to complete a traditional teacher preparation program and pass examinations to become licensed to teach art.

Findings reveal that faculty of higher art teacher education programs in Indiana paid attention to the national and state standards in K-12 visual art and the standards for teacher education when preparing students to become licensed K-12 art educators. External motivations were accreditations system for teacher preparation requested by Indiana Department of Education related to NCATE. Schools and districts could be external motivations that pre-service art teachers adopt the standards in order to succeed in a job market. Internal factors were respects of roles and leaders of art education associations, desires to train/be qualified teachers and attain balanced knowledge between art studio and art education. Alternative routes to licensure were viewed as economically advantageous but not supportive of high-quality education. Policy had little impact on issues of identity. I concluded with recommendations for improvement in art teacher preparation that were needs of supportive policies for pre-service teachers’ teaching and teaching licensure including traditional and alternative licensures.

This study takes place in a Mid-Atlantic public charter school over the course of a semester with eight seventh- and eighth-grade students in a visual art painting class. The author aimed to discover whether the integration of art therapy techniques within her curriculum might increase the self-efficacy students felt towards art-making. The study employed the ethnographic method of action research to allow the researcher to implement the study within regular classroom instruction and routine. This method also allowed more in-depth and cross-sectional analysis by the researcher due to regular exposure and established relationships with the subjects. Four exercises, modeled after commonly-used art therapy exercises, were inserted into the beginning of classroom instruction along with immediate individual reflection. Along with the student artwork, four other bodies of data were analyzed including: field observations, one-on-one interviews, written responses and an initial benchmark survey. Thematic analysis allowed the researcher to identify themes that would gauge levels of student engagement, compare content of the work and recognize student affect. Results from analysis confirmed the hypothesis as evidence revealed an increase in self-efficacious behaviors and attitudes towards art-making for students. This study confirmed adolescent artistic developmental stages as well as developmental tendencies towards gaining and displaying control. These findings correspond to the need for differentiated teaching to adolescent students and the importance of educator awareness and consideration of developmental needs. This study also highlights the possibility of enhancing the student experience when the practice of art education and techniques of art therapy are carefully and intentionally combined. It provides a model of an empathetic approach to curriculum for the purpose of providing a holistic art education.

This study looked at the impact of a weeklong visual art program informed by clinical art therapy on empathy development with two groups of adolescents in their school setting. The study used a mixed-methods approach to uncover any quantitative change in empathy as well as identify emergent themes seen through qualitative data. Quantitative outcomes indicated no change in empathy development as seen through analysis of a survey measure. Qualitative analysis uncovered several key findings seen through observations, participant interviews, and visual art data; most specifically, participants illustrated beginning levels of empathy by way of increased self-awareness and several cognitive functions involved in empathy development.

The use of quantitative data-driven instruction and assessment in the visual arts curriculum could impact the outcome of student creativity if employed within the visual arts, a content area that uses primarily qualitative pedagogy and assessment. In this paper I examine the effect upon measured creativity resulting from the use of Quantitative Data-Driven Assessment compared to the use of Authentic Assessment in the Visual Arts curriculum. This initial experimental research exposed eighth grade Visual Arts students to Authentic Assessment in one group, and Quantitative Data-Driven Assessment in another. Two experiments were conducted from the results. In the first experiment, both groups of student post-test art works are compared for mean creativity scores as defined by an independent expert panel of Art Educators. The second experiment compares for gains in pre-test/post-test creativity as the teacher assessed. Gains in mean creativity scores are compared between groups. Difference in assessment motivations are discussed as possible influencing factors.

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine how I can facilitate experiences with art that promote "productive ambiguity," or the ability to transform tensions that disrupt our current understandings into opportunities for personal growth. Ambiguity becomes productive when our encounters with difference stimulate curiosity, imagination, and consideration of new possibilities and perspectives. While employing a multi-methods practitioner inquiry that combined elements of action research, autoethnography and arts based research, I addressed the following questions with a voluntary group of fifth grade research participants: How can I facilitate experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity? How do my students interact with the various visual content and instructional strategies that I develop and implement? How might these interactions inform my future teaching practice, and how does my own reflective visual journaling process inform my research? In addition to employing reflective sketching to document and analyze data, I also presented research findings in the form of a visual research narrative.

My analysis of research findings produced the following teaching strategies for facilitating meaningful experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity: (a) Use an inquiry approach to instruction as much as possible in order to position students to actively navigate the space between the known and unknown while seeking fresh understandings rather than passively accepting new information. (b) Explore how new concepts or themes relate to students' lives in order to situate unknowns in relation to their present knowns. (c) Aim to balance structure, flexibility and accountability while developing and implementing curricula. This promotes productive ambiguity as both teachers and students negotiate their pre-conceived ideas or plans and push themselves to respond to challenges encountered within their immediate environment. (d) In order to avoid unnecessary confusion, explicitly state that students should takes risks while generating new ideas rather than identifying a pre-existing solution. (e) Finally, ask students to identify why skills and knowledge generated during these activities are valuable in order to promote meta-cognition of how this ambiguous space can become more productive.

In addition to these practical findings, research participants agreed that sharing their interpretations of visual phenomena with one another enabled them to understand each other better. I also discovered the ways in which productive ambiguity emerged in the spaces in between my teacher/researcher/artist roles when I perceived challenges as prospects for personal transformation. As a whole, this dissertation exhibited how relational aesthetics and arts based research theories translated into my elementary art classroom practice while simultaneously integrating these concepts into the research study design and presentation.