International Journal of Education & the Arts

Articles

• Volume 9 Number 1: Cuero, Kimberley. Venturing into unknown territory: Using aesthetic representation to understand reading comprehension.

  Based on Elliot Eisner's notions of multiple forms of representation and Rosenblatt's aesthetic/efferent responses to reading, a teacher educator/researcher had her undergraduate students explore their connections, using aesthetic representations, to a course entitled Reading Comprehension. Each aesthetic representation revealed the complexities of Reading Comprehension in unique ways through a variety of media including: interior classroom design, culinary arts, quilting, music, and martial arts. The teacher educator invited five of the students from the course to participate in monthly collaborative inquiry sessions during the subsequent semester (lasting five months) where students articulated the aesthetic process they underwent. Benefits and applicability of using aesthetic representations in the university classroom are explored in the final section of the article.

• Volume 9 Number 2: Prendergast, Monica. Teacher as performer: Unpacking a metaphor in performance theory and critical performative pedagogy.

  This survey paper explores the interdisciplinary literature of performance theory and critical performative pedagogy in an attempt to consider metaphorical applications of performance to pedagogy. This exploration involves looking at teaching as performance in the broadest cultural sense of the word - interested more in efficacy of communication and mutual empathetic understanding - than in the more commonly-held economic, technological and political senses of performance which are more interested in setting, raising, and maintaining standards of efficiency and effectiveness (see McKenzie, 2001). In examining these issues in both performance studies and education, the conclusions are that educational researchers and teacher educators can benefit significantly from a critical awareness of the proliferation of metaphors for teaching as performance that highlight both aesthetic and socio-political challenges inherent in a life in the classroom.

• Volume 9 Number 3: Edström, Ann-Mari. To rest assured: A study of artistic development.

  This article concerns artistic development within the context of a Master of Fine Arts program in visual arts in Sweden, and presents an empirical study based on repeated interviews with a group of art students. The aim is to contribute to our present understanding of artistic development by focusing on changes in the relation between the student and his/her artistic work as part of their artistic development. The study describes and analyzes the character of these changes, within the theoretical frame of phenomenographic research on learning. The notion of 'resting assured' is used to describe the main characteristic of the qualitative change found in the relation between the student and his/her artistic work. To 'rest assured' refers to a state of trust in their own ability that the students develop. Findings are discussed from an educational theoretical perspective, emphasizing the connection between self-direction and resting assured.

Interludes

• Volume 9 Interlude 1: Rolling, Jr., James Haywood. Rethinking relevance in art education: Paradigm shifts and policy problematics in the wake of the Information Age.
  This article addresses the advocacy of organizations like the National Art Education Association who seek greater legislative support, funding and time allocations to be devoted to arts instruction and the development of arts practices in the arena of public education. The author argues the timeliness of a reconceived paradigm for understanding and advocating the relevancy of arts practices in the wake of the Information Age. This article seeks to rethink the semiotics defining art in an era of shifting paradigms and as contextualized in contemporary educational policy.

Articles

• Volume 8 Number 1: Costantino, Tracie. Articulating aesthetic understanding through art making.

  In this article I will present case study research of an elementary school art teacher who provided both verbal and visual means for students to respond to art while on a museum field trip. I will focus on how the students’ drawings from memory and artwork in their sketchbooks present compelling articulations of their understandings of certain artworks. I will also discuss how their reflective writing about the field trip supports and elaborates on their visual articulation, and how the students’ works are manifestations of qualitative reasoning, visual thinking, and imaginative cognition (Efland, 2004) in addition to linguistic thinking. Through this discussion, I hope to illustrate the essential role of imagebased, nonlinguistic thinking (as in visual thinking, qualitative reasoning, and imagination) in interpreting and expressing understanding of works of art.

• Volume 8 Number 2: Lind, Vicki. High quality professional development: An investigation of the supports for and barriers to professional development in arts education.

  This study focused on a model of professional development designed to support and encourage arts educators to increase their understanding of student learning in the arts, broaden their knowledge of the Visual and Performing Arts Standards, build upon their repertoire of teaching methods and assessment strategies, and improve leadership skills. Data included 300 hours of observation, focus group and individual interviews, written responses to reflective prompts, unit plans, video and audio tapes, and samples of student work collected over a two year period. Findings indicated that working collaboratively, focusing on student learning, and identifying and planning curriculum around issues central to the discipline positively impacted teachers work. The issue of time constraints was consistently identified as a barrier to professional growth.

• Volume 8 Number 3: Wallin, Jason. Between Public and Private: Negotiating the Location of Art Education

  This article seeks to articulate developing trends in art education and practice, locating such movements within the broader cultural contexts of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and postmodernity. Against this more general synopsis, the autobiographical position of the author as a student and teacher of art will be elucidated as inextricably entwined with such cultural movements. This entwinement will be understood both in terms of its capacity to "position" the subject, and yet concomitantly as a site of disavowal, refusal, and subjective agency. In this manner, the personal commitment of the author to art education will be developed in a way to implicate early school and familial experiences with art. Such early autobiographical experiences arguably form the coordinates of our identities as art educators, and similarly, constitute the key issues with which we must necessarily grapple in pedagogical practice. It is in negotiation with such issues and early enculturation that this article argues our relationship to art curriculum and practice is located.

• Volume 8 Number 4: Macintyre Latta, M.; Buck, G. & Beckenhauer, A. Formative assessment requires artistic vision

  This two-year study focused on the lived terms of inquiry in middle-school science classrooms. The conditions that enable teachers to see and act on science learning as ongoing inquiry were deliberately sought in Year 2. Nine science teachers participated in search of capacities connecting curriculum, teaching, and assessment for greater student and teacher inquiry. An online logbook chronicled this search, serving as a dialogic medium revealing a movement of teachers seeking out and seizing back possibilities for teaching and learning in relation to the given realities of classrooms. The nature and role of formative assessments in support of learning were encountered as the obstacle to be worked out in teachers’ practical action. The necessary interpretive eye and capacity to act in accordance with the dynamic character of formative assessments became the task at hand for teachers and researchers. This task demanded artistic teaching visions, attending to the creation of student meaning on an individual and collective basis. The difficulty, alongside the necessity, of educating artistic teaching visions offered glimpses into how formative assessment use holds potential to restore the participatory dynamic integral to learning. The philosophical/theoretical ground of arts based educational research was found to offer much potential to science inquiry, linking processproduct- learner in support of formative assessment use and offering implications for a participatory mode of professional development.

• Volume 8 Number 5: Hudson, P., & Hudson, S. Examining preservice teachers' preparedness for teaching art.

  The Australian Federal Government's call for another teacher education inquiry aims to investigate preservice teacher preparedness for teaching. Art education was selected for this study as the teaching of art education in primary schools occurs in less than ideal conditions and may often be avoided by generalist primary teachers (Russell-Bowie, 2002). Eightyseven final-year preservice teachers were surveyed on their perceptions of their preparedness for teaching primary art education at the conclusion of their Bachelor of Education program. The 39 survey items were derived from the New South Wales Creative Arts K-6 State Syllabus (Board of Studies, 2000) across four stage levels (i.e., early stage 1, stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3). Percentages and mean scale scores suggested that these final-year preservice teachers believed they were generally prepared to teach art education in primary schools as a result of a preservice teacher education visual arts unit. Nevertheless, more than 10% of preservice teachers indicated they could not agree or strongly agree that they could provide 20 of the 39 teaching practices advocated by the syllabus and 20% indicated this for 7 of the 39 teaching practices. Tertiary education institutions need to be proactive in responding to the challenge of determining preservice teachers' preparedness for teaching. Surveys linked to a state syllabus may assist in assessing preservice teachers' perceptions of their preparedness for teaching and may provide valuable information for further development of tertiary education coursework.

• Volume 8 Number 6: Brown, Andrew R. Software development as music education research.

  This paper discusses how software development can be used as a method for music education research. It explains how software development can externalize ideas, stimulate action and reflection, and provide evidence to support the educative value of new software-based experiences. Parallels between the interactive software development process and established research methods are drawn, with particular focus on action research, case study, and activity theory. A new approach to arts educational research called Software Development as Research (SoDaR) is proposed. The paper includes examples from the author's use of this approach when developing the jam2jam software to facilitate networked music improvisation experiences for young children.

• Volume 8 Number 7: Taylor, P. G., Wilder, S. O., & Helms, K. R. Walking with a Ghost: Arts-based research, music videos, and the re-performing body.

  In folk-rock duo Tegan and Sara's 2004 music video Walking with a Ghost, two women face one another, mirrored images in black and white. One is dressed in black - grunge shirt, pants and boots, while the other stands barefoot in a simple white dress. The black-clad figure removes three red paper hearts from her twin's chest, leaving crimson gashes in her clothing as the white-clad twin morphs into three mutilated figures. The wounded trio sings to their other self, "no matter which way you go, no matter which way you stay, you're out of my mind, out of my mind . . ." In this article, we respond to the ways that Tegan and Sara's music video relies on their twin bodies as visual and metaphorical narrative devices as well as sites for re-inscribing cultural memory. We do this by presenting and analyzing our personal audiovisual responses (hypertextual video shorts) to Walking with a Ghost. Employing an autoethnographic arts-based research approach, we visually and metaphorically inscribe our own video bodies with text and images to explore personal and cultural reactions. Further, using the experiences of a graduate art education technology class' work with the video, we share the curricular implications for understanding how memory and the body affect, inform, and alter human perception.

• Volume 8 Number 8: Wright, S. . Graphic-narrative play: Young children's authoring through drawing and telling.

  This arts-based research illustrates how young children engage in 'graphic-narrative play' - a personal fantasy-based experience depicted on paper - while representing imaginary worlds centered on the topic, what the future will be like. The descriptions show how the children not only made representations, but also manipulated these in abstract ways as they created and recreated images, ideas and feelings. The findings illustrate how the child becomes a cast of one, taking on multiple roles (i.e., artist, author, director, scripter, performer and narrator) and selecting when and how to play with all the available voices offered through the multimodal media - drawing, 'telling', dramatization, expressive sound effects, gesture and movement. These multiple texts involved embodied authoring - layers of visual and physical action, character development, plot scheme, scenery and running narrative working in harmony, simultaneously. Children's open-ended construction of meaning surfaced content that reflected universal story themes such as good-evil and capturing-defending, and their voices often were powerful, humorous, philosophical and reflective. Yet the sequencing of events did not necessarily follow linear structures - instead, the children worked within fluid structures.

• Volume 8 Number 9: Albertson, C., & Davidson, M. Drawing with Light and Clay: Teaching and Learning in the Art Studio as Pathways to Engagement.

  In this essay, Albertson and Davidson explore the attributes of photography and ceramic arts education to identify eight key elements integral to engagement in these art studios for under-served and disenchanted learners. They suggest that these key elements can provide numerous clues as to how teachers and school communities might reimagine both their mission and approach to classroom practice. Through this exploration, they relate literature on apprentice models of teaching and learning, relational education, resiliency theory, and care in the context of classroom practice to their experience and research into teaching and learning in photography and ceramic arts. Albertson and Davidson believe that what is good for the most vulnerable learners, is good for others too, and by bringing these attributes to light, it is their goal to illustrate some of the ways that all teachers might build pathways to engagement for their own "tough audiences" in all subject areas.

• Volume 8 Number 10: Zoss, M., Smagorinsky, P., & O'Donnell-Allen, C. Mask-Making as Representational Process: Situated Composition of an Identity Project in a Senior English Class.

  Eisner, Gardner, and others have argued that the arts should be better integrated into the K-12 curriculum. In this study we examine three high school senior boys who, as part of a unit of instruction on identity, each produced a mask through which he artistically expressed his sense of self. Using a sociocultural framework based in the work of Vygotsky, we analyzed the boys' composition of their masks in terms of their goals for working on the project, the material and psychological tools they employed to produce the masks, and the settings in which they learned how to use their compositional tools for such purposes. Based on both concurrent and retrospective protocols that the boys produced in conjunction with composing their masks, we investigated their processes of composition as what Gee terms identity projects; i.e., as efforts to project themselves into their mask texts and as part of their long-term projects to explore and develop their personal and socially-situated identities. Each participant used the mask-making composition as an occasion for inscribing his experiences, beliefs, and emotions into the text, albeit in different ways and toward different ends. The study concludes with a consideration of the use of arts in literacy education, a reconsideration of the limitations of language-based-only conceptions of literacy, and the possibilities for expanded learning opportunities when English/Language Arts classes open up students' textual tool kits to allow for broader opportunities to engage with the curriculum.

• Volume 8 Number 11: Davenport, M. G. Between Tradition and Tourism: Educational Strategies of a Zapotec Artisan.

  This case study examines the teaching and learning strategies employed by a Zapotec weaver in Oaxaca, Mexico, to draw attention to the personal agency of indigenous artisans participating in the tourist economy, and to examine ways in which non-formal and informal education in skills and understandings related to art can function in the lives of real people, especially members of less privileged cultural groups. Among the strategies employed by this artisan are intergenerational transfer, self-directed research, experimentation, and workshops. Implications for art education include consideration of economic incentives and other motivations for art-related learning in this and other settings.

• Volume 8 Number 12: Lynch, H., & Allan, J. Target Practice? Using the Arts for Social Inclusion.

  Use of creative processes as a tool for social inclusion has gathered momentum in recent years. This article reports the views of education professionals based in Scotland on the use and effects of targeting. While this strategy aims to improve access to those communities considered marginal, it is apparent that some of the effects are detrimental to the development of an equitable approach. Using the framework of social capital we gain insight into strategies which enable difference to become positive and where the top down mechanism of targeting is replaced by a dialogical exchange.

• Volume 8 Number 13: Beattie, M. Creating a Self: A Narrative and Holistic Perspective.

  The paper presents insights into the creation and re-creation of a narrative from the perspective of two female students, Phillipa and Eva, at Corktown Community High School. Corktown is an alternative high school which focuses on the development of the whole person-creative, intellectual, social, emotional, aesthetic and physical. The school is connected to the external community in significant ways, and there is an emphasis on freedom of expression, self-government, and autonomy within a collaborative work culture. Their narrative excerpts show the interconnectedness of the intellectual, imaginative, emotional, and social dimensions of their lives, and the ways in which they bring all these to bear on the creation of an identity that is true to the persons they are and to the persons they want to become. Phillipa and Eva provide insights into the realities and complexities of adolescents' lives, and the ways in which these two young women learned to refigure the past and to engage in the ongoing process of creating new narratives for their lives in which they could be successful both personally and academically.

• Volume 8 Number 14: Aitken, V., Fraser, D., & Price, G. Negotiating the Spaces: Relational Pedagogy and Power in Drama Education.

  While there is a growing body of literature on relational pedagogy as a concept, less attention is given to the details of just how relational pedagogy manifests in classroom practice. Similarly, while issues of power, democracy and co-constructed learning feature in contemporary research, the details of how power relationships can be effectively altered between teachers and children warrants closer scrutiny. This paper explores how pedagogy is enhanced when spaces are negotiated between teachers and children in the real and fictional worlds of drama. The findings emerge from a two year collaborative research project between generalist elementary teachers and university researchers. Salient issues of trust, power sharing, and metaxis, which are part of relational pedagogy in the drama classroom, are explored. In particular, the paper discusses how traditional power and knowledge positions are 'disrupted' through the drama strategy of 'teacher-in-role' - a strategy with both political significance and pedagogical force.

• Volume 8 Number 15: Blair, D. V. Musical Maps as Narrative Inquiry

  This study explores the metaphorical relationship between the process of narrative inquiry and the process of "musical mapping." The creation of musical maps was used as a classroom tool for enabling students' musical understanding while listening to music. As teacher-researcher, I studied my fifth-grade music students as they interacted with music and one another during the creation of the maps. Their conversation with the materials of music and map, with each other as collaborators, and later with the class as audience parallels the process of narrative inquiry as the students experienced the music, constructed their story, and shared their story of the musical experience. Like narrative, the process of creating a musical map serves as a form of inquiry, enabling understanding of an experience and affecting change in self through the living and constructing of the story and affecting change in others through the sharing and telling of the story.

• Volume 8 Number 16: Bhroin, M. N. "A Slice of Life": The Interrelationships among Art, Play and the "Real" Life of the Young Child

  This study examines the interrelationships among art, play and "real" life, as perceived by young children. Twenty-one children aged four and five in their first year of formal schooling in Ireland, were observed during art-related play activities and classes over a period of four months in 2004. Research data consisted of art works (both original and photographed), field notes, video recordings of children's behaviours and mini-interviews with the children. Data analysis revealed the multifaceted interrelationships between art, play and real life among the children. All children showed evidence of intertwining art, play and "real" life experiences in all strands of the visual arts curriculum. Individual differences in "cognitive style" unrelated to gender also emerged. Some worked quietly concentrating completely on the process and product in hand while others verbalised what was going on as they worked. Just over half of the children extended their actual experiences into the realm of fantasy in their art and play while the remainder tended to be factual, depicting and re-enacting "real" life events as they experienced them. These findings have educational implications as young children's artistic play activities are an important element in pre-service teacher education and in the teaching of Visual Arts at the Primary school level.

• Volume 8 Number 17: White, B. Aesthetic Encounters: Contributions to Generalist Teacher Education

  This article describes the learning experiences of three pre-service teachers within a university-level course entitled "Aesthetics and Art Criticism for the Classroom." Discussion is focused on the nature of the meaning-making that emerges from aesthetic encounters and its educational value. Specifically, what can pre-service generalist teachers learn from aesthetic encounters that they may ultimately apply in their own classrooms? For evidence of emergent meaning-making I rely on examination of what I call aesthetigrams. These are essentially maps of one's encounter with an artwork. They provide a basis for reflection on the encounter, for the student and for myself as the instructor, as well as insights into the nature of aesthetic learning.

• Volume 8 Number 18: Hewson, A. Emotions as Data in the Act of Jokering Forum Theatre

  For three years the author has been using Forum Theatre strategies as a means of experientially exploring classroom management with preservice teachers in a post- degree BEd program. During the third year, the author undertook an arts-based action research project to examine her actions as facilitator, or Joker, and to explore Forum Theatre's potential for redressing oppressions in a school setting. In the analysis of one challenging session, she suggests that emotions are important data to consider when deciding how best to respond in the moment, as Joker or as classroom teacher. Noticing responses of fear, anger or shame in oneself and others may help identify oppressive practices or tacit assumptions that deserve critical attention. The sociological concept of saving face has relevance for classroom management and is recommended as an area for further study.

Interludes

• Volume 8 Interlude 1: Upitis, Rena. Four strong schools: Developing a sense of place through school architecture.
  The driving premise of this paper is that students should be schooled in built and natural environments that afford them ways of understanding of how their daily physical actions and social choices affect the earth. Views of prominent philosophers and scholars in support of this premise are described. Next, four cases illustrate how schools can provide students with opportunities to develop ecological mindfulness through practical activities that are enhanced by natural and built environments. The examples-from Canada, the United States, and Australia-span the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education. It is concluded that schools and curricula that focus on a sense of place are able to support the practical activities that lead to meaningful relationships between members of the community, and between people and the land.

Articles

• Volume 7 Number 1: Rodríguez: Experiences with poetry, pedagogy and participant observation: Writing with students in a study abroad program.

  Many anthropologists have turned to creative writing as they struggle to represent experiences/encounters with other cultures. Study abroad students, while not necessarily anthropologists-in-the-making, are also representers (and representees) of exotic cultures while abroad. This paper explores creative writing as a strategy to help study abroad students engage questions about cultural representation, reflexivity and identity while immersed in the other culture. It examines a semester-long pilot project in which both students and the author explored poetry as a means to reflect upon and represent experiences with the Other in Central Mexico. It suggests that creative writing as an arts-based method of qualitative inquiry, while not a panacea for the representation crisis, provides students and researchers a powerful way to reflect upon cross-cultural experiences and offers many directions for further research.

• Volume 7 Number 2: Gervais: Exploring moral values with young adolescents through process drama

  The connection between drama and moral education in young adolescence has not been widely researched. This study examines the role of process drama. In this study process drama is defined as educational drama for awareness and conflict resolution through the creation of a dramatic collective exploring the moral values of junior high school age students. Students examined their values through themes of family, friendship, and other issues of personal importance. When dramatic cognitive dissonance was followed by group discussion and reflection, students’ awareness of their values articulation processes was heightened and their interpersonal problem solving skills improved. The ensuing group ethos that developed was characterized by caring, respect, and mutual commitment. This study suggests that dramatic engagement focusing on personal story can be a significant moral education tool for junior high students.

• Volume 7 Number 3: Trotman: Evaluating the Imaginative: Situated Practice and the Conditions for Professional Judgement in Imaginative Education

  It is now a matter of routine that schools in England are able to demonstrate the value of their work in terms of "impact" and "outcomes." In the province of imaginative education this is problematic. While Government has sought to create a new relationship between inspection and school selfevaluation, this in effect has amounted to little more than a bureaucratic and performative form of "self-inspection." At the same time the teaching profession is reminded that it lacks a shared language to enable clarity and precision about its judgements (Hargreaves, 2004). Acknowledging the necessity for imaginative educators to make their work publicly demonstrable, and recognising the private imaginative lifeworld as a sacred space, this paper calls for a (re)focusing of educational evaluation in imaginative education. Drawing on phenomenological research approaches and ideas of connoisseurship and pupil voice, six "situated" imaginative practices, spanning the solitary and the collective, are proposed in an attempt to consider ways in which the imagination might be made amenable to communal educational evaluation. Before the development of a shared evaluative language can be entertained, the necessary conditions for educational evaluation must first be created, and these conditions involve educators in the cultivation of their own imaginative lifeworlds as a professional practice. Ultimately, through processes of interpretation and communalisation, educational evaluation of the imagination becomes an intrinsically transformative practice.

• Volume 7 Number 4: Nielsen: Apprenticeship at the Academy of Music

  Inspired by studies of apprenticeship and theories of situated learning, this study argues that learning should be understood in relation to ongoing social practice. Using interview material and participant observation studying piano students’ learning at the Academy of Music in Aarhus, it describes how transparency and access to the music culture at the Academy are important for the piano students’ learning processes. In particular, two ways of learning are described: learning by imitation and learning by performance. In both these ways the learning process involves and is organised around becoming a member of the musical culture and developing an identity as a musician.

• Volume 7 Number 5: Belliveau: Engaging in drama: Using arts-based research to explore a social justice project in teacher education

  This arts-based research invites the reader to consider the complex learning that emerged when a group of pre-service teachers collectively developed a play about anti-bullying as part of a teaching practicum. To capture the learning that emerged during the collective writing and rehearsing, the author engages in an artistic process by writing the key findings in the form of a drama. By using drama as a method of inquiry, as well as a way of documenting the learning, the author attempts to capture the multiple voices within the collective pre-service teacher process.

• Volume 7 Numer 6: Kim: For whom the school bell tolls: Conflicting voices inside an alternative high school.

  This article is a study of conflicting voices inside an alternative high school in Arizona. Voices of alternative schools are, quite often, not included in the discourse of curriculum reform even though the number of alternative schools is growing every year. Bakhtinian novelness of polyphony, chronotope, and carnival are incorporated into an arts-based, storied form of representation to provoke empathic understanding among readers. Multiple voices (polyphony) of the school are juxtaposed within a certain time and space (chronotope) while all the different voices are valued equally (carnival) to represent conflicting views on public alternative school experiences. The purpose of the article is to provide readers with vicarious access to tensions that exist in an alternative school, so that they may engage in questioning the nature and purpose of these spaces. In so doing, the study aims to promote dialogic conversations about “best practice” for disenfranchised students who are subject to experiencing educational inequalities in the current era of accountability and standardization.

• Volume 7 Number 7: Betts: Multimedia arts learning in an activity system: New literacies for at-risk children.

  This study concerns a multi-year after school arts technology program, the Multimedia Arts Education Program (MAEP). The Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC) sponsored MAEP in downtown Tucson for low-income youth. A five-semester curriculum was developed to introduce multimedia literacies in the electronic arts workplace and provide tools for students to become creators as well as consumers of new literacies. In this six-year study, formative data on an early cohort of participants was collected over an eighteen-month period using participant observation in the labs and interviews with students and their parents or guardians. A pre- and posttest questionnaire measured changes in perceived self-efficacy and attitudes about art, technology and learning. This study also looked at long-term effects of participation in MAEP. Program graduates were contacted four years later and asked about their high school success (defined as graduation) and career directions. The study findings are reviewed and analyzed using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) for retrospective analysis. The paper includes a description of the MAEP activity system and the interrelationships within the system. Survey instruments and a sample lesson outline are included in the appendix. The program was successful for many of the participants who completed the five semesters and earned a computer to go with the new skills to use it.

• Volume 7 Number 8: Oreck: Artistic choices: A study of teachers who use the arts in the classroom

  In recent years the arts have been introduced into many pre-service and in-service professional development programs for general education teachers. At the same time, pressure for immediate test-score improvement and standardization of curriculum has limited the creativity and autonomy of teachers. This study, the qualitative part of a mixed-methods investigation of teachers across the U.S., involved six New York City elementary school teachers who found ways to use the arts in their classrooms on a regular basis despite the pressures they faced. The study investigated the personal characteristics and the factors that supported or constrained arts use in teaching. The results suggest that general creative and artistic attitudes rather than specific skills as a maker of art are key to arts use. A willingness to push boundaries and take risks defined this group of teachers. They recognized obstacles and challenges to arts use, but made choices that helped them maintain a sense of independence and creativity in teaching. The strongest motivation to use the arts use was their awareness of the diversity of learning styles and needs among their students. The teachers articulated a variety of ways in which arts-based professional development experiences encouraged them to bring their creativity into the classroom, expand their teaching repertoire, and find effective ways to incorporate the arts in the academic curriculum.

• Volume 7 Number 9: Roulston: Qualitative investigation of young children's music preferences.

  This qualitative study examined young children’s music preferences through group conversations with children, interviews with parents, and nonparticipant observation of classroom settings in daycare and elementary classrooms. Data were analyzed inductively to generate themes, and revealed that (1) children expressed distinct preferences for an eclectic range of music from very early ages; (2) rock and popular music were frequently mentioned as preferred styles by parents and children, with movie and television soundtracks high in popularity; (3) music listening was characterized by a reliance on diverse technologies, with listening inextricably interwoven with viewing; and (4) music listening and experiences in the home described by children and parents varied considerably from what was offered in the school and daycare settings. Findings from this study contribute to an understanding of young children’s music preferences and listening habits in contemporary Western society.

Book Reviews

• Volume 7 Review 1: Hebert, D. G. Teaching music and dance of Namibia: A review essay.

• Volume 7 Review 2: Costantino, T. E. The rewards of art criticism in art education: A review essay.

• Volume 7 Review 3: Thompson, C. Art practice as research: A review essay.

• Volume 7 Review 4: Stokrocki, M. A Nordic model of technology education: An essay review.

• Volume 7 Review 5: Barrett, J. R. Culture and the arts in education: A review essay.

• Volume 6 Number 1: Samuel Leong: Integrating Ancient Nanyin Music within an Interdisciplinary and National Education School-wide Curriculum: An Australian-Singaporean Collaborative Arts Education Project

  This article describes a school-wide arts education project that incorporates an interdisciplinary approach involving an Australian university, the Singapore Ministry of Education, the Singapore National Arts Council, a community music association, and a local primary school. The Project engages young school children with Nanyin music, an ancient musical art form from China, and works with practicing Nanyin musicians and their musical practices. The Project integrates music into the regular music curriculum for an entire ten-week term, and incorporates a National Education focus with an interdisciplinary approach, encouraging students to make connections with subjects such as language, mathematics and social studies. The Project culminates with a public performance of Nanyin music by the participating students and an exhibition of their project work. This article will also present the viability and usefulness of the Project from the perspectives of Nanyin musicians and school participants.

• Volume 6 Number 2: Jonathan Savage: Information Communication Technologies as a Tool for Re-imagining Music Education in the 21st Century

  This article investigates a potential way ahead for music education in the 21st century. Drawing on material from the case study of a Manchester-based composer in northern England, it argues that those within formal education should examine more carefully the musical values and practices of artists and composers working with “technologically-enriched” contexts. It describes the need for the reconsideration of the role of technology in music education along with expanding the aims of music curricula and the possibilities for cross-disciplinary practice. Finally, the author urges all music educators to consider the wider artistic opportunities that new information communication technologies (ICT) can offer pupils.

• Volume 6 Number 3: Patricia E. Calderwood: Risking Aesthetic Reading

  This reflective article explores a tension between private and public expression of deep aesthetic response to reading, with specific reference to the play of this tension in the public space of the classroom. Implications for teaching are included, most specifically the need to understand the sensitivities and emotional vulnerability of students, the teacher’s challenge of modeling open and deep responses to texts, and the creation of a supportive environment in which it is safe to take the risks needed for including deep aesthetic response in the classroom.

• Volume 6 Number 4: Peter Gouzouasis & Anne-Marie LaMonde: The Use of Tetrads in the Analysis of Arts-Based Media

  In this article, we chose the musical form of a sonata to examine tetrads, a simple four-fold structure that Marshall McLuhan coined and employed to describe various technologies. Tetrads, as cognitive models, are used to refine, focus, or discover entities in cultures and technologies, which are hidden from view in the psyche. Tetradic logic frames human artifacts and the means of doing things. The ideas that McLuhan eloquently brought to consciousness, long before technologies became the sophisticated communication tools they have become today, may be reinterpreted in a far more timely fashion. The poignancy of his views invite our immediate attention in light of the limitless extensions humans are being afforded with new technologies. McLuhan has always remained a significant and powerful voice among artists—his ideas, in effect, resonate with our artistic sensibilities.

• Volume 6 Number 5: Carol A. Mullen, Margie Buttignol & C. T. Patrick Diamond: Flyboy: Using the arts and theater to assist suicidal adolescents.

  This article integrates story and the form of qualitative methodology known as arts-based inquiry. The authors use this approach to provide a case study of Kal, a 15-year-old boy who had unsuccessfully attempted to end his life by “flying” off his apartment balcony. The paper begins with orientation to the background of this case and to arts-based inquiry and case history and then proceeds with an imaginative re-creation of the involvement of Margie, Kal’s caregiver, in this case in the form of a letter written in role by her as Kal to his mother. Finally, the authors discuss how arts-based representations can be used to positively affect mental health and to generate creative healing energy. In this presentation Kal is the leading character, and Margie, Kal’s real-life teacher in a hospital-based mental health unit in Ontario, Canada, is the supporting actress. Through dramatic fictionalization of her work with Kal, Margie found that “human learning can be renewed when teacher researchers use arts-based textual strategies to reflect on experience and invite others to respond to these inquiries” (Diamond & Mullen, 1999, p. 18).

• Volume 6 Number 6: Burke, J. M.; Cuilla, K. A.; Winfield, A. G.; Eaton, L. E.; & Wilson, A. V. Epiphamania.

  This article is a narrative exposition of collaborative research performed at Bergamo in October 2001. As a performance of research, we hoped to extend the involvement of audience/participants and to problematize both method and articulation of lives lived (Knowles & Cole, 2001) by using art forms in (re)searching the nature and possibilities of socially constructed and experienced boundaries. The primary foci of our work are (1) the relationship of research and/to/with art, (2) the nature and effects of socially constructed boundaries in research/life/curriculum, and (3) the nature of collaboration. We used the media of dance, poetry and readers’ theater to both theorize and present data about socially defined roles and identities and our responses them.

• Volume 6 Number 7: Gosse, D. My arts-informed narrative inquiry into homophobia in elementary schools as a supply teacher.

  Using fiction writing techniques, such as the creation of composite characters and scenarios gathered from data collection and the author’s tacit knowledge, this narrative teacher inquiry illustrates how anti-homophobia education might unfold in an elementary school. The art of yarning or storytelling is explored as an effective tool to confront homophobia with elementary school students and teachers. The author manipulates tone and style to create a bridge between the academy and the public, especially reaching out to teacher candidates and practicing teachers to share his insights and imagined possibilities. This research draws from poststructural sensibilities, challenging binary systems of gay-straight and male-female, exploring how accepted heterosexist and misandrous knowledge and social beliefs are constructed and upheld, and ultimately soliciting questionings so that status quo assumptions may be ruptured. In this supply teacher’s fictional narrative, the imagination is celebrated as a provocative mode of artful educational inquiry.

• Volume 6 Number 8: Upitis, R. Experiences of artists and artist-teachers involved in teacher professional development programs.

  This research explores the experiences of artists and artist-teachers involved in two professional development programs for arts education: a national Canadian program and a state-wide American program. Both programs aim to help classroom teachers develop ways of teaching in and through the arts by interacting with partnering artists and/or arts organizations. Based on survey data and interviews with artists, artistteachers, teachers, and administrators, the paper outlines the experiences of artists and artist-teachers who had been involved in the programs for at least two years. The main themes developed through this research were: (1) how artists’ views of their art forms were altered, (2) what the artists viewed as challenges of contemporary public education, (3) how artists’ views of the teaching profession were altered, and (4) how artists articulated the benefits of the arts in young people’s lives. The paper closes with a discussion of issues to consider when designing professional development programs involving artists and teachers.

• Volume 6 Number 9: Cosenza, G. Implications for music educators of an interdisciplinary curriculum.

  This article makes the case that authentic music learning need not be sacrificed nor compromised in any way when the music teacher designs and teaches curricula and units of study that integrate music learning with learning in other academic subjects, including other fine and performing arts subjects. The author argues that music teachers may think they are losing instructional time in the service of other subjects when, in fact, if music teachers understand the cognitive connections and shared information among subjects, they have opportunities to enhance music learning in substantive and authentic ways. Some sample curricular designs are outlined in the article as examples of how learning among subjects can serve multiple subject areas, including music.

• Volume 6 Number 10: McMillan, C.: "Musical ways of knowing: A personal approach to qualitative inquiry in education."

  In this comparative essay, I examine how musical ways of knowing inform my educational research. To understand this question, I employ dual perspectives as a musician and qualitative researcher. I use Eisner’s concept of the art of educational evaluation (1985a, 1985b, 1997)—particularly as educational evaluation relates to connoisseurship and criticism—to explore how my aesthetic understanding of musical performance, with its descriptive, thematic, interpretive and evaluative aspects, illuminates the process of qualitative inquiry. I also evaluate an earlier quantitative study of sight-singing achievement among young students by viewing it through a more aesthetic, affective lens. In sharing how I have learned to trust musical ways of knowing to inform my educational research, I suggest ways that other music educators can focus their aesthetic lenses on research questions of interest to us all.

• Volume 6 Number 11: Pitts, S.: Twenty-nine world premiers in two hours: The story of Powerplus.

  This article considers the effectiveness and implications of the Powerplus composing project, in which teenage students were asked to write for a chamber ensemble in preparation for a public concert of their work. The perspectives of all participants are considered, with a view to understanding i) the developing identities of young composers, ii) the effects of combining the musical expertise of players, teachers and students in the project, and iii) the expectations and attitudes of audience members attending the final concert. Empirical data from questionnaires, interviews and observations are used to analyse the attitudes and experiences of participants, revealing a high level of support for the project and for the value of composing in music education. The implications of the project for future research and practice are considered, and suggestions are made for strengthening the professional networks which could better contribute to young peoples’ development as composers.

• Volume 6 Number 12: Andrzejczak, N., Trainin, G., & Poldberg, M. From image to text: Using images in the writing process.

  This study looks at the benefits of integrating visual art creation and the writing process. The qualitative inquiry uses student, parent, and teacher interviews coupled with field observation, and artifact analysis. Emergent coding based on grounded theory clearly shows that visual art creation enhances the writing process. Students used more time for thought elaboration, generated strong descriptions, and developed concrete vocabulary. The advantages of using production of art and artwork in the pre-writing process provided a motivational entry point, a way to develop and elaborate on a scene or a narrative. This study shows that the benefits of a rich visual art experience can enhance thought and writing in response to the finished artwork.

• Volume 6 Number 13: Savva, A. & Trimis, E.: Responses of young children to contemporary art exhibits: The role of artistic experiences.

  This study explores pre-primary children’s responses to contemporary art exhibits in a museum setting, the role of previous artistic experiences, and the impact of the art museum visit on children’s responses to artworks and making art during classroom practice. The sample included 32 children (16 boys and 16 girls) randomly selected from two classrooms in two nursery public schools in Nicosia, Cyprus. In addition to open-ended interviews, classroom observation notes, and videotape analysis procedures, the artworks of children were used to find out the influences of the visit to the art museum. The findings suggest that children’s contact with a range of art forms including contemporary art exhibits in a museum setting is an important part of their educational experiences if appropriate approaches and methods are used.

• Volume 6 Number 14: Veblen, K., Beynon, C. & Odom, S. Drawing on diversity in the arts education classroom: Educating our new teachers.

  In this article, the authors discuss their attempts to make antiracist multiculturalism a reality in their students’ future classrooms. They note that the literature is replete with examples of what not to do in trivializing curriculum, and they attempt here to take theory into praxis/practice by exposing and describing their strategies for engaging their students in antiracist multicultural understandings and activities.

• Volume 6 Number 15: Custodero, L. Making sense of "Making Special": Art and Intimacy in musical lives and educational practice.

  An Essay Review of Dissanayake, E. (2000). Art and intimacy: How the arts began. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

• Volume 6 Number 16: Davis, S. G. "That thing you do!" Compositional processes of a rock band.

  Understanding how students make music in non-school settings can inform teaching practice in schools, making teaching more relevant to students’ musical perspectives. This research study examined the musical processes of a three-member rock band, their roles within the group, and considered how they constructed musical meaning. The most salient findings that emerged from this study lie at the intersection of musical growth, musical enculturation, and musical meaning. Collaborative composing was facilitated by shared musical tastes and grounded in friendship and commitment to music making. Engagement and investment in the music prompted meaningful musical experiences for group members. Ownership, agency, relevance, and personal expression fuse at the core of the value they place on this musical and social experience. Implications for the instrumental music classroom are also shared.

• Volume 6 Number 17: Paley, N., Crawford, J., Kinney, K., Koons, D., & Seo, J. Remaking The Educational Imagination.

  We document a set of artistic reconstructions of Elliot Eisner's The Educational Imagination which took place during a graduate seminar in contemporary curriculum discourses. In this project, students and their instructor collaboratively explored The Educational Imagination as a site for an arts-based examination of knowing, identity, and textual authority. Participants created sculptural representations of the text. The sculptures functioned alternately as artworks and experimental places of learning, thus suggesting alternative practices by which the educational experience might be reimagined. In producing these textual/artistic reconstructions, participants created an intersubjective/interpersonal dialogue as they analyzed the educational, aesthetic, and ideological factors which shaped their thinking about curriculum as remade from Eisner's text.

Book Reviews

• Volume 6 Review 1: Sheelagh Chadwick. Review of Herbst, Anri; Nzewi, Meki; and Agawu, Kofi (Eds.). ( 2003). Musical arts in Africa: Theory, practice and education. Pretoria, South Africa: University of South Africa Press.

• Volume 6 Review 2: Eisner, E. W. & Day, M. D. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education: A Project of the National Art Education Association. Mahwah, N. J.:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Reviewed by Teresa Cotner, California State University, San Bernardino

• Volume 6 Review 3: Davis, Jessica Hoffman. (2005). Framing education as art: The octopus has a good day. N.Y.: Teachers College Press. Reviewed by Richard Siegesmund, University of Georgia.

• Volume 5 Number 1: Laura A. McCammon & Heather Smigiel: Whose Narrative is it?: Ethical Issues when Using Drama with Teacher Narratives

  The authors describe ethical issues they have encountered when teachers develop narratives about their own practice and then again when these narratives are later explored using drama techniques. Specifically, they look at the developmental process itself, both in the creation of the original narrative and the subsequent creation of a dramatic text. They also examine the climate of trust and respect that needs to be in place when teachers share narratives especially when the author of the narrative is not known. Issues of power relationships also arise especially when soliciting narratives from pre-service teachers and sharing them with wider audiences.

• Volume 5 Number 2: Elkoshi, Rivka: Is Music “Colorful”? A Study of the Effects of Age and Musical Literacy on Children’s Notational Color Expressions
  This eight-year study represents a pioneering effort to investigate color expression in children’s graphic notations at two stages of development: “Pre-literate” (age: 7.0-8.5), before students received school music instruction, and “Post-literate” (age: 14.0-15.5), three years after students acquired Standard Notation in school, and to consider the effects of age and musical literacy on notational color expressions. Two meetings with Israeli/Jewish schoolchildren were held along a course of eight years: The first meeting with 46 second-graders (1995); the second meeting with 33 ninth-graders (2003). Of these, 17 students participated in two meetings. All participants acquired Standard Notation in their sixth-grade. In each meeting, subjects performed a musical phrase called “Timbre”, represented it graphically and explained their notations. Seventy-nine notations were collected and analyzed by MSC (Morphological, Structural, Conceptual) method of interpretation (Elkoshi, 2000, 2002, 2004). Based on MSC, notations were classified under four categories: A (Association), P (Pictogram), F (Formal response), and G(Gestalt expression). Results show that the conceptual sub-division of the musical phrase into fragments (G) is color related, whereas the conceptual perception of the chronological sequence (F) is shape rather than color related. Associations (including Synesthesia) is probably age related. Post-literate notational color expressions were not affected by musical literacy.

• Volume 5 Number 3: Becky Wai-Ling Packard, Katherine L. Ellison & Maria R. Sequenzia: Show and Tell—Photo-Interviews with Urban Adolescent Girls

  In this project, we used photo-interviews as a method to investigate the hopes and fears of urban adolescent girls who actively participated in their community organization. The photo-interviews were featured in a collaborative, creative arts program involving urban adolescent girls from a community organization and college students enrolled in a research methods course. Case studies of four adolescent participants are presented, illustrating the role of neighborhood context and past experiences in shaping hopes and fears. The potential synergy between image-based research and arts-based education is discussed.

• Volume 5 Number 4: Elliot W. Eisner: What Can Education Learn from the Arts about the Practice of Education?

  My subject is what the practice of education can learn from the arts. I describe the forms of thinking the arts evoke and their relevance for re-framing conceptions of what education can accomplish.

Book Reviews

• Volume 5 Review 1: Magne Espeland. Review of Sullivan, Timothy & Willingham, Lee. (Eds.) (2002). Creativity and Music Education. Toronto: Canadian Music Educators Association.

• Volume 5 Review 2: Sally Armstrong Gradle. Review of Abbs, Peter. (2003). Against the flow: Education, the arts, and postmodern culture. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

• Volume 5 Review 3: Joan Russell. Review of Leong, Sam. (Ed.). (2003). Musicianship in the 21st century: Issues, trends & possibilities. Sydney: Australian Music Centre.

• Volume 5 Review 4: Richard Colwell. Review of Aróstegui, José Luis. (Ed.). (2004). The Social Context of Music Education. Champaign, IL: Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation.

• Volume 4 Number 1: Monica Prendergast: "I, Me, Mine: Soliloquizing as Reflective Practice"

  Arts-based qualitative researchers are expanding the borders of what constitutes educational research through work that recognizes and elevates the creative/imaginative elements at play, within a social science frame, in the researcher's interaction with his or her subject of inquiry. This paper examines the construction/creation of soliloquies as forms of reflective practice through an understanding of this dramatic voice applied to qualitative research writing. A recent research study in theatre audience education at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, presented soliloquies expressed as personal and data poems, dialogues of symbolic interactions (between "I" in practice and "Me" in reflection), as autobiography (talking to myself about myself), and autoethnography (talking to the group within which I place myself). Soliloquy writing offers myriad ways to engage in reflective practice and qualitative interpretive inquiry.

• Volume 4 Number 2: Gary Peters "The Aestheticization of Research in the Thought of Maurice Blanchot"

  Increasingly familiar within the State University system, the thought of Maurice Blanchot is in danger of settling all-too-comfortably into a research culture that in fundamental ways is radically at odds with the peculiar trajectory of his singular writing. In the light of this, the current essay is intent on returning Blanchot to the “outside,” to an “exteriority” that is not critical of the hegemonic research culture, but Other—an Other mode of research. Trying to think of research affirmatively, in the absence of the negative dialectics more typical of the academic communicative community, both throws new light on Blanchot’s own aesthetic method while, importantly, offering a great deal to those intent on imagining models that better “fit” the experience of art practitioners engaged, whether formally or informally, in practice-based research. Driven by the interminable waywardness of “fascination” rather than the teleologies of knowledge and understanding, Blanchot proposes (albeit fleetingly) a non-methodological method of progressing that speaks from the experience of the artist and an aesthetic that is not only unengaged with the will-to-knowledge but, in fact renders such knowledge “truly impracticable.” Perverse as this may sound, the very thought of such an Other mode of research may yet prove to mark an important and necessary shift in what “counts” as research within an academic culture that must increasingly familiarize itself with the alterity of art…and then take it seriously (as research).

• Volume 4 Number 3: Margaret Macintyre Latta & Karl D. Hostetler "The Call to Play"

  This article explores the nature of play and its presence and potential in teaching and learning encounters. Play is portrayed as a movement that can characterize the process of learning and teachers’ reflections on their practice. The exercise of techne and phronesis are found to be key but problematic elements in this movement. The paper is in the form of a conversation, a medium calling the authors themselves to play with the play that might occur in classrooms. Thus, the authors’ play is itself a subject for inquiry. Their interplay warrants considering play to be an elemental activity for reconceptualizing teaching/learning practices.

• Volume 4 Number 4: Margaret S. Barrett & Heather Smigiel "Awakening the 'Sleeping Giant'?: The arts in the lives of Australian families"

  In 2001 a nation wide study (Costantoura, 2001) raised a number of questions in relation to the arts and Australian families. This study used group interviews and surveys to question people aged between 18 and 60 about their participation in the arts. Results from this study suggested that the arts add an important dimension to family life; however, the ways this occurs and the nature of family participation in the arts were not made clear. Significantly, this study did not include the perceptions of young people under the age of 18. Here we report on one aspect of a complementary research project that sought to provide more information concerning the ways in which Australian families participate in the arts and to identify the meaning, purpose, and value of the arts for children (ages five to fifteen) in Australian school and community settings. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which children describe their engagement with the arts in family settings using the voices of young people as the primary source of data.

• Volume 4 Number 5: Stephanie Springgay "Cloth as Intercorporeality: Touch, Fantasy, and Performance and the Construction of Body Knowledge"

  The monstrous body (Shildrick, 2002), the altered body (Featherstone, 2000) and the masquerade (Tseëlon, 2001) have been subjects of recent theoretical analysis through scholarly writing and the works of contemporary visual artists (Wilson, Dyck, Orlan). Each term while slightly different, marks a theoretical concern with bodies that are conditioned as the abnormal other. Theories that engage with the monstrous, altered, and masquerading body do not position these terms as static binaries in opposition to the ideal or normal body, but rather their arguments are located within the body itself such that encounters with the strange are constant conditions of becoming (Shildrick, 2002). The latent body is always in process, open, pliable, and protruding. Opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, and standard, the monstrous, altered, and masquerading bodies resist, exaggerate, and destabilize distinctions and boundaries that mark and maintain bodies, signifying pleasure and desire as sites of insurgency. Bodies have been accorded a place of central importance in recent scholarship as researchers attempt to construct the meanings of the lived body, the social body, and body image (Grosz, 1994). Each discipline whether science, technology, sociology, sport, and/or art has de-constructed and challenged western philosophy which is rooted in a mind/body split (Price & Shildrick, 1999). What is evidently missing from this cogent literature is a re-representation of the body as tactile and felt. In this paper I analyze the monstrous, altered, and masquerading body not to further dichotomous thinking and systems of regulation and control, but as sites of excess where the pleasures of the body are central aspects of body knowledge. Interrogating the boundaries of the body, I offer a model of intercorporeality (Weiss, 1999) that examines the body in relation to other bodies and the ways in which knowing and being are informed through generative understandings of touch, fantasy, and performance. The arguments call for educational practices that are open to desire, allowing for tactile and felt knowledges.

• Volume 4 Number 6: John Finney "From Resentment to Enchantment: What a Class of Thirteen Year Olds and Their Music Teacher Tell Us About a Musical Education"

  The study set out to uncover pupils’ experience of learning music and their teacher’s experience of teaching music in their weekly class music lesson in a secondary school for 11-19 year olds in the east of England. A class of twenty-four pupils, aged 12-13 years, in their second year of secondary schooling, and their music teacher, were observed and interviewed over a two-term period, creating an ethnography of their classroom musical lives. The unfolding story showed pupils giving meaning to their music lesson in terms of having a "teacher who understands things" and of a teacher "making connections" with them. The relationship between learner, what is to be learnt and teacher proved to be critical. The account will enable music teachers to reflect upon the ways in which they engage with their pupils as they seek to create a positive climate for learning. It may further assist in arriving at common understandings about the character and purpose of a musical education.

• Volume 4 Number 7: Elizabeth de Freitas "Contested Positions: How Fiction Informs Empathic Research"

  This article uses fiction and critical theory to explore the concept of empathy. Empathy has become one of the most contested concepts in the postmodern revisioning of the social sciences (Simon, 2000). Empathy assumes that we can profoundly understand the experiences of the Other, despite the radical cultural differences that divide us. I present two fictional narratives in which an educational researcher named Martha West examines both the promise and peril of research informed by empathy.

• Volume 4 Number 8: Marybeth Gasman & Edward Epstein "Doorways to the Academy: Visual Self-Expression among Faculty Members in Academic Departments"

  In this article, we seek to understand how faculty door displays can evolve into an elevated form of self expression rather than mundane decoration. Other research on this topic has linked the decoration of faculty doors to theories of personalization: the need to mark the territory as belonging to the owner and as a symbol of commitment to an institution. Our discussion, however, focuses less on the personal and more on the use of the door as a means of positioning oneself within the department, institution, and discipline. We find that faculty door displays encompass more than just matters of personal style but also touch on the larger concerns that the professor wishes to communicate to the academic public.

Book Reviews

• Volume 4 Review 1: Warren Sellers. Review of Doll, W. E. Jr. & Gough, N. (2002). Curriculum Visions. Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, Vol. 151; General Editors Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

• Volume 4 Review 2: James G. Henderson. Review of Eisner, E. W. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

• Volume 4 Review 3: Pamela Burnard. Review of Cox, Gordon. (2002). Living music in schools 1923-1999: Studies in the history of music education in England. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

• Volume 3 Number 1: Margaret Meban: "The Postmodern Artist in the School: Implications for Arts Partnership Programs"

  In this article, I reflect on my experience as a visual artist working in an elementary school as part of an arts partnership program. Specifically, I discuss how in making art in the public space of a school institution I found myself censoring the content of my work, which resulted in a shift of the style and purpose of my art-making, and ultimately, altered the nature of the educational experience for students. Working from a reconstructive postmodern perspective of artistic practice within the context of a public school which enacted a conservative curriculum orientation I found myself engaging in a process of self-censorship by selecting themes and issues that would not be considered controversial within the context of this elementary school. Perplexed by the direction my work and educational role should take I began to accommodate the immediate interests of the students which resulted in a studio program that emphasized the basic skills of drawing and painting with little attention paid to the social function of art. By considering curriculum orientations that a school may enact and the values and philosophical assumptions that underpin them, along with the positions of the current postmodern art world, I discuss the complex position that the artist may occupy in the school while participating in an arts partnership program.

• Volume 3 Number 2: Christine Marme´ Thompson "Celebrating complexity: Children's talk about the media."

  Essay Review of Joseph Tobin's Good guys don't wear hats: Children's talk about the media.

• Volume 3 Number 3: Michalinos Zembylas "Of Troubadours, Angels, and Parasites: Reevaluating the Educational Territory in the Arts and Sciences Through the Work of Michel Serres."

  This article examines Michel Serres' philosophy of the "educated third" and considers his views on a philosophy of communication. Serres' interdisciplinary writing constructs themes that can be traced across literature, philosophy, science, mythology and art, borrowing ideas and approaches from them and transforming those into original, provocative and synthetic voices that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Serres' views provide a refreshing perspective to educators, especially, those in art education and science education and advocate a reevaluation of some contemporary educational ideals to emphasize invention and imagination.

• Volume 3 Number 4: Cheryl J. Craig: "The Shadows of New York: A Continuing Inquiry into the School as Parkland Metaphor."

  Drawing on a theoretical framework centered on Clandinin and Connelly's (1995) metaphor of a school as a "professional knowledge landscape" and Diamond's (2000) idea of schools and inquiry being thought of as "parkland," I employ the "story constellations" (Craig, 2001) approach to excavate narratives of community, school and reform, both given and lived at Cochrane Academy, a Grade 4-5 magnet school located in a historic African American neighborhood in the mid-southern US. These stories set the stage for an art-making experience that occurred in a 5th grade art class in the heels of the events of September 11th. I show that metaphoric parkland connections existed between scenes of New York City and Cochrane's storied landscape prior to the tragedy. These illusionary commonplaces gave rise to the Shadows of New York healing mural that became a mobile parkland space which, in turn, was gifted to the people of New York. Throughout the inquiry, I emphasize the critical relationships between and among art, education and social justice and signal how vitally important these connections are in enabling constrained situations to be lived, and responded to, in educative, as opposed to miseducative, ways (Dewey, 1938).

• Volume 3 Number 5: Nancy Dibble & Jerry Rosiek "White Out: A Case Study Introducing a New Citational Format for Teacher Practical Knowledge Research."

  This case study describes a biology teacher who comes to see her European-American racial identity as mediating her attempts to counsel Mexican-American students to pursue further science education. The teacher's journey to this understanding involves reflection on the structure of the science curriculum, on her personal history, and dwelling on uncomfortable feelings that contain kernels of insight that eventually grow into deeper understanding. The authors consider the whole of this process, and not just some specific conclusion that can be represented in form of summary propositions, to be the content of the practical knowledge the case study conveys. To represent this kind of knowledge adequately, this case study uses a "sonata-form" that has been introduced and explained in other articles. To this it adds the innovation of side notes, a system of notation designed to connect teachers' narratives with research from outside their experience without suggesting that teachers' experience is derivative of that research.

• Volume 3 Number 6: Stokrocki & Samoraj "An Ethnographic Exploration of Childrens Drawings of Their First Communion in Poland."

  This ethnographic study explores what some children in Poland represented in drawings of their first Holy Communion, how they developed them, and the significance of the drawings. We describe, analyze, and compare drawings as a whole and with findings from other studies on child artmaking. Description includes the Holy Communion experience in general, the ritual in Poland, the Corpus Christi procession, the school context and related lesson. Analysis focuses on theme, schema, color, and space usage. Drawings do not express content--deep religious feelings but reveal other aesthetic interests in massive churches and decorative details. Conclusions include summary of elements of the event¹s uniqueness, discussion of what was left out of the drawings, and alternative explanations which include limited drawing abilities, gender differences, outside influences, power relations, ritualistic role of the ceremony, and the essence of holy communion and the children's drawings.

• Volume 3 Number 7: Dzansi "Some Manifestations of Ghanaian Indigenous Culture in Children’s Singing Games"

  This article discusses some Ghanaian cultural values and expressions that are embedded in children’s playground repertoire. The discussion is based on the description and interpretation of some of the songs children performed for me during my fieldwork in Ghana in 2001. Ghana has embarked on school reforms and policies to make school music reflect the culture of the local communities. As I analyzed some children’s repertoire within the cultural contexts in the Ghanaian indigenous communities, it is evident that the playgrounds and homes are fertile grounds for tapping and honing their artistic potentials to enhance and transform music performance in the classroom and beyond.

Book Reviews

• Volume 3 Review 1: Peter R. Webster. "Review of Parncutt, R. & McPherson, G. (Eds.) (2002). The science and psychology of music performance: Creative strategies for teaching and learning, N. Y.: Oxford University Press"

• Volume 3 Review 2: Kenneth Marantz "Review of Duncum, Paul & Bracey, Ted. (Eds). (2001). On Knowing: Art and Visual Culture. Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury University Press"

• Volume 3 Review 3: Nick Rabkin "Review of Deasy, Richard J. (Ed.). (2002). Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development. Washington, D.C.: Council of Chief State School Officers"

• Volume 3 Review 4: Sally Gradle "Review of Kellman, Julia. (2001). Autism, Art, and Children: The Stories We Draw. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey"

• Volume 2 Number 1: Robin Mello "The Power of Storytelling: How Oral Narrative Influences Children's Relationships in Classrooms"

  This article presents findings from an arts-based research projcet that took place in a fourth-grade classroom over the period of one school year. It examines the impact of storytelling on children's self-concept. In addition, it discusses how storytelling helped children process their social experiences in school.

• Volume 2 Number 2: Bjorn Rassmussen & Peter Wright "The Theatre Workshop as Educational Space: How Imagined Reality is Voiced and Conceived"

  In this article, we claim a concept of education that allows a space for dealing with sensuous impressions, examining knowledge, experiencing disconnections, re-experiencing meaningful connections and learning "how to know." This is a different form of education than where the emphasis is merely on the "flow of information." Arts education, we argue, should not be a practice that is pre-designed, and hence textually ordered and contextually controlled, in order to better serve the expectations of any societal or cultural institution. In claiming this space, we need to deconstruct both the concept of "Aesthetic" and "Education" in order to find new ways of organising an education that is both aesthetic and playful. What we argue is that Dramatic Knowing is a form within the broader concept of a "cultural aesthetic," and highlight cultural production as distinct from merely socialising young people to arts canons or using theatre as an under-developed curriculum tool. Recent studies of youth culture (as referred) show that young people make the most of the inter-textual play between fine art, popular art and everyday life, and it is in this area of "play" that we are able to uncover new models of drama education. In linguistic terms, dramatic knowing highlights a certain intentional, interactive, creative, and context-situated production of meaning. This production takes place in theatre workshops, and two forms of workshops are described that reflect arguments made about education, partnership and the potential for youth culture research.

• Volume 2 Number 3: Paul Duncum "Theoretical Foundations for an Art Education of Global Culture and Principles for Classroom Practice"

  The article begins with an outline of the theoretical foundations for an art education that addresses global culture. It reviews and critiques the widely held, popular theory of cultural imperialism that sees, typically, U.S. culture overshadowing and destroying national and local cultures. By contrast, the author argues that by employing reading reception theory and theories of indigenization and cultural translation, it is possible to see a vastly more complex set of cultural issues through which we need to navigate. The article concludes with principles for dealing with global culture in the classroom, as well as some examples of exemplary classroom practice.

• Volume 2 Number 4: Susan W. Mills "The Role of Musical Intelligence in a Multiple Intelligences Focused Elementary School"

  The role of musical intelligence was investigated at a Central Florida elementary school. Four participating teachers implemented the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) by Howard Gardner in their classroom curricula. Extent and quality of musical experiences, corresponding assessments, and comparison with representative schools from MI literature were examined through case study data collection methods. Only one assessment for musical growth and one assessment for musical ability were found in the MI literature. No such assessments were present in the school setting. Influences on the role of musical intelligence included perceptions about: MI, music integration, musical growth, assessment of musical growth and assessment in general. Political climate at the school and district were also cited as highly influential in determining the role of musical intelligence in the school's MI curriculum. Recommendations to correlate MI learning strategies and music activities with Sunshine State Standards benchmarks learning, and to allow time and resources for such training, were suggested by participating teachers. Other recommendations include greater contributions to MI literature from the arts education community, music specialist involvement in curriculum planning, and support from school and district administration.

• Volume 2 Number 5: Colin Durrant "The Genesis of Musical Behaviour: Implications for Adolescent Music Education"

  This article addresses some of the concerns regarding music education for the secondary school/adolescent age range. Many tensions are highlighted--the apparent lack of success and engagement by students, yet at the same time, their almost universal need to identify with music within particular sub-cultures. Reference is made specifically to the curriculum in schools for England and Wales and the reports which suggest that all is not well. Inasmuch as it is a complex issue, some illustrations and solutions are outlined, though only as suggestions for exploring a way forward.

• Volume 2 Number 6: Nitzan Ben-Shaul "Outline of a Developmental-Cognitive Approach for Comprehending the Art of Cinema"

• Volume 2 Number 7: Angela Elster: "Learning Through the Arts: Program Goals, Features, and Pilot Results"

  This article describes an artist-teacher-institutional collaboration that began in Toronto, Canada, in the mid-1990s, and that has grown to become national initiative. "Learning Through the Arts" (LTTA) was established in 1995 by The Royal Conservatory of Music, a national leader in preschool and music education programs, and was soon to change the ways in which 60 artists, 200 teachers and 4,000 students in Toronto approached and experienced public education. The initiative grew out of a response to the need to expand learning opportunities for young people in schools. The project involves an approach to learning through the arts, where the arts are used to access concepts and make meaning. The structure of the program is outlined in the paper, as well as some initial research findings. The five year pilot project, which developed and tested the model that is now being implemented with over 20,000 students in six additional cities across Canada, involved Toronto artists in partnership with the former North York Board of Education (now the Toronto District School Board). After a short period, LTTA garnered the support of artists, teachers, principals, and upper administration. Research on the Toronto pilot has indicated that students' attitudes towards school curricula have improved, that teachers have gained confidence and skills related to teaching from an arts-infused perspective, and that administrative practices were changed to increase support for arts curricula after involvement with LTTA.

• Volume 2 Number 8: Rena Upitis, Katharine Smithrim, Ann Patteson & Margaret Meban: "The Effects of an Enriched Elementary Arts Education Program on Teacher Development, Artist Practices, and Student Achievement"

  "Learning Through the Arts" (LTTA) is a school transformation project developed by The Royal Conservatory of Music (Canada). The first elementary schools were founded in Toronto, Ontario, in 1995, and LTTA is currently operating in elementary schools in 7 urban and rural sites across Canada. LTTA is designed with the goal of engaging students deeply in learning, through carefully designed math, science, history, geography, and language units that incorporate performing and visual arts into the learning process. This goal is achieved through a structured program of teacher development which includes the involvement of artists who work along with teachers to develop curricula. LTTA offers effective and sustainable professional development programs, based on the sharing of knowledge and skills between teachers, artists, and students, through multi-year partnerships. Artists model techniques and activities for teachers to implement in their classrooms and also work directly with students in schools.This articledescribes the baseline data gathered as the first part of the evaluation of the national LTTA program, for the students, teachers, parents, and administrators involved in the six sites that were established in 1999. Preliminary data were gathered over the 1999-2000 year. Canadian Achievement Tests (CAT/3) were used to assess students' performance in vocabulary, reading comprehension, and mathematics. In addition, writing samples were taken and scored holistically. Students also completed a survey indicating their interests in schooling in general and in the arts in particular, as well as in the activities they engaged in outside of school. Parents were asked to report on language(s) spoken at home, leisure activities, household income level, and the mother's education level. Teachers were surveyed regarding a variety of teaching beliefs and practices. Administrators were surveyed regarding their support for arts activities, both in terms of human and financial resources. Baseline data indicate that there are clear correlations between achievement in mathematics and language and engagement in arts activities, particularly with respect to music lessons (outside of school). That is, students who take music lessons outside of school perform significantly better on all language and mathematics measures than their peers who do not take music lessons. Not surprisingly, socio-economic status is also clearly related to arts activities and achievement, and strategies for tracking changes within socio-economic groups over the next two years of the study are planned. It was also found that attitudes towards various art forms are established in students as early as the first grade, with boys being less interested and perceiving themselves as less skilled, for example, in singing and dancing than their female peers. Hypotheses and general issues for consideration for the next two years of work are described, and methods for exploring those issues and hypotheses are also discussed.

• Volume 2 Number 9: Kit Grauer, Rita Irwin, Alex de Cosson & Sylvia Wilson: "Images for Understanding: Snapshots of 'Learning through the Arts'"

  In this article, we examine, in images and text, a case study of two artists and the teachers at an action research school involved in the "Learning through the Arts" program. We are guided by the following research question: What changes occur in the artists' and teachers' beliefs about learning and teaching as a result of this program? Emerging from the research are several themes under the umbrella of beliefs about teaching and learning: the role of the researchers and image based methodology in affecting beliefs; the role of the children's response in shaping beliefs; and integration in an arts infused curriculum. Given the rising interest in artist-in- residence programs across North America, and particularly the Learning through the Arts programs across Canada and internationally, this image based educational research contributes valuable insights into the beliefs, practices, and issues surrounding such programs.

• Volume 2 Number 10: Donald Blumenfeld-Jones: "Partial Stories: An Hermeneutic Account of Practicing History"

  An essay review of Janice Ross's (2000) Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Rise of Dance in American Education (University of Wisconsin Press).

• Volume 1 Number 1: Margery D. Osborne & David J. Brady, "Joy and the Paradox of Control"

  In this essay we write about joy and about magic. The stories we recount of our work in art, science and teaching are examples of magic: all are mysterious, transformative. We focus on magic because the word is provocative and we wish to provoke an exploration of a much neglected facet of teaching and of education, the uncontrolled and out-of-control, the qualities of teaching that cause joy.

• Volume 1 Number 2: Francois Victor Tochon, "Action Poetry as an Empowering Art"

  Through several narratives of experience, and under the theme of "The Arts and Learning", the article presents lived processes of poetic emergence in French-speaking Switzerland and Francophone Northern Ontario. These processes suggest that it would be beneficial to transcend the usual structural options in instruction on the literary art object, given the integrative possibilities of action and of poetic action in particular. In order to integrate the dynamics of creation, instruction in schools could work from active, poststructuralist principles and become "didactive", that is pedagogically active along a trend that defines learning as the creation of entirely new knowledge, concepts and artefacts. Didactics, along the line of the European educational research, has long been neglected in the American literature. This is time to see its possibilities.

• Volume 1 Number 3: Minette Mans, "Using Namibian Music/Dance Traditions as a Basis for Reforming Arts Education"

  The incredible diversity of music in southern Africa causes many teachers to doubt their ability to teach in cultures other than their own. Those teachers who have formal music training often don't have a working knowledge of the local peoples' music and dances. In addition, there are very few published materials available, so where to begin? Because they feel uncertain about the music of another culture, teachers may turn towards "formula" lessons. There is, however, a danger of tokenism in such formulas. This can be avoided by learning more about the culture.
          In this article I identify some of the questions that can lead to a better understanding of music and dance in cultures other than one's own. Video and audio examples are provided that illustrate answers in Namibia. By asking the right questions, the characteristics of a particular musical culture can be exposed. However, understanding something about a culture does not necessarily equip one to teach it. Therefore the development of teaching-learning materials for schools is necessary. These normally include transcriptions of songs and dances. Based on my research on Namibian music and dance a possible transcription of both sound and movement is described.

• Volume 1 Number 4: C. T. Patrick Diamond & Carol A. Mullen, "Rescripting the Script and Rewriting the Paper: Taking Research to the 'Edge of the Exploratory'"

  This paper is a sequel to our playlet ("Performance as Rehearsal") that was performed as part of a larger presentation called "Passion Play" at a national-level educational research conference in 2000. We reflect here on our experience of scripting and performing our "two hander" and on the audience's reactions to it documented by means of a response/evaluation sheet. We begin with a dramatic dialogue to evoke our initial (even self-defeating) reactions to our playlet as script and as performance. We then feature the audience's reactions to the playlet. Finally, in a reflective narrative, we affirm our need as teacher educator researchers to perform our academic texts by using aesthetic techniques such as literary allusion and allegory, postmodern interruptive modes, and invitational prompts. We end with the script that we originally (first) created for the playlet.

• Volume 1 Number 5: Barbara Poston-Anderson & Peter de Vries, "'The Peter Piper Pickled Pepper Mystery': Arts Educators Collaborate to Create a Musical Play for Pre-schoolers"

  This article outlines how an arts-based collaboration unfolded between a music educator and a drama educator in a tertiary institution. The particular context was their creation of a musical play for pre-school children entitled, "The Peter Piper Pickled Pepper Mystery." Written from both educators' perspectives, this commentary provides insights into their collaborative process from the scripting and composition through to the rehearsal and performance stages. Reflecting on their journey together, the researchers identify the main characteristics which they believe contributed to their perceptions of a successful collaboration.