Kathryn Grushka

Artists as reflective self-learners and cultural communicators: an exploration of the qualitative aesthetic dimension of knowing self through reflective practice in art-making

This article tells a story of how a group of women artists with a passion for the media of fibre came together and through individual and group reflective practices used the visual arts as a learning platform to negotiate social and cultural meanings and inform understandings of self. The epistemological basis of the arts and the imagery of vision to ‘see’ offered for these women a way to access their qualitative world and a platform upon which to negotiate constructs of self. For these women reflecting through imagery was an essential validating tool of self‐understanding. Over a number of years they refined and developed individual and group reflective processes that informed their own cognitive mythologies and refined their art practices. The longitudinal study draws on 10 years of artistic practice by seven Australian women artists. It examines their art‐making processes, concepts, symbolic meaning‐making systems through image analysis and insights gained through being an active participant in their reflective discourses. The research reveals over time the artists refinement of intensions in meaning‐making and the evolution of their aesthetic dimensions of self shaped using personal reflective practices. They engaged in new cultural discourses which actively contributed to an emergent cultural script and art‐making which was ultimately emancipatory.

Meaning and identities: a visual performative pedagogy for socio-cultural learning

In this article I present personalised socio-cultural inquiry in visual art education as a critical and expressive material praxis. The model of Visual Performative Pedagogy and Communicative Proficiency for the Visual Art Classroom is presented as a legitimate means of manipulating visual codes, communicating meaning and mediating values through imaging technologies. It identifies that visual art studio learning outcomes as exhibition artworks facilitate the mediation and communication of ideas, and support understanding of individual identities, social behaviours, culture and beliefs. A critical phenomenological methodology was used to explore longitudinal and case-study learning insights about student learning in a post-compulsory visual art curriculum in New South Wales, Australia. Through analysis of student artworks, reflective journals and post-schooling case-study interviews, the research identified that this unique learning environment developed visual communicative proficiency in the students. The findings affirm the significance of personalised imaging inquiry strategies to support understandings about the self, society and culture. The studio pedagogies and visual arts education curriculum in NSW represents an alternative approach to a prescribed and explicit values curriculum. This article will identify the key elements of the model of Visual Performative Pedagogy and Communicative Proficiency for the Visual Art Classroom. It will expand on the aesthetic and critical approach in arts learning as studio pedagogy and the exhibition process that generates public benefits through socially embedded and embodied inquiry.

Using Arts-based Methods in Pre-service Teacher Education: Perzine Pedagogies

The possibilities afforded by perzine pedagogies to nurture reflexivity in pre-service student teachers are presented and explored in this article. Perzine pedagogy as arts-based inquiry is grounded in the events of practical life and may provide a learning context for exploring the problematised nature of teaching. It considers how this reflexive and inquiry-oriented method offers opportunities to interrogate past learning, to accommodate the affective, to challenge constructed beliefs and to build adaptive behaviours. Employing the narrative inquiry lens of the researcher artist/teacher educator and the narrating and reflective voice of a visual arts teacher, this article illustrates how perzine production may inform insights into construction of teacher/learner identities. Perzines offer opportunities for experiential, critical and experimental encounters to move beyond the competency rhetoric to meet a new ethic: a personal desire for self-reflection and expression through opportunities to re-represent the teacher/learner self.

Visual Art, Visual Design and Numeracy

The world of visual learning is a primary way of knowing. It embeds visuo-spatial reasoning and number skills, essential for numeracy understandings and is developed through creating art and design works. The world of visual art and the design is underpinned by the world of perspective, space, proportion, ratio and measurement along with abstract concepts that inform problem-solving and the construction and design of objects in the material and digital world. Artist/designers work with images and other visual systems, such as three-dimensional models, as their cognitive tools, and this numerical, spatial and diagrammatic knowledge can both reflect and affect thought. Engaging with visual arts learning enables students to develop a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts and their application across learning areas.

Media Arts: Visual Culture and Numeracy

The ascendency of a visual culture in the arts, sciences, media and everyday life places the image as a key meaning-making tool (Stafford in Echo objects: the cognitive work of images. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007).

The Digital Studio as a Global Education Site

The investigation of human rights and social justice are major objectives of an innovative pre-service teacher-training course at a regional Australian university. The course immerses a cross curricula cohort of secondary pre-service teachers in an arts-led critical global education agenda (Gibson, 2011).