Melanie L. Buffington

Creating and Consuming Web 2.0 in Art Education

ABSTRACT Web 2.0 has the potential to dramatically affect educational practices in a variety of ways. Within the field of art education, students and teachers can utilize Web 2.0 to further student understanding and art-making. The potential for students to create the Web is an aspect of Web 2.0 that is particularly well suited for an art classroom. Through examples from teachers and from the authors own practice, this article details potential uses of delicious, flickr, blogs, podcasts, and wiki. Through these technologies, students may collaboratively build knowledge, develop a deeper understanding of their own artworks and those of other artists, and interact with artworks in new ways.

Contemporary Approaches to Critical Thinking and the World Wide Web.

The benefits of critical thinking1 are frequently heard and promoted by todays educators. Critical thinking is now an oft-cited issue in most school subjects. Because of its prevalence, and because making art is a way of thinking, I began researching the concept of critical thinking.

Keeping up with our students: The evolution of technology and standards in art education

ABSTRACT This article addresses the standards of technology in the visual arts, arguing the standards function as de facto policy, the guidelines that shape what teachers teach. In this study, we investigate how art education standards approach technology as a teaching tool and artmaking medium, analyzing the current National Visual Arts Standards, the 21st Century Skills, the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Standards for Art Teacher Preparation, the NAEA Professional Standards for Visual Arts Educators, and how 26 university art education programs teach technology. Because a new set of digital standards were developed as media arts, separate from the visual arts, we believe that media arts should be considered a subset of the larger umbrella of visual arts, seeing visual art educators are the best equipped to address the new digital media arts standards and forms of making. Finally the article makes suggestions about how university art teacher preparation programs can redirect their courses to better relate to contemporary art practices, current educational uses of technology, and the world of ubiquitous computing.

Research Is… Results From a National Survey

To promote research, NAEA established the Research Commission in the spring of 2012 and the Cross-Division Research Committee (CDRC) was formed soon aft er with the goal of developing ways to share research within NAEA. In the summer of 2012, members of the CDRC gathered at Kutztown University to rename the group and develop a mission statement. Now known as the Professional Learning through Research Group (PLR), a working group established under the Research Commission, the PLR includes 14 art educators from every division and region of NAEA. <TQ>COMP: Possible pull quotes are in yellow highlights.</TQ>

Food Landscapes: Cooking, Community Service and Art-Making with Teens

ABSTRACT In this article, we describe Food Landscapes, an interdisciplinary program involving youth who live in an urban community identified as a food desert. Food Landscapes combined socially engaged art-making, cooking, community engagement, and community service to open dialogue with youth about food justice and equity, the meaning of community, and the formation of meaningful relationships between youth and community members who have disabilities. We describe the program and discuss the theory and model bases for the program and lessons learned during program implementation.

(Dis) Union at 150: Collective Memories of Secession

Abstract This article reports on the results of an exploratory qualitative study of the collective memories of Secession held by a diverse group of university students (n = 54) at a large southern research institution. Participants completed a survey that asked them to produce a narrative of Secession as well as to rank a selection of heroes and provide an explanation for their ranking. We found that the majority of responses contained elements from different, and even opposing, collective-memory traditions, including the Lost Cause and freedom-quest narratives of the Civil War. The article explores the responses using a theoretical framework based on the socio-cultural theories of language and narrative developed by Bakhtin and Wertsch in light of historical work done on collective memory of the Civil War.

Preparing a Professional Teaching Portfolio for an Art Teaching Position

11 In my position in a university art education department, I work with preservice teachers as they prepare their professional portfolios. They frequently ask excellent questions and I find that I do not always have the answers to their questions. Though I share my personal experiences with students, it is obvious that my experiences creating a portfolio and using in the job search process are dated. After searching in the literature in our field, I found some recent work on the job search process at various levels (Bain, 2005; Buffington & Lai, 2006), some work on portfolios in general (Bullock & Hawk, 2000; Campbell, Cignetti, Melenyzer, Nettles, & Wyman, 2007; Constantino & De Lorenzo, 2006; Kimball, 2003; Seldin, 2004; Wyatt & Looper, 2004), but little that was specific to the creation of professional portfolios for art educators. The many books and articles from general education about professional teaching portfolios address numerous important general concerns. However, to better understand the expectations of professional portfolios in the field of art education, I conducted a survey of art curriculum supervisors who are members of the Supervision and Administration Division of the National Art Education Association to learn about how they use portfolios in the hiring process. Of the 469 members of the Supervision and Administration Division, I received 93 responses to the survey. In this article, I share some suggestions based on the data from the survey and offer advice to job applicants regarding the creation of a professional teaching portfolio.

Art to Bring About Change: The Work of Tyree Guyton.

Public art takes many forms including commemorative sculptures, site-specific works, and collaborative murals. Additionally, public art can beautify an urban environment (Riley, 2005) or raise awareness of social issues in a manner similar to the AIDS quilt (Russell, 2004). Another possibility is that public works of art are a form of discourse and open conversations and dialogue. Such works of art can help communities work toward unity and empowerment (Hall, 1989; The Heidelberg Project, n.d.; Senie, 2006). As noted by Russell (2004) and Argiro (2004), studying public works of art can be an important part of art education. Tyree Guyton creates public art that is compelling, challenging, and ripe with possibilities for study in school.

Telling Our Tales: Becoming Art Educators

This year-long study shares a collaborative narrative inquiry project performed by four graduate students and one faculty member to understand the factors that influenced our paths to art education. We collected data by writing, analyzing, and then reflecting on stories of our experiences. Through careful analysis we identified five different hubs of experience that significantly affected our paths to the field: early experiences and family, school art experiences, mentors, identity, and young adult experiences. By thinking through our experiences, analyzing our narratives, and identifying the hubs, we came to a greater understanding of the influences on our paths to art education. These understandings inform our teaching practices enabling us to support students in meaningful ways.

Food Landscapes: A Socially Engaged Art Project

40 The Food Landscapes1 project was a semester-long, socially engaged after-school art and service program for youth in Richmond, Virginia. Funded primarily by a Community Engagement Grant from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Food Landscapes was a multi-faceted program designed to engage youth in learning about cooking, art, and food justice2—and about their role in the community. VCU’s Art Education Department, School of Social Work, and multiple community partners collaborated in this project.3 The idea for this program came from the youth themselves, relating to their interest in combining art and cooking with working with people in their community. Previously, youth at the NRC participated in cooking programs that addressed healthy eating habits and meal preparation, but did not relate to food access issues in their neighborhood. The Food Landscapes project worked with youth to explore food access through socially engaged art (SEA). Youth learned new cooking skills and partnered with adults with disabilities at a nearby day support center to cook together. These two community organizations—the NRC and TDSS—serve members of the Fulton4 community, so we thought all participants would benefit from interacting with people in their community. In a culminating community-wide event, the youth presented short videos reflecting on their experiences in the program, performed a step dance they choreographed, and answered audience questions.