Pamela G. Taylor

Service-Learning A Language of “We”

Like community service, service-learning engages students in working with the community and contributes to the development of their civic responsibility. Though learning undoubtedly occurs during community service, service-learning is a structured and theoretically grounded practice in which service experiences are directly connected to academic objectives.

Madonna and Hypertext: Liberatory Learning in Art Education

This article was taken from a 2-year study that examined the use of computer hypertext as a base for art education in high school. Students from advanced, beginning, and intermediate art classes us...

Press Pause: Critically Contextualizing Music Video in Visual Culture and Art Education

Music video is one of the most influential visual culture forms to hit youth culture since the advent of television. Although provocative, the value of studying such visual culture as the music video in art education is much more than providing mere spectacle or motivational tactic. As many teenagers know, music videos portray meaning. They provoke, sell, promote, and tell stories through densely textured images and sound. They are exciting, dramatic forms of art that are in their own right an excellent source of learning as well as a provocative link to more traditional artistic forms. Like any form of art and educational experience, music video, as well as other visual culture studies, requires meaningful contextual research and analysis as well as alternative approaches to what we think about, teach, and learn in art education. In a quest for a critical, comprehensive, and contextual approach to music video analysis and interpretation, this article examines and correlates theories of critical pedagogy, visual culture art education, and music video. Commensurately, it explores Radioheads music video entitled Go to Sleep (Radiohead, 2002) and shares descriptions of specific art classroom practice utilizing music videos.

Hyperaesthetics: Making Sense of Our Technomediated World

An exploration of the ways that technology increasingly alters our understanding of self and the world in which we live points to the unfolding of what computer theorist Peter Lunenfeld (2000) calls a hyperaesthetics. In this article, the author correlates theories of art and artmaking with a burgeoning hyperaesthetics through theoretical comparison and interpretational modes of critical inquiry. In an attempt to provide a theoretical and methodical study of hyperaesthetics, the author presents the ways that traditional artistic strategies such as perspective, multiple representations, and media transparency reveal connections with—and reveal ways of understanding—such contemporary technological conditions as transparent hypermediacy, multiplicity, erasure, and networked identity. The author describes a technology-inspired art appreciation class experience to illustrate the ways that such connections between artistic strategies and technological issues may inform contemporary art education practices. This experience provides evidence as well as inspiration for an exciting new direction in art education theory and practice in this technomediated world—the quest for a theory of hyperaesthetics.

Making Meaningful Connections: Interactive Computer Hypertext in Art Education

Abstract When interactive computer technology is used in meaningful and connective ways, it both enhances and provokes the focus and purpose of art instruction and learning to be expansive and personally relevant. In this paper, we describe an approach to interpretation and curriculum design that requires users to make visual and conceptual associations among examples of visual culture, works of art, and content from various disciplines for the purpose of making meaning. A theoretical foundation for using hypertext authoring software to promote an empowering form of art education is provided, as are strategies for constructing rich interpretations of works of art and meaningful curricula. The use of hypertext authoring software by teachers and students to create interactive readings and on-going interpretations makes explicit their function as Type II applications. We believe that better ways of teaching and learning result from such interactive, hypertextual experiences with works of art, as they require users to make explicit various connections among various meaningful texts, experiences, and sources.

eLASTIC: Pulling and Stretching What It Means to Learn, Know, and Assess Art and Educational Progress.

The problematic issues related to standardized assessment of the nonstandard and to multiple ways of knowing in the visual arts motivated the research and first phase development of eLASTIC: electronic learning and assessment tool for interdisciplinary connections. In this article, the author describes the evolution and implications associated with this research centering upon the edifying nature of student-initiated links and connections. Using experiences from a 3-year study in Doha, Qatar, this eLASTIC research promises to inform the development of tools that compel students to learn beyond the curriculum while at the same time offering embedded assessments that yield ample data for demonstrating what art students know and are able to do.

Innovation in animation: exiting the comfort zone

In approaching the broad arena of art animation in the studio classroom it is useful to first deconstruct the defining elements of animation, stripping it of its popular connotations. Working from that vantage point, it is informative to investigate the work of some key pioneering artists and to see what innovations their visions necessitated as they created images or mechanisms that could conjure images. Such an inquiry compels the student to engage in a rich studio activity that uses a hybrid of materials, both digital and tactile, and often unorthodox. The benefit of such an approach to teaching animation prompted a full course within the animation curriculum; a course dedicated to innovation. This was initiated by the need for the students to learn to discover new methods and approaches to image making, leaving their comfort zones which often revolved around one style of drawing and a favorite software program.