Mindi Rhoades

This return was an opportunity for me to dive into the depths of a particular time in art education history, to swim through the sentiments flowing throughout this 1976 issue (Davis, 1976)—their vi...

This article documents work with pre/in service teachers who are university students across three universities in three regions of the US, across multiple courses. Given our shared concern about the narrowing of space for imaginative literacy practices in schools, we focus on our collective use of open-ended, arts-based pedagogies as a way to challenge how we, as instructors, and our students conceive of literacy practices. A collection of Shaun Tan texts (including picturebooks, wordless graphic novels, and other multimodal/media texts for young people) served as focus texts across our three classroom contexts. We found surprise, a problematizing of narrow literacy definitions, and flexibility were all common ways of responding to this open-ended, arts-based literacy work. It resulted in tensions around and challenges of conventional or ordinary classroom literacy practices and pedagogical choices.

This article defines dramatic inquiry, exploring its possible contributions to discourses on subjectivity, embodied pedagogy, and relational knowing in art education. As a communal, ensemble endeavor emerging from the discipline of drama education, dramatic inquiry offers strategies for enhancing arts education's critical inquiries by facilitating imaginative, transformative dialogues from within visual culture phenomena. Theoretical reflections on dramatic inquiry's origins and its potential educational value are accompanied by suggestions for teaching and learning practices that inspire “critical questions that envision alternative just futures” (Desai, 2009 Desai, D. (2009). Imagining justice in times of perpetual war: Notes from the classroom. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 6(2), 6–25. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar] , p. 25) and imagine their fruition. Building on Heathcote's ( 1984 Heathcote, D. (1984). Collected writings on education and drama. L. Johnson & C. O'Neill (Eds.). Melbourne , Australia: Hutchinson. [Google Scholar] ) work in drama education and Edmiston's explicitly critical, socio-cultural orientation (Freire, 1970 Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. ( M. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY : Continuum. [Google Scholar] ; hooks, 1994 Hooks, B. (1994). Outlaw culture: Resisting representations. New York, NY : Routledge. [Google Scholar] ; Kumashiro & Ngo, 2007 Kumashiro, K. , & Ngo, B. (2007). Six lenses for anti-oppressive education: Partial stories, improbable conversations. New York, NY : Peter Lang. [Crossref] [Google Scholar] ) we explore Edmiston's ( 2011 Edmiston, B. (2011). Teaching for transformation: Drama and language arts education. In D. Lapp & D. Fisher (Eds.), The handbook of research on teaching the English language arts. New York , NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar] ) seven key dimensions of dramatic inquiry through their use in K–12 classrooms and their resonance with contemporary artists' and art educators' practices.

This set of poems emerges from the flashpoint at the intersection of art, text, translation, and meaning-making. Several result directly from a class field trip with art educator Terry Barrett’s to the Columbus Museum of Art. We wrote during prolonged interactions with particular pieces. Others result from reflecting on making and remembering. The title of this collection, “imprint,” operates on multiple levels. There is the imprint of the text itself, the prints of the photos, the fictional prints and printmaking referenced, the mental images burned into memory, the lasting impression. There is something magical about trying to translate evanescent ideas, unformed understandings, and ephemeral moments into something more, something lasting, something to keep. These poems represent an attempt to capture something fleeting and slippery also in words. They are an attempt to pause, to contemplate in slower cadence, to ponder the surfeit of signs. They are an attempt to notice, to echo, to share and spark connections. They are an assemblage of images told in fractured pieces, bundled together, and shared.

Using the metaphor of mapping as an overarching metaphor, this article presents an amalgamated version of the first five years of Big Gay Church, an annual session at the National Art Education Association’s convention since 2009. Big Gay Church is a collaborative small group of queer art educators and allies coming together to explore the intersections of religion, education, the arts, culture, and LGBTQ identities. By using tools and constructs from dramatic inquiry and other performance pedagogies, as well as inviting attendees to fully participate as members of the congregation, we transform this conference session into an opportunity for scholarship, action, connection, and fellowship. Such arts-based academic interventions can provoke a re-imagining of ways forward, together, in education and research.

This research study focuses on four teacher-researchers’ experiences with Shaun Tan’s (2006) The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel that is in their elementary, middle school, high school, and university classrooms. While in each case, many readers approached The Arrival with resistance, the aesthetic style and lack of recognizable language also invited readers to enter and participate in the story. The teacher-researchers found entry points through dialogic and embodied ways of meaning-making in order to engage students in a deep exploration of issues surrounding diversity and social justice. Drawn together by the common threads of critical multimodal literacies and arts-based pedagogies, the authors found that readers responded powerfully and empathetically to the text as they worked together to construct and expand meaning.

While the past decade shows dramatic progress in tolerance, acceptance, and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) people/rights in the United States, this population remains underserved. Statistics on LGBTQ youth suicide remain troublingly high; yet, when LGBTQ youth attend schools with Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), open faculty support, anti-bullying programs and policies, and LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, they fully integrate and avoid many of the stresses and negative safety/health consequences of homophobia (Kosciw, Greytak, Diaz, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2012, p. 6). An annual National Art Education Association Convention ensemble performance—Big Gay Church— examines the material, physical, psychological, and spiritual impact of Conservative, fundamentalist, anti-LGBTQ religious doctrine in creating and maintaining the underserved, marginalized status of the LGBTQ community in the US. Big Gay Church advocates and demonstrates the power of creative, collaborative, arts- and inquiry-based scholarship for interrogating discrimination and injustice, accepting agency, and imagining and enacting more equitable possibilities.

In 2005, digital media artist/activist Liv Gjestvang founded a nonprofit organization, Youth Video OUTreach (YVO), to teach lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth skills to create a documentary about their lives that could serve as a centerpiece for outreach and advocacy efforts by/for LGBTQ youth. While adult-initiated, the youths primarily drove the organization’s direction, goals, and outcomes. Youth Video OUTreach has combined key dimensions of critical civic praxis with artivism, primarily in out-of-school contexts, as strategies to create and capitalize on community resources and effect positive community change. Combining two concepts—Ginwright and Cammarota’s (2007) critical civic praxis and Sandoval and Latorre’s (2008) artivism—this article provides a framework for constructing collective, creative projects that challenge sociocultural inequities. In particular, marginalized youth have found artivism a powerful tactic for reaching broader audiences with narratives, experiences, and perspectives that contradict and complicate dominant ones.