Digital Technologies and performative pedagogies: Repositioning the visual

Images are becoming a primary means of information presentation in the digitized global media and digital technologies have emancipated and democratized the image. This allows for the reproduction and manipulation of images on a scale never seen before and opens new possibilities for teachers schooled in critical visuality. This paper reports on an innovative pre-service teacher training course in which a cross-curricula cohort of secondary teachers employed visual performative competencies to produce a series of learning objects on a digital platform. The resulting intertextual narratives demonstrate that the manipulation of image and text offered by digital technologies create a powerful vehicle for investigating knowledge and understandings, evolving new meaning and awakening latent creativity in the use of images for meaning making. This research informs the New Literacies and multimodal fields of enquiry and argues that visuality is integral to any pedagogy that purports to be relevant to the contemporary learner. It argues that the visual has been significantly under-valued as a conduit for knowledge acquisition and meaning making in the digital environment and supports the claim that critical literacy, interactivity, experimentation and production are vital to attaining the tenets of transformative education (Buckingham, 2007; Walsh, 2007; Cope & Kalantzis, 2008)

The Embodiment of Photographic Imagery Through the Lens of Time, Light and Memory

The photograph has its own unseen and implied past and future. The lens of memory accesses both the conscious and subconscious thoughts of its creator and audience. The photographer utilizes memory as an embodied experience in the construction of the photograph. Memory is filtered through the prevision experiences, assumptions beliefs, and cultural biases of its creator. This paper is a theoretical discussion about the way memory, experience and vision can connect the photographer to their photomechanical device, the camera, as an extension of the body. capturing time, light and memory shapes new states of beings and opens possibilities whereby the improbable and the impossible are envisioned as an embodiment of the photographers past, present and future imaginings. In field of visual art and design education, students must develop skills as inventive designers and photographers who can connect to their embodied past. For the students to achieve embodiment of the image, they need to have control of the technical and aesthetic elements of the photographic medium through the lens of time, light and memory

Transdisciplinary Art-Science Identities and the Artification of Learning

Transdisciplinary art-science learning is linked to semiosis and the performative nature of learning. At the core of contemporary learning is sensemaking through images. We learn through how we perceive, remember, and imagine the world. An ethics-approved inquiry looked at the artmaking practices of gifted secondary school students between the ages of 15 and 17 years (n = 108) with a focus on their art-science performative learning. The study applies Deleuzoguattarian thinking and other post-structural perspectives on contemporary representational practices for learning and communication in art-science spaces. One of the research key findings is that artified visual pedagogies can both transverse and/or facilitate meaning-making across art-science spaces and brings forth the creation of science-linked identities. Educators must now engage with the idea that visual reasoning as performative action is now the connecting pedagogy in all epistemic fields

Design as rhetoric: A New South Wales technology education curriculum perspective

The imperatives in education of preparation for work and the ability to be active (productive) participants in the evolving technological society drive much of the current agenda in technology education. This agenda increasingly privileges technical ways of knowing in design over more aesthetic, creative and hermeneutical ways of knowing or arts oriented ways of knowing in design. Increasingly the aesthetic dimensions of design education are present in curriculum as broad overarching rhetoric with the reality a more specific technical curriculum driven by a conservatism that serves technical interests of control, for industry, training and economic imperatives. This paper will attempt to deconstruct some of the history and curriculum forces that have shaped and are shaping design in technology education. It will examine those aspects of design thinking which gave rise to its central pedagogical positioning in design & technology and general curricula and have since isolated designing in many curriculum from their aesthetic hermeneutic and cultural beginnings. Design is now being realigned and re-designed within current technology literacy statements and technology curricula. This association brings together the engineer and the designer, science, mathematics and technology education and is poised to loose much of what originally defined its unique aesthetic knowing and design literacy

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

Conceptualising visual learning as an embodied and performative pedagogy for all classrooms

The challenge for arts educators is to find language and conceptual framings for visual art education that resonate with the transformative and literacy aims of mainstream education and position visual learning as core and visual proficiency as essential. The unique value of visual knowing is now an imperative in our ocular-centric culture where new technologies, consumerism, and unprecedented mobility impact on all students in the twenty-first century. Visual creative adaptability and its culturally located critical and generative understandings draw from our sense-rich world of human experience. Grounded in the theories of communicative knowing; becoming as the experience of performing self; experience and creativity as personal agency; and informed by socio-cultural inquiry, visuality, and art practice as research, the research connects explicitly to socio-cultural values. This paper presents a conceptual model of Visual Embodied and Performative Pedagogy, as a renewed language for visual arts education. The paper argues that deeply felt and enacted visual experience, as art-making, is central to personal socio-cultural inquiry and subjectivity insights. The paper will foreground the theory behind embodied art-making as it informs an individuals’ understandings of self with empirical Australian visual education research, between 2004–2007. The research centres the significance of images in society and the need for all students to develop visual communicative competencies. The benefits of working with images as socially embedded and embodied visual inquiry are argued. In so doing it calls into question the established primary role of images in learning as illustrative. It argues that learning through imaging acts is now an essential conduit for knowing and the mediation and communication of ideas and feelings in the new image-oriented society

Visual embodied and performative pedagogy: visual learning as becoming

The challenge for arts educators is to find language and conceptual framings for visual art education that resonate with the transformative and literacy aims of mainstream education and position visual learning as essential. The unique value of visual knowing is now an imperative in our ocularcentric culture where new technologies, consumerism and unprecedented mobility impacts on all students in the twenty first century. Visual creative adaptability and its culturally located critical and generative understandings draw from our sense-rich world of human experience. Grounded in the theories of communicative knowing (Habermas,1976), becoming as the experience of performing self (Deleuze, 2001, 2004), experience and creativity as personal agency (Semetsky, 2003) and informed by socio-cultural inquiry, visuality and art practice as research (Sullivan, 2005) the research connects explicitly to socio-cultural values. This paper presents a conceptual model of Visual Embodied and Performative Pedagogy as a renewed language for visual arts education. It is grounded in material embodied practices, socio-cultural learning and identities understanding as they emerge in an ethico-aesthetic learning space that contributes to participatory democracy. The paper argues that the embodied and performative visual experience is central to personal socio-cultural inquiry and subjectivity insights. The paper will foreground the theoretical arguments for Visual Embodied and Performative Pedagogy of self with empirical Australian visual education research, between 2004-2007 (Dinham, Grushka, MacCallum, Brown, Wright, & Pasco, 2007; Grushka, 2009). It centers the significance of images in society and the need for all students to develop visual communicative competencies. The benefits of socially embedded and embodied visual inquiry are argued. In so doing it calls into question the illustrative and often secondary role afforded to visual communicative proficiency found in visual arts education and its related learning outcomes. It argues that it is an essential way of knowing for the mediation of ideas and eelings in the new image oriented society

Visual consumers and art makers: adolescent art-making as a site of legitimate critique of cosmopolitanism

The phenomenon of globalisation presents for adolescent studies a need to navigate the complexities of a transnational commodity society. While globalisation facilitates a freeing up of culture, it can also present as perplexing and contradictory to young, emergent adults. Secondary visual art curricula in Australia, informed by postmodern and popular culture perspectives, are providing sites for the active and powerful negotiation of the phenomena of cosmopolitanism, citizenship and the construction of identity. These sites accomodate personal narrative perspectives that represent legitimate critique for the condition of a mobilised and fragmented self. An examination of five years of Higher School Certificate artworks in New South Wales reveals a rich imagery of how students use their art-making to affirm their consciousness about the world and self. It reveals how visual art-making may facilitate the ongoing mediation of society via mutating images, symbols and meanings in cultures, and provides tangible evidence of how aesthetic engagement can promote an investigation of personal and cultural values through communicative knowing

Valuing visual learning as self-narrative and embodied knowing in the post-compulsory visual art classroom: voices of parents, students and teachers

The visual arts experiences and their centrality to the learning of the 21st century is presented as it supports adolescent identities and participatory democracy through narrative and embodied education. The paper reports on an aspect of a research project that employed a critical phenomenological methodology to explore longitudinal and case study learning insights about post-compulsory student learning in a visual art curriculum in New South Wales, Australia. The research is informed by the theories of visuality, performative theory and embodied education. It is foregrounded by vision as a governing trope. The voices of students, parents and teachers are used to reveal how visual socio-cultural inquiry through self-narrative in the art studio classroom, is a deeply felt, embodied and performative experience that informs identity insights

Visualizing citizenship: the socio-cultual performative narrative in visual art education

While economic futures and work readiness preoccupies curriculum imperatives increasingly there is discussion around the wider social issues of cultural sustainability and citizenship imperatives (Hawkes, 2002; McCarthy et al., 2004). Visual Art education, in an increasingly globalised visual world, is gaining significance, for its contribution to a wider understanding of how its multi-disciplinary inquiry strategies contribute to the wider understanding of the field of cultural production (Dewey, 1934; Bourdieu, 1977; Bracy, 2001; Emery, 2002; Freedman, 2000) Visual art education is presented as a performative site for the development of subjectivities and ethico-aesthetic understanding (Guattari, 1995) as they inform cultural meaning, society and citizenship dispositions. The paper presents the general findings of a longitudinal and case study research project into the learning outcomes of post-compulsory NSW Visual Art syllabus. These findings will be elaborated through a student who selected to inquire into her Australian identity through visual artmaking. It reveals the wide range of multi-dimensional inquiry questions and demonstrates that seeing the world through the particular or private has public benefits for the maintenance of the culturally and socially sensitive citizen