Review of Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum by Arthur Efland

This is a review of Arthur D. Efland’s 2002 book, Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum, which sets for itself the admirable task of coherently mapping variously situated theories of cognition, and from an integration of those theories, modeling a rationale for the necessary integration of arts learning in general education curriculum

Searching Self-Image: Identities to Be Self-Evident

Naming can alternatively be a definition of identity or a source of stigma. Un-naming can alter a story and serve to unhinge fixed definitions, initiating a democratic discourse that finds its own way of escaping the thrall of hegemony and dominating canons. Can qualitative research serve to un-name axiomatic frameworks of identity? This paper is written to follow up to Messing Around With Identity Constructs (Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 10, Number 4, pp. 548-557) and continues the author’s effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in research writing

One of These Things is Not Like the Other: Art Education and the Symbolic Interaction of Bodies and Self-images.

This article begins with the premise that self-imagery is constituted as a shape-shifting aggregate of symbolic systems that incorporates the human body itself as one of its representations. At intermittent points of the body’s embodiment of visual culture and tacit social experience, alternative representations accrete into varying symbolic systems, the multiple shapes a self-image may take over a lifetime. Given that social identity is derived from the interaction of various symbolic systems, how do some bodies and self-images come to be taken as that of identities incompatible with most others? In this exploration of the self-image and identity, the author reconsiders the purposes of art education in human development, especially when the self-image is given primacy over the objects we typically plan to make in the classroom

Editorial: NAEA Travelogue-Dialogue

Editor’s Note: Throughout my term as Senior Editor, not only have I had the assistance of a hard-working Editorial Board of reviewers, but also I have had the benefit of the expertise of James Rolling, Jr. as the Studies Editorial Assistant. At the recent NAEA convention we not only talked about our Studies editorial work, but also as James was preparing for his dissertation defense of his study of the construction of African-American identity, our adviser-student conversations continued. It seems appropriate that James continues the dialogue in his words. —Graeme Sulliva

Visual Culture Archaeology: A Criti/Politi/cal Methodology of Image and Identity

This study argues the efficacy of the phenomenological cultural work of a visual culture archaeology that liberates a political and critical identity, resistant to domination, authoring social change and its own agency through multiple and incommensurable positions. Built upon Foucauldian premises, visual culture archaeology is developed as a methodology for discursive un-naming and re-naming, and emerges from the inherence and attenuation of inscripted meanings in the reinterpretation of identity during a postmodern confluence of ideas and images. The hybridized representation of the African American in Western visual culture has been unique in the effort by some to define us over significant periods as less than human, less than American, or less than statistically significant in the purpose to maintain an unequal relation of economic and political power. This paper continues the author’s effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing

Figuring Myself Out: Certainty, Injury, and the Poststructuralist Repositioning of Bodies of Identity

How does the named body refigure itself? Bodies are evidentiary. They are documentary. We position our bodies and juxtapose them in foreground to a tableau other bodies; self-images are traced against other images of identity. We position our bodies to tell stories—to tell self-histories, sometimes false, sometimes true, always incomplete. For each of us, our thinking—our image of self—tends to cohere around an identifiable, repeatable pattern of discursive meanings that we first inherit and then overwrite with newly experienced and refreshed meanings. Life stories are structures in flux, deconstructions. The source of injurious self-image appears to be wound up in the cultural construction of “abnormality.” The reconstitution of a spoiled identity is effected in the presentation of extra-normative figures of self, selves outside the boundaries of a normalizing frame, selves less traveled. The author makes the argument that a body tells its own life in spite of all manner of stereotyping and propaganda, offering glimpses of humanity, poetry overcoming monstrosity

Rethinking Relevance in Art Education: Paradigm Shifts and Policy Problematics in the Wake of the Information Age

This article addresses the advocacy of organizations like the National Art Education Association that seek greater legislative support, funding and time allocations to be devoted to arts instruction and the development of arts practices in the arena of public education. The author argues the timeliness of a reconceived paradigm for understanding and advocating the relevancy of arts practices in the wake of the Information Age. This article seeks to rethink the semiotics defining art in an era of shifting paradigms and as contextualized in contemporary educational policy

Marginalia and Meaning: Off-Site/Sight/Cite Points of Reference for Extended Trajectories in Learning

This study argues that drawing upon off-site/ sight/ cite points of reference affords a space for extended trajectories of learning and the cultivation of rich and atypical personal meaning unavailable within the terrain and climes of typical schooling frameworks. This paper continues the author\u27s effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing

Exploring Foshay’s Theorem for Curriculum-making in Education: An Elementary School Art Studio Project.

This study explores the question of “why we teach as we do” through the self-reflexive lens described by several noted curriculum theorists, but perhaps best exemplified in a simple theorem for a reflexive curriculum-making praxis first proposed by aesthetics educator Arthur W. Foshay in his aphorism, “Who is to encounter what, why, how, in what circumstances, under what governance, at what cost?” The efficacy in Foshay’s postulation is not self-evident, but must be revealed in an alternating sequence of engagements with the constituent elements of its syntax. The method for this presentation of living inquiry in curriculum-making is trifold, involving the intersection of an art studio project involving 3rd and 4th grade students in a new elementary school; the mixed genre writing of an accompanying paper drawing upon the artist/teacher/researcher’s autobiographical narrative and poetry; and, a series of drawings that retrace and elaborate upon the project and paper. This study argues that Foshay has proposed a qualitative theorem inviting ongoing interpretation in curriculum-making. An alternating sequence of conceptualizing events constitutes a living inquiry, offering the possibility of greater innovation in learning than the more formulaic unit structures designed by mandate

One of These Things is Not Like the Other: Art Education and the Symbolic Interaction of Bodies and Self-images.

This article begins with the premise that self-imagery is constituted as a shape-shifting aggregate of symbolic systems that incorporates the human body itself as one of its representations. At intermittent points of the body’s embodiment of visual culture and tacit social experience, alternative representations accrete into varying symbolic systems, the multiple shapes a self-image may take over a lifetime. Given that social identity is derived from the interaction of various symbolic systems, how do some bodies and self-images come to be taken as that of identities incompatible with most others? In this exploration of the self-image and identity, the author reconsiders the purposes of art education in human development, especially when the self-image is given primacy over the objects we typically plan to make in the classroom