Art Student Perspectives of Activist Art: A Phenomenological Study

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the lived experience of seven undergraduate art students who created an original piece of Activist Art through a class assignment. The researcher sought to hear participants’ stories and examine the artwork created to give meaning to their experience. The overwhelming response showed that undergraduate students wanted to tell their stories and looked inward to find personally powerful and relevant causes that they wanted to share with their classmates, and, in creating a lasting piece of artwork, with the world. The implications of this work suggest that art programs set up in an out-of-date Disciple Based Art Education (DBAE) curriculum that focuses on technical skills and not on visual communication with integration in social justice education are doing a disservice to their young artists. In developing a curriculum for undergraduate art majors, programs have effectively provided technique and media instruction in various courses to develop artists’ skills. The program doesn’t yet do enough to develop the artist’s sense of themselves as individuals with something to communicate visually. Teaching activist art or teaching courses with a project or unit embedded within the course that includes an activist art component would help contribute to undergraduate artists sense of themselves as individuals with ideas to contribute through their art

Game-Based Teaching Methodology and Empathy in Ethics Education

This article describes the experience of a group of educators participating in a graduate course in ethics. Playing role playing games and the work accompanying that play were the predominate methodology employed in the course. An accompanying research study investigated the lived experiences of the course participants. Themes that emerged from interview data included student engagement, participants’ applications, empathy development, and reactions to professor modeling

Game-Based Teaching Methodology and Empathy (Chapter in How Shall We Then Care? : A Christian Educator’s Guide to Caring for Self, Learners, Colleagues, and Community)

Excerpt: While ethics instruction in initial teacher education and advanced preparation in education fields is fairly common,1 less common is the particular curriculum and teaching methodology described herein. Professional educators make many daily decisions regarding curriculum, instruction, and assessment.2 A number of those decisions reflect a need for and commitment to ethical frameworks that inform professional decisionmaking. Indeed, as Shapiro and Gross point out, “The most difficult decisions to solve are ethical ones that require dealing with paradoxes and complexities.”3 Often, educators find themselves at decision points in which ethical systems seem to clash