Archives

  • Leaning into Disequilibrium
    Vol. 15 No. 2 (2022)

    We live and work in times of disequilibrium in the arts, arts education and the broader artistic and creative education ecologies. Many of our communities are struggling during the global pandemic, affected by economic and socio-cultural shifts from extended periods of lockdown and potential health risks for participatory and socially engaged projects. This feeling of imbalance, a state where internal or external forces prevent the self/selves from reaching equilibrium or balance may have long term impacts on artistic and creative education. What we have also witnessed, is a resilience to being off kilter. To lean into the disequilibrium and work/in in the feeling of imbalance, creating new spaces and places for being extraordinary, fantastical, phantasmagorical, phenomenal in artistic and creative education is our challenge. What have we created? What have we shifted and turned? What have we ruptured and dis-rupted? We invited JACE contributions that extend this (dis)rupture of practice and consider where next from here? 

    Volume 15(2) furthers articles JACE recieved as part of this call. We are thrilled to be pubslihing articles that explore the worlds and reworlding of artists, researchers and teachers that have thrived throughout the pandemic. 

  • Leaning into disequilibrium
    Vol. 15 No. 1 (2021)

    We live and work in times of disequilibrium in the arts, arts education and the broader artistic and creative education ecologies. Many of our communities are struggling during the global pandemic, affected by economic and socio-cultural shifts from extended periods of lockdown and potential health risks for participatory and socially engaged projects. This feeling of imbalance, a state where internal or external forces prevent the self/selves from reaching equilibrium or balance may have long term impacts on artistic and creative education. What we have also witnessed, is a resilience to being off kilter. To lean into the disequilibrium and work/in in the feeling of imbalance, creating new spaces and places for being extraordinary, fantastical, phantasmagorical, phenomenal in artistic and creative education is our challenge. What have we created? What have we shifted and turned? What have we ruptured and dis-rupted? We invited JACE contributions that extend this (dis)rupture of practice and consider where next from here? 

  • Cover image: Sarah Healy, Dance for me, Salomé... Dance! Photorelease, 1994.

    re-siting studio practices
    Vol. 14 No. 2 (2020)

    Studios are inherently practice oriented sites that evoke and invite intercultural, sociomaterial, technological and integrative connections. This edition of JACE invited authors to consider place, site and space in ways that contribute to artistic and creative education. To do this we have curated 2 issues of Volume 14 2020 to explore this special edition more fully and to open definitions of the studio as a site of and for artistic or creative practice. That is, we take artistic and creative practices (social and material, human and nonhuman) to be the defining characteristics of a studio, not its physical features.

    This opens up the possibility for re-siting the studio in different places, spaces and cultures post-2020 in a new COVID-normal.

    Our intention was to prompt authors to trouble conventional notions of studio practice and consider the implications of this for artistic and creative education - with these implications potentially being ethical, political, cultural, social, and/or material. 

    Cover image: Sarah Healy, Dance for me, Salomé... Dance! Photorelease, 1994.

  • re-siting studio practices
    Vol. 14 No. 1 (2020)

    
Studios are inherently practice oriented sites that evoke and invite intercultural, sociomaterial, technological and integrative connections. This edition of JACE invited authors to consider place, site and space in ways that contribute to artistic and creative education. For the purposes of this special edition, we define the studio as a site of and for artistic or creative practice. That is, we take artistic and creative practices (social and material, human and nonhuman) to be the defining characteristics of a studio, not its physical features.

    This opens up the possibility for re-siting the studio in different places, spaces and cultures.

    Our intention was to prompt authors to trouble conventional notions of studio practice and consider the implications of this for artistic and creative education - with these implications potentially being ethical, political, cultural, social, and/or material. 

    Cover image: Sarah Healy, Dance for me, Salomé... Dance! Photorelease, 1994.

  • Emmanuelle Brizuela's interculturalisms visual provocation

    INTERCULTURALISMS
    Vol. 13 No. 1 (2019)

    For this interculturalisms issue we invited contributions that considered ways of exploring cultural transformation, intra-and interculturalism and socially just practices in artistic and creative education. Authors were invited to consider ways that the sites and spaces we practice in, learn in, teach in and research in can contribute to or hinder social and cultural change. Our call for papers began with a visual provocation from our JACE intern University of Melbourne student, Emmanuelle Brizuela. Emmanuelle drew on a range of personal sites and cultural spaces she inhabited to think about how a young person in Melbourne lives, learns and works in a multi-layered and multi-tiered inter-cultural world.  Now we are ready to publish JACE and this issue includes five papers written by authors that explore ways that each have moved from multicultural or cultural practices to intra-and interculturalisms in their sites. Each of them consider ways that international arts education can explicitly engage with intercultural education models and frameworks, critical pedagogies and practices for more diverse and inclusive classrooms.

  • Landscape view from Reykjavik Harbour

    The Landscape of Artistic and Creative Education in 2018
    Vol. 12 No. 1 (2018)

    The UNESCO Seoul Agenda (2010) calls for “a concerted effort to realise the full potential of high quality arts education to positively renew educational systems, to achieve crucial social and cultural objectives, and ultimately to benefit children, youth and life-long learners of all ages” (p.2). With this agenda in mind, the Melbourne UNESCO Observatory of Arts Education and JACE Editors invited contributing authors to consider the discussions that emerge from this position and the landscape in which practice thrives. As the landscape continues to shift, grow, melt and be harvested, cut back, depleted, re-planted and to regrow - creative and artistic education finds itself in both a precarious position in some spaces, and more hopeful and sustainable sites of enrichment in others. This our first issue in Open Journal Systems (OJS), extends the concept and metaphor of the landscape in artistic and creative education to our colleagues and communities, and asks you to explore the emerging issues felt, realised and opened as a result of the UNESCO Seoul Agenda. These concepts of the precarious, and the sustainable can be discussed through critical dialogue in visual and theoretical papers, conceptual and practice driven articles or advocacy essays that have a call to action or raise awareness of artistic and creative education in your social, environmental, political and cultural site.  
  • Cover: Kathryn Coleman, Intersections & Overlaps, Digital drawing, 2017

    Looking back, to look forward.
    Vol. 11 No. 1 (2017)

    Welcome to our special 10th birthday edition of the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education (JACE). As well as celebrating ten great years of past achievements, our latest edition marks some exciting changes with the journal. We are honoured to have been appointed to steer the journal forward and we have some very exciting ideas for 2018. Secondly, JACE is now a fully-fledged Open Access journal and, thanks to assistance from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) it is now hosted by Open Journal Systems here at jace.online. As always access is free, and we will let you know as each new edition becomes available. There will be two editions a year; including a special themed edition and an open-themed one as well. Elsewhere in this edition is the submission information and deadlines for 2018.

    Dr Kathryn Coleman & Dr Richard Sallis 

  • Teacher Artmaker Project
    Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016)

    This special edition of JACE on theTeacher Art-maker Project (TAP) draws together a range of insightful contributions from accomplished teacher-artists spanning from 2012 – 2015. Its production has embodied the creative process, gradually emerging in an organic fashion that is indicative of the way artists work collaboratively. Despite the time elapsed between the inception and completion of this edition, all the articles remain poignant: each author revealing a deeply personal yet theoretically and artistically astute exploration of the complexities, conflicts and triumphs that accompany their navigations of the teacher-artist role.

    This JACE TAP edition is different from other JACE publications in that the design of the journal is a deliberately iterative exploration of its own construction.The intent was to reveal a playful interaction with content, openly connecting ideas with loose graphic narratives, through constantly changing form. Approaching the content of this issue of JACE is purposefully artful. The usual conventions of academic publishing that often relies on a restrained vernacular, gives way to experimental interpretations of content.

    The approach to this piece of visual communication immediately presented a paradox of an ‘open brief’.That is, it did not prescribe the usual (and orientating) parameters of a visual communication need.The hidden scripture of a formal design brief often belies the ‘play’ necessary during the creative process. In this case, the brief focused on play as driving the graphic appearance of each individual article. The openness of the brief allowed the journal to develop organically with the designers working as visual authors responding to the articles with the language of visual communication. The culmination was a final piece of visual communication discovered in the design response to each individual article.

  • Creativity and the implications for a creative/creativity pedagogy
    Vol. 9 No. 1 (2015)

    Discussions of creativity have considerable currency in the elds of education and artist scholarship at present. Educators (and artists) have a vested interest in the question of whether creativity can be taught, nurtured or simply recognised as innate. Selzer and Bentley (1999) writing ahead of Ken Robinson’s highly in uential All our Futures (1999) addressed the debate head on, arguing persuasively that creativity “is the application of knowledge and skills in new ways to achieve a valued goal.” Robinson later elaborates on qualities identi ed as characteristics of creativity: using imagination; pursuing purposes; being original; judging value (Robinson, 1999). What these and other critical inquiries into the nature and practice of creativity served to do for those of us working in the creative arts was to provide an impetus for critical inquiry into the pedagogies of creativity. If we are to accept that creativity is not an inherited characteristic or an innate skill but can indeed be fostered, supported and generated then there is clearly a role to be played by educators in this endeavour and by scholars and practitioners associated with the materials of innovation and imagination – frequently found in the creative arts. The Journal of Artistic and Creative Education is a tting place for continuing and broadening the discussion around creativity and implications for a creative/creativity pedagogy and this issue takes up this opportunity. Five highly individual papers each present a way of thinking about creativity, education and artistic practice, and the relationship between these elements.

  • Special edition – performed research
    Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014)

    Welcome to this JACE Special Edition on Performed Research. This edition heralds not only a new topic for consideration amongst the JACE readership – the methodological uses of performance within a research framework – but it also marks the transition from one editorial team to another. Since JACE was rst published in 2007, Dr Wesley Imms has been at the helm as Editor. He has successfully nurtured JACE through many editions, thoughtfully crafting the disparate and diverse areas of scholarship that sit under the broad and expanding umbrella of ‘Artistic and Creative Education’, into a series of rich discussions of practice, research and inevitably, praxis. The new editorial team would like to thank Wes and acknowledge his leadership and scholarship as the founding editor of JACE.

    This Special Edition on Performed Research comes to you at a time when there is burgeoning interest in this particular eld and growing excitement about its possibilities. In July 2014, researchers and practitioners with an interest in the place of performance as a means of gathering, analysing or presenting research are meeting at the very rst Artistry, Performance and Scholarly Inquiry Symposium hosted here at The University of Melbourne. The Special Edition has been prepared in anticipation of this event, with two-fold intent: as a contribution to the dialogue which will take place at the Symposium, and as a way of drawing attention to this eld of research practice to the wider arts research community who is the readership of JACE. The co-editors of this Special Edition on Performed Research are also the co-convenors of the Symposium. We see this as an exciting opportunity to align a live event with a JACE publication.

    Central to the symposium is the recognition that ‘performed research’ challenges singular de nition. The eld now includes an array of methodological practices and discourses including: performance/performed ethnography, ethnodrama, research-based theatre, performance in and as qualitative research/inquiry, as well as autoethnography, verbatim and documentary theatre. In recent times, researchers from a range of traditions of inquiry and artistic practices have brought the aesthetic and performative into their investigations of the social, cultural, and political world; in so doing they highlight the potential for giving voice to the marginalised, the silenced and the personal - those less visible and less heard through more traditional academic research methods.

     

  • Special Edition – Gallery and Museum Education
    Vol. 7 No. 1 (2014)

    This special edition of the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education (JACE) brings together authors from across Australia discussing issues central to the ongoing development and importance of education within museums.

    What are the distinctive characteristics and significance of museum education? How does learning occur in museums and what does it look like? Who is engaged in museum education and where does it take place? What are some of the benefits of museum education? This edition explores these broad questions through nine articles that individually address the role of museum learning as providing a transformative experience in a rich, ‘hands-on’ and diverse environment. The authors present a wide array of case studies and examples from their institutions and their research, providing practical and invigorating discussions on the purpose, pedagogy and practice of museum education.

    At a time when there are significant cuts being made to education budgets in Australia, thereby often limiting excursions to museums and other cultural sites, it seems timely to publish a special edition that sheds light on the power of learning in museums and to make a case for museum learning. Moreover, museums are already producing effective learning experiences that are highly appreciated by their users, and these deserve to be celebrated. This celebration will hopefully lead to increased appreciation and understanding of the educational possibilities in museums and galleries, of why professionals have chosen to work in particular ways, and the outcomes of their work.

  • Addressing the Subjective through Arts Education
    Vol. 6 No. 1 (2012)

    Each paper in this issue has, either explicitly or covertly, focused on the individual and the subjective in education. In Cartlidge’s work, this was in reference to methods for utilising personal narrative when helping adults understand their world. For Jacobs, it was in terms of exploring how personalised experiences, presented through students’ aesthetic texts in secondary drama, are accommodated by teachers. Österlind explored a similar concept, with similar students, but in terms of accounting for and utilising the ‘emotional’ within the curriculum. Stimson entered the highly personalised world of dream analysis, and the nal paper – in contrast, but with similar results – quantitatively analysed the impact on the individual of leadership style and disciplinary climates in a university. This has proved to be an enlightening issue for JACE, one that broadens our concept of the individual, the subjective, and creativity in education.

  • REFLECTIONS FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE PERSONAL AND THE PROFESSIONAL
    Vol. 5 No. 2 (2011)

    This issue of JACE has no single focus. It does, however, own a repeating theme through the ve articles concerning how curriculum is (and should) be impacted by ‘the personal’. This is an important topic; in the arts we are aware that a disjuncture often exists between documented curriculum and actual practice. What we are asked to do and what transpires in the classroom can vary widely, often because formal curriculum does not meet the needs of individuals –students and teachers. As a result, in the arts teachers often resort to hybrid curricula and ignore approaches dictated by professional bodies (Gray & MacGregor, 1991). Each article in this issue in some way challenges the notion of curriculum being a rational structure of learning, instead being a journey where personal values and beliefs dictate how it is rei ed in classrooms.

    Two papers explore this from a curriculum design perspective, and a further three from the perspective of teaching practice. Of the latter, the common question being explored is; how do teachers use their own artistic practise to inform, develop or analyse their professional practise? The articles present the compelling case that a teacher cannot remove her or himself from the reality of how curriculum converts to actual lived experience for arts participants. Our teaching practice becomes an integral part of our own ‘being’; to be an educator is, in part, to accept that education shapes our life in ways not dissimilar to how, we hope, some of our students are enriched through our teaching.

  • Artistry and the Personal in Education
    Vol. 5 No. 1 (2011)

    This issue of JACE highlights some of the breadth and complexity of artistry in education. Is it possible to conflate the personal with the social in a manner that celebrates both individual art making and collegial social learning? This issue explores such a paradox through four articles that individually address the role the arts play in providing students opportunities to collaborate, yet does so while celebrating ‘the personal’ in learning. Deborah Fraser and Graham Price from New Zealand begin this conversation

    by emphasising the value of shared learning in primary settings. Their research utilises arts research methods to investigate the benefits of social learning in art activities, while providing evidence of the importance of the personal in the art making practice. In contrast, Canadian Carl Leggo’s work is highly individual in focus. He paints a captivating image of what can 

    happen when one immerses oneself in the artistry of the written word. He broadens his perspective to the possibilities that exist when one engages in conversations with others about poetry – the ‘shared social learning’ spoken of in Deborah and Graham’s article. An essential component of Carl’s article that captivates the reader is the joyful indulgence of simply immersing yourself in art; who would not like to simply spend time reading, writing or making? Fellow Canadian Nicholas Stanger does exactly this in his writing. He takes us, both in text and by video link to the ‘magic place’ of his childhood, and encourages us to indulge ourselves in the reminiscence of past pleasures. The immediacy of his foray into Vancouver’s beautiful woods (he does this in preference to a morning coffee), the serendipity of found materials and childlike activities, and the power of creating transient artworks all remind us of the personal pleasures many of us have enjoyed in our youth. Anne Harris and Jon Staley remind us that not all children have memories to treasure, but can build positive memories through the arts. Their central thesis remains constant with the previous authors, in that they celebrate the ‘authentic creative journey’ as a method for tapping ‘the personal’ while still addressing wider social possibilities of the arts. This issue contains a suite of beautifully crafted accounts of the myriad way the arts allow us to indulge in the personal while communicating with others and building the social networks necessary for a better community.

  • Musical and cultural relevance in a changing world of music education.
    Vol. 4 No. 1 (2010)

    The International Society for Music Education World Conference was held in Beijing in August, 2010. Prior to this, the Commission for Music Policy: Cultural, Educational and Media Seminar was hosted by the Henan University College of Arts in Kaifeng, China, from 27th-30th July with a focus on “Policy concerns: Traditional and popular culture in music education”. The articles in these two special issues of JACE represent a selection of the papers presented. The seminar brought together a range of music educators including teacher educators, teachers, and researchers from many parts of the world who explored the promises and limitations of policies and practices related to evolving digital technologies, culture, and music education. The dominant theme that emerged from the seminar was that forces of change in the forms of globalization, technological development and the increasing in uence of popular culture are issues for music educators, curriculum designers and policy makers world-wide. A sub-theme of the conference highlighted both positives and negatives in the accommodation of traditional music and popular music cultures in a rapidly changing global landscape.

    A key thread running through these articles is the question of musical and cultural relevance. In the last two decades many researchers, academics and teachers have noted that for most young people, music at school lacks relevance (Green, 2008; National Review of School Music Education, 2005; Ross, 1995; St George, 2010). This is re ected in low rates of engagement and high rates of attrition in school music programs. This situation is particularly remarkable given the important role that music plays in young people’s lives outside of school. Radical developments in technology have allowed young people access to and participation in an unprecedented range of musical tastes and styles, yet a number of music educators and policy makers have ignored popular music culture in favor of Western European art music. As Kos points out, school music programs are increasingly seen as “repositories for the moldy and obsolete”.