Transcending gender dichotomy through art teacher education in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a patriarchal society characterized by gender dichotomy and male domination that permeates through social, educational and domestic spheres resulting in numerous challenges for art teacher education students. Expanding critical consciousness within art teacher education programmes is an imperative step towards developing art teachers who are self-aware and reflexive concerning the intersections of gender, art and education. This study investigated how engagement with visual art can provoke a heightened critical awareness about gender bias, stereotyping and equity among Zimbabwean art teacher education students. Sixteen selected art teacher education students (eight males and females) at the Great Zimbabwe University participated in the study. Participants were guided by researcher-constructed prompts for purposes of image making, interpretation and dialogue. Visual discourse analysis of the students’ visual narratives and discourse analysis of focus group transcriptions revealed several themes as well as evidence of critical reflection and expanded critical awareness related to gender issues. Visual and dialogic methods offer promise for critical engagement and reconciliation of tensions surrounding issues of gender amongst art teacher education candidates.

The Influence of "Art Teaching Guide" on the Concept of Art Education, Teaching Practice and Art Teacher Education in China

In China, with the rapid economic development and the general improvement of people's quality, the traditional mode of art education has been unable to meet the needs of social development. The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan calls for building a high-quality education system and promoting the modernization of education. In the process of vigorously promoting the new curriculum reform, with the overall educational goal of cultivating students' "core qualities" and promoting people's all-round development, China has introduced advanced western educational concepts in the aspect of fine arts education and adopted corresponding measures to reform China's fine arts education. This article discusses the influence of "Art Teaching Guide" written by American professors Mike Parks and John Cesca on Chinese art education philosophy, teaching practice and art teacher education. Finally, combining with the actual situation of Chinese art education, the author expresses some thoughts and hopes about the content of this book.

Opening Thirdspace: Cultivating critical geographies in art teacher education

Pre-service teachers new to a field placement need the opportunity to orient themselves in relation to their larger teaching contexts and configure geographies that resonate with the lives of their students. Soja’s Thirdspace offers a lens through which teachers might explore place multi-dimensionally. Building upon a previous arts-based educational research study assessing the potential of arts-based inquiry for supporting pre-service teachers in exploring their teaching contexts, this study, through a second curricular iteration, focused explicitly on art pre-service teachers’ critical geographic analysis, in the form of Thirdspace. In mapping their school zones, pre-service teachers began to identify illusory impressions and conceptions of students, schools and communities and then began to deconstruct them. Such Thirdspace journeys offer space for pre-service teachers to hone their perceptions, to retrain their gazes to see their students’ physical and lived worlds in their complexity and plurality, and to re-imagine the relation between place and pedagogy.