Addressing Sexual and Gender Diversity in an English Education Teacher Preparation Program

Teacher education programs as a whole do little to prepare graduates to create and maintain classroom and school cultures that recognize and affirm lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer + (LGBTQ+) identities. This chapter describes how an English education program chair at a Midwestern university has integrated the study of sexual and gender diversity alongside English language arts pedagogy in three different courses, including specific texts and learning activities, as well as student responses to the in-class experiences. Recommendations for future study and curriculum design are addressed.

Thinking Minds, Virtual Bodies

With the emergence of the pandemic, the world adapted virtually; dance education and performance were no exception. Particularly, Indian classical dance (ICD) education and practice garnered mixed reactions due to the deviations from the intimate personified practices which are inherent in the traditional ICD system. Therefore, certain changes in the system became mandatory. With reference to the ideal tenets of arts pedagogy as mentioned in the ancient performing arts treatise Natyashastra, this paper provides specific significant methodologies which can benefit the knowledge exchange process in ICD especially in the online environment. Derived from the training in the sciences, this paper is an attempt to inform the virtual ICD scenario regarding complementation of and improvements in the traditional ways of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. These ways will appreciably enrich the desired purposes of the “felt” and “embodied” which may have been lost with the shift to the virtual scenario.

A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy

between home and school walking a way to learning life through the city. (David Haley) This article takes the reader for a stroll through a programme of ecological arts-led, performance-based research. The style is more poetic than scientific, although much ecological science is embedded within the art form. Indeed, Charles Darwin was known for his regular walks, as time and space for his reflections on evolution and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was noted for the poetic form of his scientific treatises. Here also, the author breaks with academic convention to engage with walking and research as creative activities to deal with ecological issues. Of course, other artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have walked as part of their practice, and there are a growing number of artists who consider walking as practice-as-research. In this article, the focus is specifically on walking as a creative form of inquiry, through community participation within urban contexts to create a critical dialogue focused on ecology in action.

Visual arts pedagogy in early childhood contexts: The baggage of self-efficacy beliefs, pedagogical knowledge and limited pre-service training

Visual arts provisions are central to children’s holistic, play-based learning, yet the visual arts self-efficacy beliefs and subject content knowledge of early childhood educators influence pedagogical choices. When early childhood educators lack the visual arts confidence, skills, and knowledge required to effectively support children’s visual arts learning and engagement, children’s learning in the visual arts domain may be restricted; resulting in a negative cycle of influence whereby the next generation are denied their right to access visual languages. Qualitative case study research explored the visual arts beliefs and pedagogy of 12 degree qualified and vocationally trained early childhood educators. The conceptual framework, designed to to interpret and analyse the research data, aligns Dewey’s philosophies of democracy, education and art with the philosophy and visual arts praxis of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. The research findings suggest educator’s low visual arts self-efficacy beliefs develop during childhood and are not improved by pre-service training, resulting in limited visual arts skills and knowledge. The research participants’ visual arts pedagogy appeared to be strongly influenced by the experiential ‘baggage’ they carried into their pre-service training and practice contexts, by the participants’ theoretical beliefs about children’s development and by a range of divergent beliefs about the purposes of visual art in the early childhood context. Although training has the potential to broadly inform knowledge and practice, this study suggests that unless limiting visual arts self-efficacy beliefs are disrupted by constructivist theoretical knowledge and combined with practical skills and knowledge, the visual arts curriculum offered to children may be significantly compromised.

IMPLEMENTASI PEMBELAJARAN ONLINE BERBASIS EDMODO DALAM SITUASI PANDEMIK COVID-19 UNTUK MATERI KEPENDIDIKAN PADA PRODI PENDIDIKAN SENI PERTUNJUKAN

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant and spontaneous changes to the realm of education, including learning performing arts in higher education. Face-to-face learning in the classroom was replaced by online learning. Teachers need to explore online learning applications to provide learning facilities at home. This paper presents a discussion regarding Edmodo-based online classroom implementation as a tool for distance learning. The implementation has been carried out on performing arts pedagogy courses, namely Curriculum & Instruction, Classroom Management, Instructional Technology, and Art's Learning Evaluation, in performing art education study programs. From the results of implementing the Edmodo, it is known that most students could pass courses based on their final grades. This implementation is an example of setting online design on the subject of other performing arts pedagogy.

Potential in Play

Liberal arts pedagogy, characterized by its emphasis on adaptability and breadth, thrives on the input of fresh perspectives; arguably, it requires them to maintain its relevance. In this paper, I engage theoretical and applied scholarship on improvisation pedagogy to illustrate how integral improvisational thought is to the spirit of the liberal arts. Considering the liberal arts ‘toolkit’ as, essentially, that of an improviser—a rounded, context-dependent and hybridizing approach that is well-suited to novel and sometimes unforeseeable scenarios—reaffirms the liberal arts’ value in the shifting academic climate of the 21st century, in which such skills are increasingly necessary. In order to explore that potential, I synthesize the foundational works of Lev Vygotsky, Stephen Nachmanovich, and Ed Sarath with newer scholarship on 21st century education.