The Third Culture

The purpose of this research is to improve the understanding of how users of online virtual worlds learn and/or relearn ‘culture' through the use of visual components. The goal of this research is to understand if culturally and historically authentic imagery is necessary for users to understand the virtual world; how virtual world residents form and reform their virtual culture; and whether the visual culture in the virtual world is imported from the real world, colonized by any dominate culture, or assimilated into a new culture. The main research question is: Is the authenticity of cultural imagery important to virtual world residents? This research investigates whether visual culture awareness can help students develop a better understanding of visual culture in the real world, and whether this awareness can help educators construct better curricula and pedagogy for visual culture education.

Ground Control to Major Tom

In this chapter I explore satellite seeing in the convergence of global visual culture as a human-satellite co-figuration. Satellites, Global Positioning Systems, and mobile devices are engaged as prosthetic extensions of an embodied experience that can augment the potential of place-based learning. I engage this co-figuration through Mirzoeff's (2000/2006) notion of intervisuality and diaspora, the work of contemporary artists Trevor Paglen and Jeremy Wood, and my experiences with graduate students in Helsinki, Finland in an intensive course that developed understandings of the city as a site of geographic and cultural identity while exploring ideas of public space and performative interventionist practices in art making. The relations of the human-satellite co-figuration give insight as to the convergence of the local as a scale of the global, imprinted with transcultural pathways for understanding how we are located in the world.

Juan Angel Chávez's Winded Rainbow

This chapter outlines the manner in which the work of Chicago-based artist Juan Angel Chávez was exhibited at a university art gallery and served as the platform for an educational outreach program that investigated issues of immigration, place, language, materiality, and environmental sustainability within a global culture. Working closely with both an Associate Professor of Art Education and the gallery's Senior Curator, two graduate teacher candidates in Art Education generated student-initiated learning experiences based on a model of curriculum creation developed and taught by visual arts educators in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The curator and graduate students implemented a local arts grant that enabled groups from secondary schools and a homeschool program to tour the gallery's exhibition of Chávez's work, participate in workshops in their classrooms, and exhibit their own artwork at the gallery.

Productive Ambiguity

This chapter presents how a concept termed “productive ambiguity,” or the ability to transform encounters with difference into opportunities for personal growth, relates to nurturing cross-cultural understanding through experiences with art. While reporting on relevant components of her recent dissertation research, the author describes how a small group of fifth graders examined the concept of productive ambiguity while engaging in relational aesthetic experiences and responding to themes through both pictures and words. Research findings reveal specific facilitation strategies that promoted self-reflection and human connection through creating, viewing and dialoguing about visual art. While comparing study findings with additional literature presented in this chapter, the reader is encouraged to critically consider the positive outcomes gained from these interactions, potential facilitation challenges, and other implications for the field of art and visual culture education.

We have a Situation!

“We have a situation!” is an ongoing political performance project that uses cyberformance (live online performance, also known as networked performance) to provoke conversations around urgent contemporary issues. Through heterarchical co-creation processes and real-time online events, temporary networked communities emerge and engage in creative problem-solving. The fifth “situation,” created at Multicidade Festival in Rio de Janeiro in November 2015, addressed the problem of water pollution in the context of the approaching 2016 Olympic Games. This chapter chronicles the process of creating and presenting this event and proposes that cyberformance fosters an intimate proto-political form of online engagement as a positive alternative to increasingly commodified activism in commercialised internet spaces. The author, who is the lead artist of “We have a situation!” concludes that networked arts projects - in social, artistic and educational contexts - have an important role to play in the post-democratic reconfiguration of civic engagement, agency and activism.

Catastrophe

Natural catastrophes are seen as a catalyst for creativity in interdisciplinary arts-integrated preservice teacher education. Preservice teacher lesson plans and implementation focused on natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, and tornadoes advance an understanding of visual culture, creative production and civic engagement. Teaching visual culture involves border-crossings, from the conceptual to the tactile, and emboldening hands-on production in interdisciplinary art education projects. Professional artists' works are analyzed as responses to environmental and related man-made catastrophes caused by climate change. The impact of the professional artists' imagery and intentions act as exemplars for arts-integrated classroom practices inclusive of civic engagement. Preservice teacher education is enhanced by an intellectual flexibility inherent in interdisciplinary lesson planning and meaning-making projects. Empathetic responses to natural and related man-made catastrophes develop preservice teachers' classroom pedagogies that further global citizenry.

Glocalism

The interconnectedness of nations and peoples worldwide is changing the face of art education. While some scholars aspire to global education that will encourage students to become engaged in creating a more just and peaceful world, others warn that global education is tied to a neoliberal ideology and must be approached with caution. This chapter will provide a discussion of the promises and challenges of infusing global civic learning into a public school art education environment and address how global civic learning might be situated in a local context in order to avoid some of the possible pitfalls. Then, through a review art education literature, the chapter will make suggestions for the types of curricular endeavors (service learning, ethnography, ecology, and public art) that have successfully been able to situate global civic learning in local environments.

Global Civic Engagement as an Empowering Device for Cross-Ethnic and Cross-Cultural Understanding in Taiwan

This study observed the feasibility of a general education course in facilitating global civic engagement for twenty-six participants from a Taiwanese university. Such a commitment was considered crucial to the fostering of cross-ethnic and cross-cultural understanding of immigration and new immigrants as a global issue within the Taiwanese context. Oral presentations, film/video watching, and service learning sessions were arranged to promote critical appraisals of things, persons, and issues related to foreign ethnicities and cultures. Data of the study consisted of relevant writings produced by the participants. The results of analyses revealed that the participants developed an awareness of persons, things, and issues that were cross-ethnic or cross-cultural in nature. Consequently, they achieved attitudinal and perceptional change of foreign ethnicities or cultures or generated critical appraisals of specific things or issues. Additionally, a considerable number of them displayed motivational readiness for global civic engagement.

Activating Art Education Learning by Mapping Community Cultures

In this chapter, the author describes a class assignment that invites university students to explore the concept of placemaking as outcome, and of mapping as methodology in contemporary art education. The objective of this is to challenge students' preconceptions of how and where community-based art education is described and practiced. The project also encourages connections to trends and processes in contemporary art. The author presents student interpretations of the assignment through two projects, inviting readers to follow an examination of ideas for local practice through global thinking. In summary, this chapter suggests a model or strategy for educators and community-based art professionals to initiate socially engaged civic praxis, and activate discussion about global thinking, by mapping local visuality.

The Art of Climate Change

A multi-faceted assignment in a course, Feminist Perspectives of Craft, guided students to investigate the thesis that global warming and climate change are feminist concerns using research, debate, studio inquiry and critique. After team debates, students created individual art pieces; the criteria were that the piece must articulate some aspect of the implications of climate change, human interaction with and responsibility for the environment, and include one or more aspects of the textile techniques that we were exploring in class. Living in a New England coastal community built upon fiber craft, textile and seafaring industry, these elements guided visual art exploration and lesson planning questioning how human interaction with the environment sustains the economy and how societies, in turn, must sustain our earth that provides for the community. Critiques of process and final artwork informed lesson planning about how decisions have far reaching impact extending to the global community.