Child's Play

NJ, 2018

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This article reports an archival investigation of the history of a rare visual arts education documentary film produced in 1960, under the auspices of the Australian UNESCO Committee for the Visual Arts. Approach to Art Teaching, was intended to showcase the development of innovative curriculum policies in New South Wales (NSW) art education. Included in UNESCO's commitment to sponsoring arts education internationally, the film was exhibited in several countries. The article comments on a debate that led to the film's producers being dubbed "methodists" in relation to the perception that the film advocated an interventionist model of art teaching. The article analyzes the film as an artifact of changes to the conceptualization of art education in a specific context in the early 1960s. In 1960-61 the Film Division of the Australian Commonwealth Department of the Interior produced an 18-minute documentary, recorded on 35-millimeter color film and entitled Approach to Art Teaching. The film purports to describe a method of teaching art to children in schools administered by the Department of Education of the government of the Australian state of New South Wales. Historical documents associated with the production of this documentary reveal the parameters of a divisive and controversial debate in art educational theory and practice, which bear resonance even in today's seemingly distant context. This debate relates to the nature of creativity, free expression, and the functions of the art teacher as an educator, guide, observer, or participant in a student's progress in learning about art. The question of the degree to which an art teacher should encroach upon what has long been considered the private mental space of a developing child, proved in the mid 1960s to be a lightning rod, provoking a moment of outrage and dissidence in art education.

Teaching and Teacher Education, 2010

Since 2003, the practice of Sydney's Teaching and Learning Cinema has involved the re-enactment of Expanded Cinema performances from the 1960s and 70s. As artists, we have discovered that direct access to the work of our aesthetic precursors is essential for understanding, and building upon the work of the past. However, since many Expanded Cinema events were ephemeral and situated in time and place, they do not easily lend themselves to documentation and archiving. As a result, the works are poorly represented in art history. Re-creating them in our own 'here and now' is a creative pedagogical process, in which the works become available once again for first-hand experience. Clearly, these re-creations are not 'authentic' or 'correct' - rather, the very concept of authenticity and the integrity of the bounded art event are brought into question by this unique form of practice-based research. In this paper, we touch on three three Expanded Cinema works we have re-created - William Raban's 2'45” (1973); and Anthony McCall's 'Long Film for Ambient Light' (1975) and Guy Sherwin's 'Man with Mirror' (1976). We discuss the dilemmas that emerge from such a process. Geographical distance, cultural context and technological developments all make significant demands on the resourcefulness and wit of the re-enactors. Emerging from this process, our re-enactments generate an organic living history, in which the works are 'kept alive' through the practice of passing them from one generation to the next.

It is possible to use film as a tool to document and illustrate subjects of art education research. But, film is far more than a way of representation of social phenomena; it can be a process through which those phenomena are explored (MacDougall, 2011). From within the discipline of anthropology David MacDougall has pioneered contemporary techniques of ethnographic observational filmmaking. I will discuss this in terms of a methodology appropriate for art education research in school, not only because the nature of children’s experience making art is partly visual, aesthetic and therefore non-verbal, but because the scope of audio visual recording, editing and presentation is able to encompass the ethnomethodological concern with the nuts and bolts which structure how experience works, and, at the same time, reveal the ethnographer’s concern with illuminating subjective experience of both the researcher and the research participants. This paper introduces some of the broad features of MacDougall’s theoretical standpoint. I set these alongside a reminder of the immediate radical empiricism of John Dewey in Art as Experience (1934). To further explore the significance of MacDougall’s approach I critique two papers which, in different ways, have explored filmmaking as arts-based research method. Firstly Tom Barone’s 2003 paper, Challenging the Educational Imaginary: Issues of Form, Substance, and Quality in Film-Based Research, which advocates a narrative based documentary form of filmmaking and secondly, a more recent paper (Wood & Brown, 2012) published in Qualitative Research Journal which surveys film based creative arts enquiry before promoting the auteur approach to filmmaking. In this second paper filmmaking is a medium through which, “qualitative researchers are characterised as creative artists who bring their precise aesthetic choice to bear on an audience through a mix of technical competence, distinguishable personality and interior meaning” (Wood & Brown, 2012). I conclude by outlining how filmmaking as employed by MacDougall might be valuable as arts-based research method appropriate for art education research and that this might interpenetrate established text based methods of analysis and interpretation of children’s experiences in school.

Australian Council For Educational Research, 2011

It is a common acceptance that contemporary schoolchildren live in a world that is intensely visual and commercially motivated, where what is imagined and what is experienced intermingle. Because of this, contemporary education should encourage a child to make reference to, and connection with their ‘out-of-school’ life. The core critical underpinnings of curriculum- based arts appreciation and theory hinge on educators and students taking a historical look at the ways artists have engaged with, and made comment upon, their contemporary societies. My article uses this premise to argue for the need to persist with pushing for critique of/through the visual, that it be delivered as an active process via the arts classroom rather than as visual literacy, here regarded as a more passive process for interpreting and understanding visual material. The article asserts that visual arts lessons are best placed to provide fully students with such critique because they help students to develop a ’critical eye’, an interpretive lens often used by artists to view, analyse and independently navi- gate and respond to contemporary society.

The UNESCO Observatory refereed e-journal is based within the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne, Australia. The journal promotes multidisciplinary research in the Arts and Education and arose out of a recognised need for knowledge sharing in the field. The publication of diverse arts and cultural experiences within a multi-disciplinary context informs the development of future initiatives in this expanding field. There are many instances where the arts work successfully in collaboration with formerly non-traditional partners such as the sciences and health care, and this peer-reviewed journal aims to publish examples of excellence.

In a well-established domain of social anthropology, observational filmmakers employ digital video cameras and audiovisual editing as a research method to investigate human experience. They embrace qualities such as the material, sensory, aesthetic and ineffable. To review this visual method for art education, this article presents film extracts from the Childhood and Modernity project led by anthropologist David MacDougall. Indian children, 10–12 years of age, shot digital video material to create new knowledge about the circumstances of their lives. This keeps qualities that are difficult or impossible to put into words at the foreground of the research. The article also discusses how MacDougall prepared children to use a video camera for observational filmmaking by teaching specific skills that facilitate close observation and analysis through audiovisual means. In this way, MacDougall's methodology and methods present a challenge and an opportunity for both art education research and classroom teaching.