Rebecca Heaton

Whilst it is accepted that art education is a cognitive endeavour, the value and contribution of cognition to art education is often deliberated. By examining literature concerning conceptions of cognition and contextualising studies with the findings of a five-year artographic inquiry into cognition in the lived experiences of artist teachers, this paper is able to present a case for the reinstatement of cognition and cognitive study across policy, practice and research in art education. The paper shares a conceptual frame to assist engagement with cognition as a concept whilst presenting a strategy to support cognitive reinstatement in the changing climate of art education. Questions are posed and answered regarding cognition’s position in art education to bring reinstatement implications forward such as its complexity and productivity within education. Recommendations, such as increased engagement, voice projection and visibility, are also suggested to infiltrate transformation in future materialisations of cognitive engagement in the policy, practice and research of art education.

Subject marginalisation is an on-going concern across the primary education sector, particularly for the arts and humanities. This poses issues for pre-service teacher partnerships and for higher education institutions (HEIs) evaluating the role of subjects within their teacher training courses as they reform their curricula to prepare students to teach across diverse educational contexts. Through the interpretation of student voice, we disseminate a case study with primary initial teacher education (ITE) students that investigates learner perceptions of their training in under-represented foundation subjects. Emerging themes include tensions between university and school-based practices, and between curriculum models, together with the need to develop student adaptability and self-direction. The authors propose that if ITE students explore and take on the dispositions of changemakers, they will become equipped with the self-efficacy and adaptability needed to develop secure bases for teaching foundation subjects as they begin their careers.

This paper presents autoethnographic strategies to manage cognitive dissonance in art teacher education. Dissonance, as a conflict in beliefs and actions, is discussed in educational research but not commonly in art education. By exposing the autoethnographic voices of three academic artist teachers based in the United Kingdom and Singapore, including that of one author, this paper identifies the constitution and location of cognitive dissonance in art education. Autoethnographic images and excerpts help reveal personal accounts of cognition whilst positioning dissonance in practice. Contributors to dissonance like belief and concept conflicts, demonstrative challenges and power relationships are also exposed. This paper recommends that educational stakeholders, such as education ministries, teacher education departments and school leadership teams collaborate to acknowledge, accept and begin to manage dissonance in art teacher education.

This paper presents data from an Erasmus + project entitled Digital Leaders Across Boundaries (DLAB) to suggest ways learning is facilitated by engagement with collaborative online tools, and specifically through the use of creative visual posts. The DLAB project that informs this paper invited academics, teachers and students from four European countries to work together on a three-year project. The first year, which the data from this article refers to, focused on the theme of Technology Outdoors and resulted in three intellectual outputs, a four-week Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a creative online community and a project website. This paper focuses on the online community, and demonstrates how the visual nature of the online community posts aided creative thinking and provided a hook for community members to adapt, develop and repurpose ideas. Using a visual ethnographic approach, the content of creative visual posts in the online community were tracked and coded to elicit how connections spread. This analytic process revealed observable ways in which ideas were developed and disseminated online. The paper findings exemplify, by exposing idea mapping, how the most effective posts allowed ideas to evolve by drawing relationships between creative outputs, participant thinking, learning cultures and practice. Sharing ideas facilitated creative thinking and collective knowledge building in the online community as the participants’ posts amplified the ideas seeded in the original MOOC content. The findings suggest that it would be beneficial for learning designers and educators to understand these processes in social online communities so as to nurture creativity within them.

This literature review paper presents ways cognitive exchange occurs in higher degree visual art education. It also attempts to demystify concerns regarding the value and presence of cognitive exchange in art education, this is because cognitive exchange is not considered in art education with the same breadth or depth as in higher education. Cognitive exchange research in higher degree visual art education is limited but there has been a surge in interest about cognitive functioning in higher education. It is therefore timely to consider how cognitive exchange is understood across visual art practices at this level. This paper presents a two phased systematic review, where cognitive exchange literature in the higher degree context is considered alongside such literature in art education. Four spaces: the individual, social, pedagogic, and policy orientated are discussed to present cognitive exchange practices in higher degree visual art education. The spaces and forms of cognitive exchange profiled, provide a knowledge contribution to disciplines that intersect with the arts and humanities. This is because they mobilize where and how cognitive exchange forms, they present opportunities and uses for cognitive exchange and help suggest ways to support its growth.