Visual Culture Art Integration: Fostering Student Voice

Abstract

Art integration research has received much attention of late, yet the focus generally examines ways integration practice and pedagogy support or enhance outcomes of high stakes testing. Serving as a counterpoint, this qualitative action research study, grounded in my experiences as a middle school arts integration specialist, addresses the value of visual culture art integration as a site of youth empowerment. Working collaboratively over a period of four months with three non-art educators to create and teach a series of social justice art integration units with sixth graders, I examined ways an integrated art and visual culture curriculum fostered safe spaces for students to take risks by deconstructing and reconstructing their identities, beliefs and understandings of others and their world through artmaking. In chapter one, I recount early teaching experiences that prompted the research questions in which an examination of which arts integration pedagogies best stimulate students to examine visual culture, articulate voice, and question power relationships that perpetuate social inequities. I address the theoretical lens of social justice art education as it frames the study and examine and discuss the current literature surrounding visual culture and art integration in chapter two. Chapter three delineates methodologies employed in the action research study including data collection measures of visual journaling, artmaking and photography. In chapters four, five, and six, I recount the process in which students engaged with, responded to, and created artwork through three curricular units--in social studies examining the intersections of culture and visual culture as evidenced through advertising, in language arts class collaboratively exploring persuasion through environmental and ecological art installations, and in math class integrating Fibonacci's theories through art making. Findings, discussed in chapter seven, indicated that visual culture art integration, used by teachers is often mislabeled out of insecurity and is a viable methodology for increasing student engagement. When students work collaboratively a space is created for them to regain power in the classroom and increase empathy awareness for themselves and others. Furthermore, art making, within a non-art classroom, can be a particularly successful arena through which middle school students articulate and clarify their voices.