Art + Design Practice as Global Positioning System

THIS IS MY FINAL EDITORIAL in a role that has commanded the lion's share of my service to the profession since I was given the charge to oversee all operations of Art Education journal 3 years ago. Consequently, it should not be unexpected for me to take stock of my journey as an art + design educator as I reach the end of this particular road on my journey. At the same time, given the wide range of themes of the issues I have either directly assembled or managed through the production process over the past eighteen issues, my greatest hope is that the rank-and-file membership of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) has also been well positioned to ask: Where are we now and where do we go from here?

Since January 2015, together we have spanned the globe of art teaching practices—exploring creative literacies, accommodations for inclusion in the art classroom, the power of interweaving multiple approaches to art + design education pedagogy, models for professional development, multimodal dialogues, cultural intersections and entrenched inequalities, artistic interventions, creative leadership, arts-based research, reinventing science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM), swarm intelligence and collaboration, STEAM in locomotion as exemplified through selected classroom case studies, the challenge of change as contemporary educators, the various research cultures and communities across NAEA, creative activity as a human right, and art as therapy. Finally, in this issue, we examine art + design practice as a global positioning system. When traveling the globe in the 21st century, it helps to tap into a Global Positioning System (GPS)—one of the most important inventions in the last 25 years for guys like me who get turned around constantly because of a faulty sense of direction. Art matters for many reasons, one of which is its inherent ability to help individuals locate themselves in a world of rapidly changing ideas and social relationships.

Art matters for many reasons, one of which is its inherent ability to help individuals locate themselves in a world of rapidly changing ideas and social relationships.

A system is defined as a “set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure” that becomes more than the sum of its parts and “produces a characteristic set of behaviors” classified as its “function” or “purpose” (Meadows, 2008, p. 188). The elements of a functioning GPS include numerous satellites, ground stations, and a receiver—the precise function of which is to figure out exactly where the user is anywhere in the world. Similarly, the elements that comprise works of art + design are the individual, sociocultural, and contextual manipulatives (e.g., memory, history, media images, social conventions, cultural debris, material properties, mythology, or stories) through which learners can perceive or radically change key aspects of identity and environment by repositioning, annexing, or exiting them as gateways (Rolling, 2006).

In 2012, I was invited to speak on the research topic of arts-based research at the VIII International Congress of Aesthetics and Art History held at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. I was hosted there for a week by Brazilian art educator Artur Matuck, and accompanied by my Syracuse University Art Education colleague, Dr. Sharif Bey. Conference proceedings and talks were translated into both English and Portuguese and it was the farthest I had ever been from home. One day, Artur took the two of us to a major retrospective of the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. One of the works displayed there was her Dialogue: Goggles (1968), a dually lensed metal and mirror fabrication experimenting with the relationship between the artist, the artwork, and those willing audience members who momentarily interact as performers in an eye-to-eye exchange of distorting visual fields.

At the time, I did not know why I archived these photos, but these five years later I have discovered that this raw material and lived experience was intended to be recollected and refined in the creative process of developing this final editorial. As I complete this process, I work to locate where I find myself now in contradistinction to where I found myself then. In this November 2017 issue, William Nieberding examines a teaching and learning methodology that fuses traditional art + design content—in this case, quilting—with the investigation of current GPS mapping technologies in an elementary school project that integrates age-appropriate social studies research goals. Focusing on the glittering quilts of Nigerian installation artist El Anatsui, Marie Huard presents a case for the efficacy of leading challenging classroom discussions with elementary and middle school children. Linda Elliott and Susan Clancy share their work to position the relevance of Wagga Wagga Art Gallery within its local community of stakeholders in Australia. In a culturally diverse contemporary society, Sheng Kuan Chung and Dan Li relocate the age-old tradition of crafting Chinese joss paper for use in a contemporary multicultural art curriculum.

Figure 1. Dialogue: Goggles, 1968, by Lygia Clark, industrial rubber, metal, and glass. Photo by James Haywood Rolling Jr.

Figures 2a-c. A dialogue between the distorted fields of vision of a native of Brazil and a visitor to São Paulo, raised in Brooklyn.

Museum educator Cathy L. Callaway presents a mash-up of Cuban and American cultures in the form of a multiformat exhibition of handmade books intended to inspire creative responses across several age levels. Jinghong Cai reflects on her experience of creating an afterschool program that taught the art of Chinese calligraphy to young children more meaningfully by utilizing an instructional philosophy that originated in the Northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Lucy Bartholomee champions the building of global citizenship awareness through her story of an international trip one summer that helped high school art students begin to identify their place in the world. Finally, in this month's Instructional Resources, Susan Witmer Wolffe offers a globe-trotting examination of the human imperative to affirm or unite one's identity with others in the artistic response of Ndebele women to mandated relocation, in the memorialization of young unarmed Black men killed in acts of excessive police violence in American cities, and in competitive flags and celebratory banners as disparate as the fraternal organizations of coastal Ghana and the various fandoms of Maryland.

So where am I now? Where do I go from here? Time will have to tell. What I can say with certainty is that it has been my honor to serve you as the Editor of this important journal of your ideas and voices. I hope the conversations have been complicated and disruptive of inertia. I hope complacency has been unsettled and that forward momentum has been achieved. I hope change has been engaged and unexpected collaborations initiated. I hope Art Education has provided many revelations along the yellow brick road of professional development since 2015. My sincere thanks to the whole editorial team and publications staff behind the scenes. I hope we all meet up again on the way to humanity's next great creative leap.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Haywood Rolling

James Haywood Rolling Jr. is Dual Professor and Chair of Art Education in the School of Art/College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the Department of Teaching and Leadership/School of Education, Syracuse University, New York. E-mail: [email protected]