MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of the Arts / School of Art
This research focuses on the motivation of adolescent students, including several with special needs, in an art classroom to create artworks through the use of digital and Visual Culture experiences. Action research was conducted in two different classroom settings over several months in a public school. Each class period was recorded with audio and video to analyze the students' responses to Visual Culture stimuli with structured discussion questions and relevant studio production. To blend this study with Narrative inquiry, other field texts collected as data included research notes, written and audio-recorded critical reflections on teaching, and photographs of students' artworks. Students involved in the study were part of inclusion classrooms including students with special needs, and students who are identified as gifted. All the students went through a unit of lessons that centered on artworks created as responses to Visual Culture experiences from the student's lives. Interpretations of student art production indicated that all of them were similarly motivated, though students had different responses to Visual Culture experiences that ranged from strong likes and dislikes of celebrity images and enjoyment of humorous personified animal images. Capitalizing on their fascinations with popular images such toys, video games, and animals, Visual Culture can serve as a bridge between students of varying cognitive and academic backgrounds, allowing them to create art as a community rather than as individuals. Research findings concurred with a pilot study which also found that students both collect Visual Culture as a way to construct their identity, and that Visual Culture can be a language through which students can communicate. Though in this study the Visual Culture studied was carefully curated to benefit the lessons taught, the students showed their interests in many other varied experiences that surfaced during the implementation of this pedagogy. One of the (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Koon-Hwee Kan PhD (Advisor); Linda Hoeptner-Poling PhD (Committee Member); Juliann Dorff MAT (Committee Member); Jeanne Ruscoe-Smith PhD (Committee Member)
Subjects: Art Education