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This editorial articulates the hope art educators might find in the radical belief of futural possibilities. Co-authors embrace the editorial process and our journey through it as an editorial team for this journal as the nurturing and coalescing of potential. The journal and its contents manifest the hope that even dire situations could be otherwise.

From your perspective, what is the place of social justice education (and politics) in the art classroom? Are these topics a distraction from the disciplinary content of visual arts education, as you understand it? From your perspective, what is the disciplinary content of art education?

The goals of this research are to analyze, explore, disrupt, and (re)create modes of being and knowing in relation to text. In particular, we focus on the educational research text. We are asking a...

This essay considers efforts to forefront knowledge dissemination at National Art Education Association (NAEA) National Conventions as a form of governmentality on art education scholarship. Starting with an analysis of the presenter policy as well as the review criteria, we consider how this rhetoric reflects neoliberal ideology and actually limits the potentials of the field for change, critique, and diversity of insights. From within this paradoxical space, we offer provocations, strategies, and quandaries. Through usurping the governmentality bearing down on thought and research dissemination, we join counter factions that have worked and continue to occupy the margins and centers of the NAEA National Convention.

“Cruel optimism … keeps us going through the motions anticipating that the same ways of being, researching, and knowing will get us somewhere.”One definition of insanity (often attributed to Albert...

This chapter contemplates the police order of neoliberalism and its impact on democratic imaginaries of creativity education. The writings of Jacques Ranciere are used to grasp the frictions and potentialities between neoliberal forms of schooling and democratic pedagogies in art education. Throughout, I ruminate on the following question: What if art education could be reconceived as a site of experimentation with democratic political engagement so that civic learning might create and transform subjectivities? In this endeavor, I examine the interdisciplinary theme of civic literacy from within the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ Map for the Arts in order to ponder the bringing together of creativity and citizenship education as a site of potential emancipation.

In the concluding chapter, I contrast creative destruction that runs capitalist economies with Agamben’s notion of decreation. I explore how educators, artists, and activists might reanimate their roles as creatives in this time through starving neoliberalized, entrepreneurialized, and economized forms of creativity. Proposed are alternative modes of decreation where productivity, innovation, and praxis are denied their pre-set ends toward a state of exception that allows us to begin anew in reimaging what creativity education might have been.

This chapter lays out the broader contexts from which collaboration comes to the foreground at this time and sounds a number of cautions against the collaborative turn as evidenced in the 21st Century Skills, new Finnish National Curriculum Framework, and cultural industries. Collaboration’s promotion is due to post-Fordist labor models and the rise of network structures. Within this nexus, collaboration maintains a democratic aura of a horizontal, decentralized platform for learning and creating that resists and subverts more restrictive vertical power structures. To flesh out these movements, I consider the model of project work within post-Fordist labor along with precarious, post-studio practices associated with the cultural and creative industries. I assert an appeal for the autonomy of collaboration within art education apart from entrepreneurial ends.

This chapter takes up the notion of critique in relation to creativity. I delve into the state of criticism in art education at this time playing out in the coercion and contortion of criticality into critical thinking skills for practical solutions. Employing such mechanisms as pragmatic blindness, art education aims to maintain present versions of the field safe from reinvention. Global education reform has come to embrace creative and critical thinking skills toward innovation—the two skillsets need one another in order for innovation to thrive. Yet, both creativity and criticality are morphing into altered forms that actually limit the possible. Radical critique is proposed as a counter to the pragmatization of criticality, art education, and society at large.

This chapter bears down on neoliberal ideology’s influence on contemporary conceptions of creativity and its education. Under the present post-Fordist system of economic production, artists—with their drive to innovate, flexible production practices, and tolerance for precarity—are being upheld as ideal workers. The resulting requirements of immaterial labor have obliged the restructuring of education through forms of neoliberal governmentality that set about instilling specific values and urgencies manifesting in the governmentalization of learning and economization of education. In my consideration of the convergence of these pressures I focus on how the Partnership for 21st Century Skills mandates the acceleration of post-Fordist economic goals for art education through government of self and others that greatly reduces the possibilities for the nurturing of creativity.

This chapter begins by asking: What if business remade creativity education on its terms? What would become of art and its education in the wake of creativity-for-business only? This chapter explores these questions in light of the intensifying entrepreneurialization of art and its education. I examine the Partnership for the 21st Century Skills’ push for entrepreneurial literacy through art and creativity education along with the rise of artrepreneurs within contemporary art. I end with a plea for the relative autonomy of art education so that it may not only be a mode of vocationalization, but also a site of struggle and critical creativity.

As we experience the entrepreneurialization and creative destruction of institutional structures and processes at all levels of society, including government, technology, and learning, art educator...

(2015). Participating in the Neoliberal Art Museum. Studies in Art Education: Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 39-52.

Some lines stay with you. I recall Sylvia Kind mentioning to me about a decade ago that the power of drawing is beneath the surface, underneath the line, for the interpretive power of the mark warrants contemplation and yields connection. As young children draw, they are telling their stories and making their worlds using drawing to learn, perceive, invent languages, and relate to others, all the while transforming what already exists for their purposes.

This essay articulates how arts-based inquiry acts as dissensual activity holding possibilities for the redistribution of the visible, audible, and sensible within knowledge production and dissemination associated with research. Rancière’s conceptions of politics and aesthetics are used to analyze expanded relations among art, inquiry, and democracy within the academic poster session format at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. We share how our reconceptualized poster defied institutionalized structures under the control of neoliberal logics through strategies of disidentification. This subversion of form and structure identifies exclusions in how we operate, so that we might redistribute spaces and processes associated with academic conferences for alternatives to be heard, seen, spoken, and performed. For these reasons, our poster serves as a generative locale from which researchers may articulate ways for representing data, engaging audiences, and undertaking critical arts-based inquiry with others that might further the practices of democracy.

This article contributes to conversations concerning art education futures through engaging alternative relations between art, education, and democracy that mobilize education as art projects assoc...

This article explores the possibilities of placing curriculum design in close proximity with participatory contemporary art projects that potentially activate our capacities and willingness to re-vision the future of art education. In this curricular questing we have been drawn toward art that encompasses participatory forms – chiefly relational art and relational antagonism in art – en route to modes of lived-curriculum as agonistic inquiry. We start with an account of the historical present as engulfed in past curricular tensions with curriculum design experiencing an arrested development in its reliance on outdated, causal models of learning in order to assume greater certainty over learning. This produces an illusion of efficiency and comes with particular costs. The interaction between the distinct perspectives of curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived offers a number of theoretical opportunities for art educators to re-engage with curricula. Next, we explore the notion of an uncertain curriculum, drawing upon relational aesthetics and bricolage to highlight curriculum as a negotiated space, while offering a student art project example that illustrates a non-deterministic and participatory form. The authors suggest that while relational aesthetics and bricolage are helpful in the space between curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived, these are also limited. Further, we share examples and possibilities for reconsidering curriculum as inquiry, inspired by relational antagonism in contemporary art. Finally, we end with a plea for the necessity of monstrous curricular excesses and conflicts in perforating both our students' and our own current and historical borders of a field yet to come.

This essay offers a conversation on mentoring within dissertation research from the perspectives of a graduate student, new assistant professor, and senior administrator. Specifically, we revisit the mentoring spaces and relations within which we were immersed while partaking in a form of arts-based educational research known as a/r/tography. We articulate an orientation toward mentoring that extends into interactive and relational forms that are in line with current discourses on mentoring within doctoral research. As we analyze our work together, we simultaneously deconstruct the ways in which we have supported and unsettled one another. While we share narratives from our experiences, we also reveal those relations that underpin a provisional pedagogy of mentoring within a/r/tography.

In this article we articulate a view of mentoring that extends into interactive and relational forms, fostering a redefinition of traditional roles and practices within mentor‐protege models. From the perspectives of a senior administrator and two assistant professors, we revisit the mentoring spaces and relations within which we were engaged while working in an approach to arts‐based educational research known as a/r/tography during dissertation research projects. From our interconnected experiences, we propose a framing of the intersections between a/r/tographic research and mentorship informed by complexity thinking. We analyzed our work together while deconstructing the ways in which we have supported and unsettled each other. Through narrative inquiry we share reflections from dissertation research experiences, while also describing patterns of an emerging pedagogy of mentoring within higher education that we term complexity thinking mentorship. Borrowing from complexity theory, this conception of me...