Objectifying the Subjective : Assessment and Feedback in Creative Arts Studio Learning and Teaching

This paper examines the Assessment and Feedback aspects of Studio Teaching as Creative Arts pedagogy. Prompted by USQ’s newly offered Bachelor of Creative Arts (BCA), the author has developed an Assessment Matrix specifically designed to satisfy a number of imperatives, including: • ‘objectifying’ the subjective aspects of creative practice as assessable coursework/research • providing the means by which accurate, detailed, personalised and confidential feedback may be provided to students individually • providing consistent, accurate, meaningful assessment records for student, lecturer, and institution • ensuring consistency, continuity, and transparency of assessment processes and records to satisfy quality audits • minimising marking and assessment time, whilst maximising assessment integrity and depth • requiring only basic level skills and knowledge of a computer application already in common use (Microsoft Excel) • adaptability to a range of creative courses ‐ across disciplines This Assessment Matrix has been in development (and trialled) since January 2009.

Looking yonder : a model of arts engagement with teacher artists and professional artists in Queensland Schools

Since 2007 Kite Arts Education Program (KITE), based at Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), has been engaged in delivering a series of theatre-based experiences for children in low socio-economic primary schools in Queensland. KITE @ QPAC is an early childhood arts initiative of The Queensland Department of Education that is supported by and located at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. KITE delivers relevant contemporary arts education experiences for Prep to Year 3 students and their teachers across Queensland. The theatre-based experiences form part of a three year artist-in-residency project titled Yonder that includes performances developed by the children with the support and leadership of Teacher Artists from KITE for their community and parents/carers in a peak community cultural institution. This paper provides an overview of the Yonder model and unpacks some challenges in activating the model for schools and cultural organisations.

Media arts section, arts Pop : arts packages of practice

This Media Arts-POP implements Media Arts curriculum in a Year 4 classroom at Waterford West State School, Queensland. While media arts form was the lead area for this package, students developed knowledge of and skills in English, visual arts and some elements of music. In the media arts elements, students learned to use media production equipment (in this case iPads, although other tablets could be used), and to use techniques such as composition and lighting to capture digital images and to record voice and sound effects. The package demonstrates that a number of curriculum areas can be combined to ensure that various curriculum areas are covered without losing the specificity of any one area.

Ambivalent realities : postcolonial experiences in contemporary visual arts practice

This practice-led research project investigates how new postcolonial conditions require new methods of critique to fully engage with the nuances of real world, 'lived' experiences. Framed by key aspects of postcolonial theory, this project examines contemporary artists' contributions to investigations of identity, race, ethnicity, otherness and diaspora, as well as questions of locality, nationality, and transnationality. Approaching these issues through the lens of my own experience as an artist and subject, it results in a body of creative work and a written exegesis that creatively and critically examine the complexities, ambiguities and ambivalences of the contemporary postcolonial condition.

Arts practice and disconnected youth in Australia : impact and domains of change

Background: This paper describes research conducted with Big hART, Australia's most awarded participatory arts company. It considers three projects, LUCKY, GOLD and NGAPARTJI NGAPARTJI across separate sites in Tasmania, Western NSW and Northern Territory, respectively, in order to understand project impact from the perspective of project participants, Arts workers, community members and funders. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 29 respondents. The data were coded thematically and analysed using the constant comparative method of qualitative data analysis. Results: Seven broad domains of change were identified: psychosocial health; community; agency and behavioural change; the Art; economic effect; learning and identity. Conclusions: Experiences of participatory arts are interrelated in an ecology of practice that is iterative, relational, developmental, temporal and contextually bound. This means that questions of impact are contingent, and there is no one path that participants travel or single measure that can adequately capture the richness and diversity of experience. Consequently, it is the productive tensions between the domains of change that are important and the way they are animated through Arts practice that provides sign posts towards the impact of Big hART projects.

Bridging the gap in school achievement through the arts : summary report

Educational Transformations Pty Ltd was commissioned by The Song Room (TSR) to conduct a study of the impact of TSR programs in government schools in relatively disadvantaged communities in New South Wales (NSW) on indicators of student performance that have been identified in previous research as related to potential engagement in juvenile crime. Students in Grades 5 and 6 were the subjects of study. TSR is a not-for-profit organisation in receipt of grants from public and private sources that conducts free programs in the performing arts in schools where these are not currently offered. These programs are conducted by mutual agreement between TSR and participating schools. Across Australia, approximately 200 schools and 40,000 students are engaged for a minimum of six months each year. Students typically participate for approximately one hour per week in each class. Instruction is provided by a Teaching Artist (TA), contracted to TSR and working in partnership with the classroom teacher at the school of placement. TSR received a three-year grant from the Macquarie Group Foundation to investigate the efficacy of its interventions in improving social and education outcomes for children in a range of high need target group areas participating in its program...

Medium and mode : relationships between visual experience and perception in an installation arts practice

Working primarily within the natural landscape, this practice-led research project explored connections between the artist's visual and perceptual experience of a journey or place while simultaneously emphasizing the capacity for digital media to create a perceptual dissonance. By exploring concepts of time, viewpoint, duration of sequences and the manipulation of traditional constructs of stop-frame animation, the practical work created a cognitive awareness of the elements of the journey through optical sensations. The work allowed an opportunity to reflect on the nature of visual experience and its mediation through images. The project recontextualized the selected mediums of still photography, animation and projection within contemporary display modes of multiple screen installations by analysing relationships between the experienced and the perceived. The resulting works added to current discourse on the interstices between still and moving imagery in a digital world.

Reflective Practice in the Arts

In creative disciplines, reflective practice is an integral and cumulative form of learning. Reflective learning generates knowledge that is specific to oneself and is a form of evidence upon which to analyse and change one’s practice. Critical reflection requires a deep knowledge of the discipline and an awareness of one’s positioning within that discipline and in relation to one’s creative performance. Meaning making through performative expression allows for personal transformation through acute awareness of and reflection on one’s own beliefs, knowledges and values through the process of creating artistic work. Self-awareness and identity are significant both in the study of the arts and in becoming an artist, as aesthetic inquiry and performance are constituted by subjective self-expression in relation to objective conditions. Reflection can be expressed using symbols or semiotic systems other than language. Depending on the disciplinary context, particular modes or forms of expression will be privileged, including material forms of practice, still and moving images, music and sound, live action and digital code. This chapter explores the problematics of what counts as reflection in the arts and how reflection is represented, expressed and performed in discursive and non-discursive ways in becoming arts literate.

Will the new ABC Arts Council Win Back the Arts Community?

The ABC’s major arts announcement this month appears at first glance to be good news for one of its core constituencies. The national broadcaster will establish an Arts Council and will roll out several new arts programming initiatives. The Corporation’s relationship with the arts community has been strained in recent years, so the new programming initiatives should be greeted positively. But without significant new funding, coupled with the uncertainties of a looming federal budget, some commentators are seeing this as little more than a shuffling of the deckchairs.

Philanthropy and the arts : Harold Mitchell's review will create a bigger funding pool

Harold Mitchell's review of private sector arts support is a bit like Ian Thorpe in his swimming heyday. He's a big presence, and has dived in with a determined goal and a strategy to win 'gold' for the arts, streamlining giving from the big end of tow. But Mitchell is also chasing people's "silver and bronze", putting forward the case that the arts touches everyday Australians (think Gen Y music festivals and going to films like Red Dog).

Community arts and appropriate internet technology : participation, materiality, and the ethics of sustainability in the digitally networked era

This thesis delivers new knowledge about how Australian community arts practices of appropriate technology are shifting due to the internet. It reconfigures the sector's incumbent ethics of sustainability in response to emerging concerns about how the internet's material politics are affecting cultural participation.

Restructuring arts and cultural funding in Tanzania : expectations and impasses

In 1984, the Tanzanian government established the Tanzania Culture Trust Fund (TCTF) – well known as ‘Mfuko’ – with the support of the Swedish government. The focus of Mfuko was to enable the arts and cultural sector to strengthen its position through grant allocations. However, rural artists have limited opportunity to access financial support to strengthen their works. The challenge remains: how to restructure arts and cultural funding in line with cutting dependence on foreign aid. This article reports on the research findings of a case study based on ‘Strategies for youth employment in Tanzania: A creative industries approach’. The study was undertaken in Dar-Es-Salaam, Bagamoyo, Dodoma, Lindi and Morogoro from July to October, 2012. This study employed mixed me thods incorporating questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. This paper argues that lack of deliberate initiatives to restructure arts and cultural funding (in line with cutting dependence on foreign assistance) have prevented artists from fulfilling their desire for better lives. Hence, the severe lack of financial support to the artists remains a challenge to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and Tanzania Development Vision 2025. Although this discussion is specific to Tanzania, the significance and contribution of this case may apply to other developing countries.

Gentrification and the artistic dividend : the role of the arts in neighborhood change

Problem, research strategy, and findings: There is a conflict between recent creative placemaking policies intended to promote positive neighborhood development through the arts and the fact that the arts have long been cited as contributing to gentrification and the displacement of lower-income residents. Unfortunately, we do not have data to demonstrate widespread evidence of either outcome. We address the dearth of comprehensive research and inform neighborhood planning efforts by statistically testing how two different groups of arts activities—the fine arts and commercial arts industries—are associated with conditions indicative of revitalization and gentrification in 100 large U.S. metropolitan areas. We find that different arts activities are associated with different types and levels of neighborhood change. Commercial arts industries show the strongest association with gentrification in rapidly changing areas, while the fine arts are associated with stable, slow-growth neighborhoods. Takeaway for practice: This research can help planners to more effectively incorporate the arts into neighborhood planning efforts and to anticipate the potential for different outcomes in their arts development strategies, including gentrification-related displacement.