This article aims to answer the question, “How can a visual culture jam be utilized to foster Culturally Responsive Art Education (CRAE)?” My master’s research project provides the data needed to approach this question. I conducted my project during Fall 2012 at a mid-Atlantic research-based university as an assignment in a pre-service art education Capstone course[1]. My participants were senior level, pre-service art educators, who were about to embark on student teaching during Spring 2013. The curriculum was centered on a performance-based art project in which participants created “visual culture jams” as a form of critical self-reflections of their own cultural, ethnic, and racial identities. The performance of these visual culture jams disrupted the notion of “essentializing” cultures and encouraged participants to probe their cultural identity (Sleeter, 2012, p. 570). My arts-based research project took place over a period of three class sessions and data includes digital self-portraits, narrative responses, and video recorded performances of my participants’ visual culture jams. Performances will be discussed through the following emergent themes: family as culture, heritage, and other forms of identity. My own reflection on the project will conclude this article and consider whether or not CRAE was successfully implemented.

Even as web-based digital media increasingly presents itself as participatory, users are still largely subject to a landscape of 'one-to-many media' in which they are the recipients of, or participants within, artifacts and edifices crafted by a relatively small elite who have full fluency in the underlying language of digital media. New Media Art Education must provide students with the literacies to respond critically to these structures and to create their own digital structures and artifacts in return. This project examines the problem of pre-formatted thinking with respect to new media works in popular visual/web culture, fine arts practice, and art education, and recommends avenues for giving students the opportunity to use programming as an expressive and empowering artform.

This project explores the intersection of place based art education and visual culture art education. Both VCAE and PBAE view art education as a politically potent discipline. Each seeks to expand the scope of art education to better suit certain ideals. However, VCAE and PBAE prioritize different ideals, leading to divergent approaches. This research suggests that we focus on the overlaps between these two paradigms, rather than the divergences. An integrated approach may serve to strengthen art education, student empowerment, and environmental sustainability. This research is manifested in an ongoing participatory art project called Picturing Your Locale. Participants are asked to photographically respond to 30 prompts related to their local environment. Some of the images will be specifically local, some will be specifically personal, and still others will reflect mainstream visual culture. The aim of the project is to get people thinking about their local landscape. What do you notice on a daily basis? What is more obscure? How does the visual stimuli we pick out, effect our interpretation of the local culture?