Social and emotional learning (SEL) standards and policies are quickly being adopted across the United States. States and school districts are now requiring demonstrations of SEL in schools and hoping for evidence that school subjects, including art education, can successfully meet those requirements and provide that evidence. This article reports…

Art educators can harness the collective intelligence and creativity of a class by focusing on the knowledge that emerges from the everyday connections and interactions among students. This article argues the importance and value of collective learning in the art classroom by presenting a lesson from a mobile media visual art curriculum entitled…

Understandings of decentralized networks are increasingly used to describe a way to structure curriculum and pedagogy. It is often understood as a structural model to organize pedagogical and curricular relationships in which there is no center. While this is important it also bears introducing into the discourse that decentralized networks are…

A visual culture learning community (VCLC) is an adolescent or young adult group engaged in expression and creation outside of formal institutions and without adult supervision. In the framework of an international, comparative research project executed between 2010 and 2014, members of a variety of eight self-initiated visual culture groups…

Teens in high school who have or are at-risk of dropping out of school confront a number of educational challenges. One of these challenges is the restricted mobility students face in school. Mobile media offers the potential to engage with art curricula inside or outside of the classroom. It also offers new ways of thinking about the role of…

Social media practices are increasingly woven into the everyday lives of teens and adults, becoming a significant part of how they relate, know, and learn. In this article, I present findings from a design-based research study that explored how the dynamics of learning and teaching art shift through social media. Learning and teaching through…

Community-based new media programs offer a distinct place of arts learning in the larger learning and media ecologies that teens and young adults navigate. As part of a 3-year case study of new media programs, the Gulf Islands Film and Television School (GIFTS) presents pedagogical and curricular insights that are relevant to both out-of- and…

Our three-year inquiry at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School (GIFTS), a community-based media arts educational center, presents a practical model illustrating how urban youth explore their own strengths and connect themselves to a learning space in a rural environment within the context of filmmaking. It also offers pedagogical insights…

Gulf Island Film and Television School (GIFTS) is a community-based new media school founded 15 years ago by a group of documentary and commercial filmmakers on the site of a former logging camp on the island of Galiano in British Columbia, Canada. This article presents insights derived from a component of a larger research project investigating…