Читать книгу Critical Digital Making in Art Education - Группа авторов - Страница 13

Important to this collection is to better understand the alignment of critical social praxis with digital art making. Sjoukje van der Meulen points out in his 2017 Leonardo article “A Strong Couple: New Media and Socially Engaged Art,” there is an “antagonism” between new media and contemporary art critics (van der Muelen, 2017, p. 117). As social art-practice scholars like Pablo Helguera (2011) and Tom Finkelpearl (2013) have written, the lines between critical pedagogy and social practice in the art community are blurred, yet focused writing and research on digital technology as an art material, method, or communication device in spaces of social art practice are underreported. Concurrently other scholars have addressed the connection of digital making and learning but not as art practice. Kylie Peppler,‎ Erica Halverson,‎ and Yasmin B. Kafai’s two-volume series Makeology (2016) introduces the emerging landscape of the Maker Movement and its connection to interest-driven learning within a variety of educational ecosystems, spanning nursery schools, K–12 environments, higher education, museums, and after-school programming. However, Makeology does not focus on new media, social practice, and arts education despite a rise in interest for media-based arts.¹ Jentery Sayers’ collected volume Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (2017) explores the interdisciplinary character of experimental methods and hands-on research to “make” things in the humanities, attending to a different set of creative disciplines and orientation to critical theory than the visual arts. Matt Ratto and Megan Boler’s (Eds.) DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (2014) examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, citing the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” emerging in recent years. The authors and artists in Ratto and Boler’s collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging to video production to knitting and the creation of community gardens. DIY Citizenship concentrates on autodidactic learning in informal contexts without much attention to the relationship between curricula and arts education. Several book collections offer a closer focus on new media, activism, and the arts (Hertz, 2012; Lievrouw, 2011; Raley, 2009), but continue to miss the dynamics of integrating new media, broader forms of social art practice, and pedagogy which is at the heart of this collection.

Our goal for Critical Digital Making in Art Education is to explore the facets and complexities of contemporary digital making as meaningful and critical ←4 | 5→praxis in a world full of injustice, othering, and indifference. Critical digital making mines the importance of digital making and knowledge formation. It values the performative qualities of pedagogy and social practice as aesthetic forces within the communities and civic structures that we operate within as artists, educators, and learners. To this end, the collection is organized into three thematic sections: formation, co-construction, and intervention. Formation focuses on relationships of digital materiality and new media as it relates to learning, making, and knowledge creation. Co-construction focuses on the entities, constituencies, and alliances emerging within social practice as creative endeavors in new media. Finally, intervention focuses on the role of artists and educators in the active creation of civic life through forms of activism and participatory practice that is part of critical digital making. In the following, we elaborate on these three themes by offering some context through contemporary art practice and how the collected authors in this volume contribute to each theme.