Two members of our Art Education community, faculty member Laura Reeder and alumna Kate Jellinghaus,  have articles in the current issue of The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education (JSTAE). This journal  serves as an alternative voice for the field of art education through the promotion of scholarly research that addresses social issues, action, and transformation as well as creative methods of research and writing. The JSTAE is the official journal of the Caucus on Social Theory & Art Education which is an Issues Group of the National Art Education Association.

Laura Reeder, our new full-time faculty member who begins at MassArt in September, confronts “either/or” professional identities in arts education in “Hyphenated Artists: A Body of Potential”:

“Multi-faceted artist/scholar/educator/learner/advocate personas are “unfenced” in order to navigate spaces of artistic, educational, and cultural productions without having to pause for identification at borders.  In this form, pedagogies for inventive social change emerge.”  [from the abstract]

Kate Jellinghaus, alumna of our Teacher Preparation Program and art teacher at Westwood High School, is co-author of “De(Fencing) with Youth: Moving from the Margins to the Center.” Kate and co-author Ann Tobey of Wheelock College  explore ideas, techniques, and strategies used to implement four collaborative art projects with teenage youth, which combined the positive power of human relationships with art making to “de(fence)” and move the youth from the margins to the center.

Two of the projects covered were  developed by Kate during her student teaching at Charlestown High School in the spring semester of 2010.  The Alternative Doorways Project gave forty Charlestown High students a chance to envision  alternatives to the metal detectors they were required to walk through each morning as they entered school. The monumental sculpted doorways they constructed of recycled materials were placed in the lobby of the school  and were later exhibited here in the Art Education Department at MassArt.

In the Haiti Print and Quilt Project Kate and Charlestown High art teacher Maurice Lane led a group of over sixty students, staff, and community volunteers who worked together to make two quilts. The students’ print designs, which were used for the blocks of the quilts, had been inspired by the art work of a collective in Haiti, and the quilts were later sold to benefit the Haitian artists in the aftermath of the 2009 earthquake.

A third project, Memory Vessels: Sharing our Stories, from the Artistic Noise program, was exhibited in the Arnheim Gallery in September 2010.