Investigating Visuality: What Do We Expect to See?

Investigating Visuality: What Do We Expect To See?

Lauren Spires

Submitted to the faculty of the School of Art, Art Education Program in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Art Education in the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning University of Cincinnati April 2015

Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, University of Cincinnati, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art Education.

____________________________________________________ Vittoria Daiello, Ph.D. School of Art College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning Master Committee

____________________________________________________ Mikiko Hirayama, Ph.D. School of Art College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning

April 28, 2015

Investigating Visuality: What Do We Expect to See? by Lauren Spires

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Visual Arts Education

University of Cincinnati May 2015

Abstract Visuality, defined by Richard Foster (1998) as the social and cultural constructions of vision (p. xix), shapes how we see the world, one another, and ourselves. It is the goal of this research to explore ways of making visuality visible through art education practices, in order to expose the influences that construct how we look and see. Within this study, a class of second grade students investigates individual and collective visualities through writing, drawing, storytelling, and dialogic reflection. The students and researcher work together to develop successful ways of revealing social and cultural structures of seeing, as well as reflecting upon possible implications. Through working together to expose and investigate visuality, students create opportunities to reconsider ways of seeing, granting one another and themselves the agency to ascribe to new and different ways of looking.

Acknowledgments The process of this research was made not only possible, but also unforgettable, by the overwhelmingly positive and unwavering support of a very special group of art education colleagues. I am extraordinarily grateful to this group of people, in particular my advisor Dr. Vittoria Daiello, for the encouragement, advice, confidence, and laughterwhich made the entire experience exceptional. I am also indebted to my sister Megan Rodney and her student teacher Kelsey Penquite for allowing me to become a part of their classroom.

Table of Contents List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... ii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Research Question .................................................................................................. 2 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 3 Rationale and Personal Reflection .......................................................................... 4 Review of the Literature: Ways of Seeing ...........................................................................7 Methodology and Method ..................................................................................................27 Chapter 1: The Seen and Unseen .......................................................................................35 Realism ................................................................................................................. 36 Context .................................................................................................................. 37 Getting It Right ..................................................................................................... 42 Chapter 2: What Do We Expect to See? ............................................................................45 Visual Constancies ................................................................................................ 44 Surpassing Expectations ....................................................................................... 46 Prior Knowledge ................................................................................................... 49 Chapter 3: Mapping our Prior Knowledge.........................................................................52 Chapter 5: Conclusions ......................................................................................................56 Chapter 6: DAAPWorks Project ........................................................................................60 Questions for Further Research .........................................................................................65 References ..........................................................................................................................68

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List of Figures Figure 1. Similar and realistic student artwork ..................................................................39 Figure 2: Student artwork exhibiting personal experiences inside or outside of school context……………………………………………………………………………………40 Figure 3: Artwork of Luke, Sloan, Brendan, and Zach………………………………….42 Figure 4: Prior knowledge concept map…..……………………………………………..54 Figure 5: DAAPWorks Exhibit……..……………………………………………...……61 Figure 6: Narrative: What Do We Expect to See?……..……………………………...…62 Figure 7: Zine: Exercises in Visuality……..……………………………………….……62

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Introduction Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

-Berger, 1972, p.7 Seeing and knowing are integral components of human nature. We see before we can speak, and our dialogue is aimed to discover “how you see things, and how he sees things” (Berger, 1972, p. 9). While we may reach understandings about our different viewpoints, we often neglect to consider how these ways of seeing and knowing are constructed. Richard Foster (1988) describes the constructions of seeing with the term “visuality.” He defines visuality as “the social and cultural constructions of vision: how

2 we are able, made, or allowed to see, and understand this seeing or unseeing therein” (p. xix).

The exploration of seeing and knowing is fundamental to the field of visual arts and visual arts education. Because artists, students, and teachers continually negotiate visuality, it is imperative to understand the nature of visuality and its implications upon art making, curriculum, and pedagogy. Furthermore, understanding the nature of visuality is invaluable for a more holistic interpretation of artwork on the part of students and teachers. Thirdly, recognizing the existence of myriad influences upon ways of seeing leads to a greater understanding that “…what you see is never all of what you get, so we must approach the world with a more humble, more vulnerable attitude” (McKay, 2009, p. 67).

Because visuality is significant to the field of visual arts education, the goal of this project is to gain a greater understanding of the nature and processes of visuality in the lives of students and educators. While the relation between what we see and know may never be truly settled, it is the purpose and joy of art education to wrestle with seeing, knowing, and the links or rifts between. Reaching a greater comprehension of the influences behind how we see implicates what we know about ourselves as students, educators, and artists- and how we see one another in the process.

Research Question The purpose of this research is to discover ways of recognizing and understanding the influences that shape how we see. In order to perceive how our visualities affect what

3 we know about our worlds, one another, and ourselves, we must first be able to expose and investigate the forces that shape our ways of seeing. Similarly, in order to grasp how visuality implicates the making, viewing, and interpretation of art, we must first be able to investigate the influences that mold how we look at one another as artists, students, and educators. Therefore, the goal of this study is to investigate and formulate ways of making the implicit forces of visuality visible through art education practices.

Methodology and Method In order to discover successful ways of making visuality visible with students, the topic was studied with a second grade class in a public elementary school. Students conducted research into their individual and collective ways of seeing through art education practices including drawing, writing, and dialogic reflection. The research was designed as a case study in which the researcher facilitated each session and gathered data including observations, drawings, written work, and recorded dialogue.

Additionally, in order for students to reflect personally upon their own ways of seeing, the activities utilized methods of narrative inquiry. This narrative research functioned as a tool in which students “tell the story‌of their experiences, set within their personal, social, and historical context, and including the important themes in those lived experiencesâ€? (Creswell, 2013, p. 75). Through written, artistic, and dialogic storytelling, students illuminated aspects of their individual and collective life experiences that influence their ways of seeing.

4 Furthermore, while the method of research was designed as a case study, the data gathered included the narratives of individual students, as well as reflective narratives of my own research experiences. As I collected their stories and transcribed the happenings in the classroom, I created a narrative that was “… co-constructed between the researcher and the participant” (Creswell, 2013, p. 71).

Lastly, the questions, stories, and experiences generated by the students propelled the research activities. The progress of the students determined each subsequent step in the research, and generated any resulting patterns or theories. Because the theories were generated or “…grounded in data from participants who have experienced the process…” (Creswell, 2013, p. 83), the methodology of the study is classified as Grounded Theory. As the researcher, I utilized the insights engendered by the students to design iterative activities that helped students to investigate their visuality. These exercises in visuality, and the understandings wrought from the collaborative inquiry of the students and the researcher, constitute the theories and explanations grounded from this study.

Rationale and Personal Reflection Seeing you seeing me is an unnerving reflection because you can never see all the things I try to be.

So what appears to you are only bits and pieces the parts are not the whole and I may never know

5 and you may never know what you’ve missed what I’ve missed and what we have gotten right.

And so we push forward giving it our best not really sure which parts of the big picture are ours or how we fit together.

It’s only when we take the time to walk around it gaze upward, inward and outward that we see how big it is and how insignificant all our measurements really are.

For lines are deep scratches drops become caverns and brush strokes impassable streams when you can’t figure out how close you’re standing or which way to look.

I was driven to study ways of seeing in greater depth due to personal experiences with the uncertainty of how to look at others and myself. While growing up, I strove to be everything I thought I should be based upon the expectations of others. I looked at my peers, family members, and myself through the eyes of the social and competitive context of my community and school. I surrounded myself with people I was comfortable with, and comfortable being seen with. This was common practice among my peers, and later in life, at work- a daily battle to be seen with the right people, doing the right things,

6 creating an image that others would want to consume. And I was consumed- with how I was being seen.

Looking back, I have so many questions. Who was really looking at me, and at whom was I looking? Who decided how I should appear, whom I should befriend, and what facades were important to be kept up? What experiences determined my choices, and what choices I perceived to be correct? In retrospect, I regret my narrow point of view, because I’ll never know what I missed while only looking for certain things.

Not so long ago, these same questions propelled me to leave my career as a consultant to pursue visual arts education. Drawing, painting, writing, and art making were actions I had always considered intrinsic to my individuality. So, then, why was I working so hard to excel within an environment of which I had no desire to be a part?

Within that career, I slowly began to realize that who I saw myself as was not a match with the person the job desired me to become. How had I ended up in a place so far removed from my deepest desires, and who I considered myself to be? What person had I been trying to become, and why?

All of these experiences allowing myself to be shuffled from one stop to the next, fulfilling the expectations of unknown entities, drove my study of visuality. To study visuality is to study how our ways of seeing- one another, our worlds, and ourselveshave been shaped by our social and cultural experiences. As I consider my own visuality, I realize that I saw others and myself through the sociocultural expectations of my family, my school systems, and my peers. Coming to this realization, as simple as it may be, is liberating; for we are people, not sets of missed or met expectations.

7 It is critical to study visuality in order to realize that there is an unfathomable amount of ways to look and see. As social beings, humans often strive to be what others want to see, without considering why, and where these expectations come from. If we think more deeply about visuality, we take an opportunity to reconsider how we look.

Through looking at visuality itself, we might realize what we are missing, and how much more there is to see.

Review of the Literature: Ways of Seeing Table of Contents Introduction and Definitions Section 1: Ways of Seeing: Historical, Cultural, Social, and Experiential Section 1.1: The Historical Nature of Vision and Visuality Section 1.2: The Cultural Nature of Vision and Visuality Section 1.3: The Social and Relational Nature of Vision and Visuality Section 1.4: The Experiential Nature of Vision and Visuality Section 2: Vision and Visuality Within Art Education Section 2.1: Culture and Visuality in Art Education Section 2.2: Visuality and Experience in Art Education Section 2.3: Visuality and the Role of the Art Educator Section 3: Summary and Implications of Research

8 Introduction and Definitions The following review investigates how art education literature defines and utilizes the concept of visuality. It is necessary to understand the existing explanations and applications of visuality within art education literature in order to comprehend its implications upon art educators and art students. Through understanding “how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein” (Foster, 1988, xix), we may lay a foundation for meaningful art education curriculum. Similarly, helping students to investigate the forces that shape visuality can empower students with an understanding of the way they see individually and as part of a culture.

To begin, art education literature defines two major concepts that address ways of seeing- vision and visuality. While vision is known as the physiological, biological process of seeing, visuality is considered to be the “social and cultural constructions of seeing” (Rose, 2012, p. 5). While different in verbiage, vision and visuality are interrelated concepts. Foster (1988) states: Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature to culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche (p.xix).

Foster delineates several different aspects of vision and visuality, or ways of seeing. In his description, he maintains that seeing involves social, cultural, historical and corporeal factors. It is in this fashion that this review proceeds, investigating art education literature for how it addresses ways of seeing as constructed by history,

9 society, culture, and bodily human experience. Within section 3, literature will be reviewed for how the aforementioned ways of seeing both affects and are critically important to the field of art education.

Section 1: Ways of Seeing: Historical, Cultural, Social, and Experiential Section 1.1: How We See: The Historical Nature of Vision and Visuality Richard Foster (1988) references the historical nature of both vision and visuality. He explains this historical nature of sight by describing different models of vision that developed within different time periods and promoted different ways of seeing based on the priorities of that culture. His examples demonstrate changes occurring in ways of seeing as a progression, as new knowledge and experience changes the way things are seen. For instance, Foster (1988) describes the progression from Cartesian Perpectivalism to Baroque art within the early nineteenth century. “Cartesian Perspectivalism, which separates subject and object, renders the first transcendental and the second inert” (p. x). This Cartesian Perspectivalism, developed in the Renaissance, prioritized empirical science and capitalist logic, as seen in works of art that demonstrate the priority of using perspective. Foster (1988) maintains that Baroque art, which “flaunts the opacity of sublime subjects and underscored the rhetorical conventionality of sight” (p. xi), challenged the notions of Cartesian Perspectivalism, prioritizing different subject matter and ways of rendering that subject matter.

The aforementioned examples of societal ideologies, which dictated the way works of art were made and consumed, are known as visual or scopic regimes (Foster, 1988, p. xix). “With its own rhetoric and representations, each scopic regime seeks…to

10 make of its many social visualities one essential vision, or to order them in a natural hierarchy of sight” (p. xix). Thus, ways of seeing were formed historically by the culture of the time period. As John Berger (1972) states, “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today” (p. 8). As stated by Foster and Berger, the nature of vision evolves along with human experience and knowledge.

As vision and visuality adapt with the evolving philosophies of mankind, it is essential to question what historical and current ideologies shape our present cultural ways of seeing. Within Visual Methodologies, author Gillian Rose (2012) refers to the characterization of postmodern vision as related to “the increasing saturation of Western societies by visual images” (p. 2). Rose (2012) also states that the saturation of visual images in Western society has reached unprecedented levels, and “Westerners now interact with the world mainly through how we see it” (p. 2). Therefore, rather than Cartesian Perspectivalism or Baroque ways of seeing, our current society sees through an “ocularcentric” lens; visual images are central to contemporary Western life.

Art education literature explains that ways of seeing are products of cultural knowledge and philosophies. As the current state of Western culture is deemed “ocularcentric” (Rose, 2012, p. 2) and saturated by visual images, it is important to question the ideologies behind and perpetuated by these images. Therefore, the next section of this literature review addresses the cultural nature of vision and visuality as dictated by art education literature.

11 Section 1.2: The Cultural Nature of Vision and Visuality Author Gillian Rose (2012) defines visuality as “what is seen and how it is seen are culturally constructed” (p. 2). Within Educating Artistic Vision, Elliot Eisner (2002) also discusses visuality as dependent upon culture. He states: Our sensory system becomes a means through which we pursue our own development. But the sensory system does not work alone; it requires for its development the tools of culture: language, the arts, science, values, and the like.

With the aid of culture we learn how to create ourselves. (p. 2).

Similarly, Julia Marshall, author of ‘Image as Insight: Visual Images in PracticeBased Research’ (2007) relays the importance of understanding present relationships between vision and culture, stating, “Vision and visual imagery play a dominant role in shaping consciousness in the contemporary world” (p. 25). Marshall describes postmodern beliefs and opinions that characterize current ways of seeing. She describes Postmodern and semiotic theories of vision, clarifying for the reader the differences between the two. Postmodern theories “understand vision from a cultural-linguistic perspective…no perception is direct or unaffected by context” (p. 25). Marshall also describes semiotic theory of vision, in which “all images are representations (signs and symbols) that can be read as texts” (Barrett, 1997; Marshall, 2007, p. 25). Rather than subscribe to just one of these theories, Marshall (2007) believes, “A pluralistic account of vision is critical to our understandings of imagery and imaging in art practice as research” (p. 25).

12 Not only is it important to consider different ways of seeing in today’s ocularcentric society, it is also imperative to question the motivations of imagery and imaging. Research by Paul Duncum (2006) and Pollock (1988) suggests that imagery must be investigated for scopic regimes. Duncum (2006) states: Considering visuality also involves the analysis of the power relationships structuring the visual field: Who looks, who is looked at, what is shown, what is seen, what is invisible in the dominant visual discourses, and how alternative ways of looking are resistant (p. 2) Like Paul Duncum, arts education scholar James Haywood Rolling, Jr. (2009) studies the influence of visuality and scopic regimes in contemporary culture. However, Rolling directs our attention to the ways in which scopic regimes lead to the oppression of certain groups of people. Haywood Rolling, Jr. (2009) describes the nature of visuality as “episodic”, stating that the mind seeks to tie up missing pieces and loose ends with something that is familiar and makes sense. However, Haywood Rolling, Jr. states these pieces that our minds utilize to close the gaps “…perpetuate visual stereotypes” (p. 97).

Further, Haywood Rolling, Jr. (2009) cites art educator and author Kerry Freedman (2003), naming a combination of specific cultural influences that disseminate visual stereotypes, including, “the fine arts, tribal arts, advertising, popular film and video, folk art, television and other performance, housing and apparel design, computer game and toy design, and other forms of visual production and communication” (Freedman, 2003, p. 1 & Haywood Rolling, Jr., 2009, p. 4). He states in summation, “In a polyglot visual culture that has gone global, the power to consistently caricature certain

13 others as insignificant is constituted by a network of visual regimes” (Aching, 2002 & Haywood Rolling, Jr., 2009, p. 97).

In summary, today’s cultural visuality is ocularcentric. Because of the prevalence and magnitude of visual imagery, pluralistic considerations of visual ideologies are necessary when analyzing visuality. Furthermore, visual regimes with the power to mask ideas and people exist within culture; it is therefore necessary to look for implicit power relationships in surrounding visual culture.

Section 1.3: The Social and Relational Nature of Vision and Visuality As ways of seeing are constructed by cultural norms and values, these priorities come into being or materialize through contact with other humans. Author Paul Duncum (2006) states, “…visuality refers to vision not only as a physical act, but as a socially embodied practice” (Foster, 1988, xix & Duncum, 2006, p. 3). Thus, seeing is a relational and learned practice within the given context of a culture.

Furthermore, John Berger (1972) discusses the intersubjectivity of vision and visuality. He states, “Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world” (p. 9). As stated by Berger, the knowledge of one’s own seeing as related to the sight of others impacts what is looked at and how it is seen. Berger calls this the reciprocal nature of vision, stating, “The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this- an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things’” (p. 9). Berger also maintains, “We never look

14 at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (8).

In this manner, vision is both cyclical and intersubjective, as the views of one human greatly impact the views of another.

Author Dennis Atkinson (2002) reinforces the transactional nature of vision and visuality within Art in Education: Identity and Practice. He presents hermeneutic theories of vision, stating “perception of the world stems from how the world presents itself to consciousness, which in turn is formed within social processes. By acting in the world both individual and the world as conceived are changed” (p. 5).

As stated by the aforementioned authors, the nature of vision and visuality is social and intersubjective; what is seen is determined by dialogue with other humans in our cultural context. Similarly, ways of seeing are influenced by the gaze of others as we come to realize we too are visible. Not only is visuality formed by cultural ideologies, but also by experience with others within a cultural context. This experience of sociocultural ways of seeing is addressed within the next section of this text.

Section 1.4: The Experiential Nature of Vision and Visuality Within Educating Artistic Vision (2002), Elliot Eisner describes the circular relationship of seeing and experience, and the influence work in the arts has on perception. He asserts, “To see is to acquire visual meaning through experience. To merely look is to engage in an act that hopefully terminates in seeing” (p. 97). In this manner, a person’s experience in the world gives meaning to what is seen. Eisner (2002) portrays an example of experience influencing the visuality of students:

15 (Children) might not see, unless it is pointed out to them, that a field of grass, for example, is not simply green but contains a wide variety of shades of green and other colors as well. In short, their ability to perceive relationships develops as they learn, and this ability is affected by the type of experience they have. (p. 67).

As such, Eisner defines the act of seeing as learned and experiential. Similarly, as cultivating experience creating and analyzing the visual, art education has the ability of expanding students’ visualities. He states, “The significance of the ability to see, and hence to construe meaning from visual experience cannot be overestimated in the production of visual art” (Eisner, 2002, p. 97).

John Berger (1972) indicates the active, experiential nature of visuality, declaring, “Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are” (9). Similarly, he describes the act of seeing as participatory; a choice on the part of the viewer: “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” (8).

Arthur Efland’s text Art and Cognition: Integrating The Visual Arts in the Curriculum defines visuality as an active process influenced by both experience and subjectivity. He states, “…for what we perceive is influenced also by what we elect to look at and this, in turn, is influenced by prior knowledge, interests, needs, desires, expectations, motives, purposes, curiosities—in short, by our dispositions” (Efland, 2002, p. 16). In so many words, visuality for Arthur Efland is an active process instigated by the individual, and informed by an intricate web of cultural and social influences.

16 However, Elliot Eisner (2002) determines that these experiences within cultural and social contexts inform visuality by creating “visual constancies”; what we have learned to expect to see becomes a sort of visual stereotype that replaces what we may actually be seeing (p. 66). This sentiment echoes that of James Haywood Rolling, who stated that visual regimes perpetuate ideological, and potentially stereotypical, ways of seeing.

Furthermore, additional art education authors deem visuality as inherently visual and corporeal. Within Art and Embodiment, Author Paul Crowther (1993) describes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s experiential philosophy of vision “as a function of features which we are not immediately aware of—namely details of our body’s present orientation to the world, aspects of its possible orientations, and, indeed, of its past orientations” (p.

106). In this manner, seeing takes into account physical experiences of the world in the past, present, and future.

Within Experience and Experiment in Art, Author Alva Noë furthers Crowther’s experiential description: When you see, you take yourself to be aware of a densely detailed world, to be sure. But you do not take yourself to have all that detail in consciousness all at once. Rather, you take yourself to have access to the detail by the flick of the eye or the turn of the head. The seeing, the experiencing of all that detail, is not something static, but something temporally extended and active.

-Noë, 2000, p. 128

17 Therefore, visuality is an active process of exploration and experience of the environment.

Likewise, Noë (2000) reasons that in order to understand vision and visuality, we must investigate “the things we do as we explore the world” (p. 128). He also presents examples as to how the study of works of art can give humanity clues to our relationships with the environment. He introduces the work of artist Richard Serra as an example of artwork that provokes viewers to investigate visuality, calling for “first-person phenomenological investigation” (p. 129). Noë (2000) cites a 1973 interview with Serra, who produces site-specific sculptures that are meant to become part of the environment.

These sculptures purposely “lack in perspicuity…to be understood they need to be explored” (p. 129). The sculptures are overwhelming in scale and produce disorientation and loss of balance among viewers. In this way, they direct viewers’ attention to the complexity of experience often overlooked. Because the pieces prompt further evaluation, this investigation of the artwork is “at once a process of exploring one’s experience of the world. And the knowledge one thus attains is knowledge of the character of one’s experience” (Noë, 2000, p. 129). As visuality is experiential, how one experiences a work of art provides insight into the characteristics of an individual’s visuality.

Art education literature classifies visuality as nuanced, complex, and interwoven with history, culture, and experience. This complicated definition exemplifies the importance of acknowledging visuality as a significant component of art and art education.

18 Section 2: Vision and Visuality Within Art Education Vision and visuality have been defined in art education literature as the historical, cultural, social, and experiential constructions of seeing. Because visual arts education centers on what is seen, unseen, and created to be seen, both students and educators wrestle with visuality on a daily basis. Therefore, it is imperative to investigate how vision and visuality both affect and are affected by art education practices. The following sections of this text examine the implications of vision and visuality upon students and teachers within art education.

Section 2.1: Culture and Visuality in Art Education: As noted above, visuality is defined as culturally constructed. Julia Marshall noted the ocularcentric character of today’s postmodern society, as most of the Western world is dominated by visual communication. The character of today’s visual culture impacts the visuality of both students and educators. Paul Duncum (2006) states, …teachers need to view their charges, not as mere students defined by schools, but as young people whose lives are embedded in the torrent of imagery that swirls around them, providing them pleasure and helping them construct ideas about themselves and their world (p. xvii).

In short, the visuals present in students’ lives take part in shaping their visuality.

Therefore, art educators must consider the roles of visual culture upon student art making, as well as the ways students see their own art and the art of others.

Furthermore, Paul Duncum (2006) argues that the visualities of students and educators are also impacted by the culturally produced concept of childhood. Duncum

19 maintains that many aspects of society, from psychology and pediatrics to popular television and books, “…emphasize both a universal and individualized concept of the child…in addition, children’s identity negotiation and survival through popular culture have been sidelined by school curricula on the assumption of infantile innocence” (p. 2).

As such, students’ visualities of their own capabilities in the art room are impacted by cultural views of children.

Art Education scholar Olga Ivashkevich (2009) further describes postmodern cultural views of childhood in Children’s Drawing as Sociocultural Practice. She states children’s culture is “…an active process of meaning production and transformation through daily peer interactions and engagement in popular cultural practices” (Buckingham, 2000; Corsaro, 1997; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Kleinfeld & SutliffSanders, 2001; McDonnell, 2000; Sternheimer, 2003 & Ivashkevich, 2009, p. 53).

Because children’s culture is an active process (p. 53), children should be viewed as participants in their own culture, rather than passive recipients. She cites James, Jenks & Prout (1998), claiming, “…children should be viewed as competent social actors able to ‘locate themselves flexibly and strategically within particular social contexts’ and actively contribute to the construction of new knowledge” (p. 138 & Ivashkevich, 2009, p. 53).

Additionally, Ivashkevich (2009) believes that art education is a site for children to negotiate culture and visuality. She argues for children’s drawing practices to be regarded as “…culturally and socially bound meaning making” (p. 52). Similarly, Julia Marshall (2007) advocates that art making can act as research into culture and visuality,

20 stating, “…art images are seen as part of a productive visual culture; as artifacts that synthesize and represent concepts, and evoke or produce reality by mediating the way we perceive reality” (p. 38).

Similarly, art educator James Haywood Rolling (2009) claims that educational institutions can act as places where dominant scopic regimes can mask certain ideas, and even certain students. In the opinion of Haywood Rolling, Jr., the visualities of educators, educational institutions, and policies impact the visualities of students to the point of masking certain humans as undesirable, rendering them invisible (p. 2).

However, he also staunchly believes that art education can act as a site for shedding these masks: As an art educator, my chosen profession addresses the social construction of invisibility as effected through masking practices inherent in public schooling.

Arts education practice carries in it the potential to de-mask and disrupt the essentializing cloaks that render the living invisible (p. 2).

Like Marshall and Ivashkevich, Haywood Rolling, Jr. also maintains that art education gives students opportunities to negotiate cultural and institutional discourses.

He cites Elliot Eisner (2002), proclaiming, “… the visual arts practices offer a way to help us become aware of ourselves, our ideas and beliefs in a most visceral manner and to more easily access, remake, reapply, and reinterpret those meanings in relation to one another” (Eisner 2002, p. 112 & Haywood Rolling, Jr., 2009, p. 2). Thus, art educators must regard student artwork as not only influenced by culture, but also as a medium for negotiation and new reality production.

21 Section 2.2: Visuality and Experience in Art Education The art education practices described up to this point contribute to the experiential learning of art students. Just as visuality is defined as socially and culturally constructed, visuality changes with the evolving experiences of students. Art making must be considered to be influenced by a student’s experience in the world and in the classroom.

Just as Ivashkevich argued for children’s drawings as cultural negotiation, she also iterates the importance of considering the context of children’s image production. She states “…looking at the particular context in which an instance of drawing takes place is crucial for understanding the meaning and value of image making in a specific child’s life” (pp. 52-53). Therefore, the context of the art education site implicates the ideas and motivations of students. Similarly, Elliot Eisner (2002) demonstrates the importance of experience and context upon a student’s art making. He says: The act of creation does not emanate from a vacuum. It is influenced by the experiences that have accumulated through the process of living. If that process did not include much nurture from the visual world, it is not likely that the world will become a resource, which the individual can draw upon for his own creative work.

Eisner, 2002, pp. 96-97

Eisner further articulates that experiences generate expectations that affect what students see. “Expectations function as perceptual constancies that often interfere with our perception of visual relationships. In such cases, what we know displaces what we

22 see” (71). On the other hand, Eisner maintains that art education can act as experience that expands student visuality. He claims, “…The ability to perceptually differentiate visual forms can be facilitated through experience. One of the major contributions of the field of art education can be said to be one of helping people learn to see qualities that normally escape attention” (71). As such, experiences in art education can expand and change a student’s visuality, enabling students to consider and dismantle their own visual constancies. Further, practice in the arts enable students to discern their own experiences with new lenses.

Section 2.3: Visuality and the Role of the Art Educator Learning to perceive what is subtle, learning to overcome visual constancies, learning to construct mental images of visual possibilities and learning to construct such images in another material are not simple tasks. It is the particular province of art education to assume responsibility for fostering these aspects of human ability.

-Elliot Eisner, 2002, p. 106.

Likewise, the visuality of the art educator has a large part in shaping the experiences and visualities of students. The ways in which an art educator sees his or her role in the classroom, views and interprets student work, and implements curriculum shape, in part, student relationships with art. Dennis Atkinson (2002) states, “In my experience, art teachers are often faced with mysterious drawings and paintings and these can raise interpretational difficulties for their professional practice and result in different ways of responding” (p. 3). Atkinson is also interested in the ability of the educator to

23 empathize with the student while attempting to see, interpret, and improve the student’s personal visuality. He asks the following questions about the importance of visuality within art education: “How can the teacher empathize without letting his or her expertise, traditions of practice, influence judgment? Secondly, how can we initiate work in art education that is relevant to and located within children’s and students’ sociocultural lifeworlds whilst simultaneously expanding their understanding?” (p. 5). Speaking from personal experience, he claims educators must be “eternally vigilant of the criteria used to evaluate and assess students’ art work” (p. 2).

Further, James Haywood Rolling, Jr. (2009) also addresses the complex and nuanced roles of the art educator. He describes his duty as an art educator is to open up curricular spaces “…where students can picture themselves in the world, no matter whether that picture is pretty or not, locating personal significance along with the agency to reinterpret the signifiers they have thus far embodied…” (p. 107). Haywood Rolling Jr., describes his role as helping students to acquire agency through art making that investigates visuality. He describes a second curricular space in art education, within which “…students can picture a more just and refined world, critiquing the cultural stories we hold to be socially significant or insignificant and exercising their acquired agency to make changes along the way” (p. 107). In the words of James Haywood Rolling, one of the roles of an art educator is to provide curricular spaces where students may safely investigate, question, and negotiate their own cultures.

24 Similarly, Paul Duncum (2006) describes postmodern art education as a site where students can be empowered by working alongside educators to develop curriculum beneficial to student needs. He states, Inspired by postmodern childhood studies, my class and I worked to produce a curriculum that incorporated a view of young children as socially reflective subjects who collaborate with educators in understanding the situations of everyday life that shape their own subjective understandings as well as the many differences between children (p. 2).

In this manner, art educators can collaborate with students to investigate through art making the ways that visuality manifests not only in students’ individual lives, but also intersubjectively among students and teachers. By working together, visualities of students and teachers, and the way they affect one another, can be addressed and made visible rather than implicit. Perhaps when visuality is actively discussed, we may recognize that “our interpretations function ‘behind our backs’ and also out ahead of us” (Gallagher, 1992, p. 91 & Atkinson, 2002, p. 77). Addressing this with students may open the door to discuss the complexity of our interpretations, and the visual constancies they may perpetuate. This may also lead to recognition of “…what kind of power relations function in our interpretations and how these relations impact upon our identities as teachers and learners” (Atkinson, 2002 p. 77).

In order to empower students with such opportunities for autonomy, an art educator must view his or her students as active participants in education and culture, rather than passive recipients. As Ivashkevich (2009) stated, “…children should be

25 viewed as competent social actors able to…actively contribute to the construction of new knowledge” (53). Similarly, educators should consider that students face and interact with the challenges of visuality in culture every day. Ivashkevich describes a research study into childhood culture as revealing that “children often ‘mix and match elements’ (p. 18) from a wide variety of popular culture texts to produce their own meanings” (p.

53). From this perspective, students are “neither manipulated nor free from prescribed meanings, but engaged in a daily process of social negotiation” (p. 53). Therefore, students already mediate visuality, and are able to investigate the way it affects different aspects of their lives.

In summation, the visuality of the art educator affects not only the ways she sees her students, but also how she understands these ways of seeing as implicating curriculum and pedagogy. Collaboration among students and teachers to investigate the manifestations and effects of visuality can lead to illumination of implicit and potentially harmful visual constancies. Thus, one role of the art educator is to facilitate dialogic collaboration that may reveal visualities, and empower students with the knowledge to look beyond what is given. In regards to visuality, art educators can work to help students become artists who “… tend to see beneath the primary surface of a situation, to uncover the covert meanings or implications of the situation” (Eisner, 2002, p. 97).

Section 3: Summary and Implications of Research In conclusion, art education literature addresses visuality as the historical, cultural, social, and experiential constructions of vision within the lives of art students and art educators. Understanding these numerous, complex, and interconnected

26 constructions of vision has several implications for students and educators. Not only does visuality impact the way students see their own work, but also the work of their peers and the relationships between both.

Visuality has been classified as shaped by history and culture, as ways of seeing developed alongside knowledge throughout history. In today’s ocularcentric society, the lives of students and educators are saturated by visual imagery that contains inexhaustible amounts of ideological messages. Students are constantly negotiating this terrain, and today’s visual culture should be considered as a part of students’ visualities.

Furthermore, art education literature refers to visuality as intersubjective and relational, as the ways in which both students and educators see are mediated by the eyes of one another. Art students and educators should consider the relationships among students’ ideas, work, and interpretations as part of each student’s visuality, as well as the visuality of the group.

Similarly, the experiential nature of visuality is continually addressed within art education literature. As stated by Berger, Eisner, Efland, and Duncum, vision is continually active, moving, and adapting. As experience continually shapes how we see, what we know from these experiences shapes what we see. In this manner, visual constancies are formed as we only see what we expect to appear, rather than the finer nuances of what is before us. These visual stereotypes can be dismantled by experience in art education, as we investigate further both our knowing and seeing.

Likewise, art educators must consider their own visuality as well as that of the educational institution when developing curriculum and pedagogy. As scopic regimes

27 have the power to mask ideas and individuals, exploration of the visuality within the specific art education context is necessary to empower, rather than mask, students and teachers.

Through mutual collaboration and investigation, art education can become a curricular site where students and teachers act as agents of culture. By understanding the nuances, manifestations, and implications of visuality upon art making and ways of seeing, artists are empowered to redefine their own ways of seeing. Art education literature defines visuality as influential, but malleable, when students and teachers work together to reveal and reinterpret ways of seeing.

Methodology and Method The goal of this research is to explore ways of making visuality visible with students through art education practices. Visuality is defined by art education literature as the cultural, social, experiential, and intersubjective ways of seeing. In order to comprehensively explore these nuances of visuality within art education, I worked with a group of second-grade students to talk about ways of seeing through art education practices including art making, writing, and dialogic reflection.

Methodology: Grounded Theory The understandings of visuality gleaned within this research have been generated by its participants- the students. Because the development of insights and explanations “…is generated or ‘grounded’ in data from participants who have experienced the

28 process” (Strauss & Corbin & Creswell, 1998, p. 83), the methodology of the research is classified as Grounded Theory. As I worked with students to develop artistic, written, and dialogic data, I attempted to generate explanations of the “processes, the actions, and interactions shaped by the views of the participants” (Creswell, 1998, p. 83). Because the students who participated in the research engendered new experiences and meaning, any and all conclusions are grounded in their actions and interactions. The insights generated from the research were utilized to create exercises in visuality, through which the students successfully illuminated forces of their visuality. These exercises in visuality, as well as the knowledge wrought from the collaborative inquiry between the students and researcher, constitute the theories and understandings grounded from this study.

Method: Case Study Because the primary goal of the research is how to uncover and discuss visuality with students, I elected to work with a large class of second graders in a local public school. The research method was defined as a case study because, “case study research involves the study of a case within a real-life, contemporary context or setting” (Yin, 2009 & Creswell, 1998). The intent of this case study is to find successful ways of investigating visuality with its participants through art education practices. Therefore, the participants utilized typical art education practices, such as writing, drawing, and dialogic reflection, to explore the topic of visuality. As defined by Creswell (1998), “Case study research is a qualitative approach in which the investigator explores a real-life, contemporary bounded system (a case) or multiple bounded systems (cases) over time through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information…”

29 (97). In this research study, the group of second-graders is classified as the case, and the multiple sources of collected data include the students’ writing, drawings, and recorded dialogic reflection. The goals of this case study are to develop general understandings of how visuality is manifested in the lives of young students; how they might already understand visuality or come to understand it, and to discover successful ways of talking about visuality with young students.

Context and Design of the Case Study For this qualitative case study, I was fortunate to be able to work with a group of 24 second-grade students in a public elementary school. My sister is the students’ general educator; she was gracious to allow me to embark on this journey with her students. The public school was located in Centerville, Ohio, a middle to upper-middle class community. The students were between the ages of 7 and 8 years, and come from diverse backgrounds and life experiences.

The case study took place over a series of four one-hour visits to the classroom, during which I facilitated activities designed to investigate visuality as understood and experienced by the students. During each activity I recorded thoughts, problems, understandings, conversations, and subsequent ideas for the next session. These written records helped to formulate the process of the research. The notes act as both a reflection of the students’ activities and insights, as well as my own perceptions of the activities.

Along with developing general understandings of students’ ideas and experiences, the notes recorded in the classroom acted as a baseline for development of the next activity in the series.

30 While the classroom was not a designated art classroom, the intent was to bring art education to the students during each session. As previously stated, each session involved different structures of drawing, coloring, sharing, presenting, and dialogue- all equally important components of an art education curriculum. The setting of the classroom involved four groups of six desks; students were accustomed to working individually and as part of groups. Additionally, students were previously assigned by their teacher a designated partner with whom they would explain their work and share ideas; this activity is referred to as ‘think-pair-share’. The students each had their own supply of colored pencils, markers, erasers, notebooks, and paper; I would bring in any additional materials needed for the activity.

It must be noted that the context of the general instruction classroom within which the research is conducted is greatly different than the context of an art classroom.

The implications of this context were revealed by the research activities and discussed with the students. Although the context of this classroom was different than the typical context of an art education room, the conclusions and ideas generated by the students provided incredible insights upon the ways visuality affects students, teachers, and art making. As detailed in the upcoming chapters, the work created by students illuminated astounding and unanticipated insights about the implications of visuality within education, art making, art education, and in their lives outside the context of school and the research.

Data Analysis

31 Authentic insight into self is more likely promoted through indirect means, asking students to reflect and recall experiences through making art…students become aware of the self as shaped in multiple discourses, giving students more choices about consciously shaping self.

-Olivia Gude, 2007, p. 8

The writing, drawing, and dialogue produced by the students in each session acted as the foundational data to be analyzed. This portion of the data, along with my own notes, observations, and interviews with students combined to produce extensive and complex records of experiences. Within students’ work, our recorded dialogue, and my own notes, I searched for patterns and themes of understanding. I also looked for how their work was formed intersubjectively, as their drawings and stories showed strong relationships to one another’s work and topics brought up during discussion. While analysis of children’s drawing is the topic for another paper, I did evaluate the content of their artwork in relationship to our discussions and other students’ stories and drawings.

As the research progressed, I realized a highly significant component of the research existed within the relationships between the students’ drawings, writing, and dialogue.

This relational space revealed the connections the students made in regards to their own ways of seeing and others’ ways of seeing. As stated by Bakhtin (1981), these spaces showed “…a dialogic process of ‘mutual interillumination’, whereby utterances ‘throw light on each other’ i.e., when one language sees itself in the light of another language” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 12 & Perez Miles, 2012, p. 114).

32 The writing, drawing, and dialogue produced by the students, along with my own notes, observations, and interviews, combined to produce extensive and complex records of experiences. These research notes, the work, and the questions of the students were collected and investigated for patterns and themes, as well as to formulate each subsequent research activity in the case study. The development of the research was collaborative and iterative alongside the understandings developed by the students in the classroom.

The Spirit of the Study Students as Agents of Culture The astute advice of Olga Ivashkevich (2009) guides the spirit and actions of my study: “Children should be viewed as competent social actors” (p. 53). Therefore, the ideas, conclusions, and questions of the students propelled the research; the students and I collaborated to discover how visuality affects all of us as individuals and as an interconnected group. Also, the activities were designed to facilitate creative and personal responses to open-ended prompts. A lesson plan was created for each session involving writing, art making, and group dialogic reflection. As summarized by Perez-Miles (2012), “…dialogic communication acknowledges the relational concept of the self, in which subjectivity is achieved by forming relationships with others. Moreover, it understands that the words of others are closely interconnected with one’s own words…” (p. 121) Likewise, the intent of the research was not to lead student drawings and stories to any of my own preconceived notions; this was an investigation into their visualities, not

33 my own. Thus, the prompts were intended to be malleable and open-ended to encourage students to exercise agency within their writings, artwork, and conversations. The intent of each activity was for students to consider their own ways of seeing, as well as how different ways of seeing manifest in their own lives. A similar goal was to discover how a combination of writing, drawing, dialogue, and reflection could act as “sociocultural practice” (Ivashkevich, 2009, p. 1), which might empower students to negotiate ways of seeing. These practices were aimed to generate new understandings about the ways students and educators see as individuals and groups, inside and outside the context of school.

Narrative Inquiry As noted previously, writing and illustration prompts were designed to call upon students’ individual and group experiences, as to engender personal understandings and experiences with visuality. A significant portion of the students’ activities involved storytelling, because as stated by Gaudelius & Speirs (2002): Through stories, people see connections- connections among their experiences and the experiences of others, and connections between experience and underlying social values. Recognizing these connections is essential in developing empowerment (p. 44).

Similarly, Creswell (1998) notes the power of storytelling in illuminating ways of seeing. He states, “Narrative stories tell of individual experiences, and they may shed light on the identities of individuals and how they see themselves” (71). Students wrote,

34 drew, and reflected upon narratives individually and collectively, exploring their own ways of seeing as well as how others viewed their narratives.

As researcher, I collected, transcribed, and compiled their stories as individuals and as a group into a final narrative reflective of our experiences together. This narrative acts as a final response to our collaborative inquiry into visuality, and highlights major themes and insights produced by the students. In this manner, the voices of the students remain the primary voices of the research project.

In summation, the methodology and method of this research is not aimed to provide rigid approaches in thought or technique. Rather, the voices, opinions, and experiences of students direct the flow of the research. The methodology, method, and research- students’ stories, artwork, and conversation- weave together to produce relational spaces that reveal the individual, intersubjective, contextual, and complex nature of visuality.

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Chapter 1: The Seen and Unseen The first session was designed to investigate the “seen and unseen” components of Foster’s definition of visuality. The intent was to begin by asking students to reflect on seeing, not seeing, and the relationships between both through drawing and dialogic reflection.

We began the activity by sitting together on the carpet at the front of the class. I introduced the activity and presented all 24 students with a black and white outline of a forest scene (pictured below or in background). Students talked about what they saw in the scene, such as trees, leaves, branches, sky, bark, grass, and “maybe water.” The water in question was the undulating dividing line between the forest above ground and the empty space underground. We hypothesized what that line could be, and the students decided it was the line dividing what we could see above ground and the mystery of the underground.

Segueing into the next portion of the activity, I asked everyone to return to their seats and draw what they thought could possibly be underground, even though we can’t

36 see it. Students were told they could draw absolutely anything that they imagined.

Several students asked questions regarding what they could or couldn’t draw, such as “can I draw more than one thing?” and “can I use color?” I encouraged them to draw as many things as they could fit on the page, using as many colors as they would like. The only guideline for this component of the activity was not to draw anything above ground yet, but to focus their attention on thinking about and illustrating what they thought could be underground.

Realism After ten minutes, students shared their stories with designated ‘think-pair-share’ partners, and returned to the carpet to discuss with one another what they had envisioned underground. The contents of the student drawings were unanticipated and astonishing.

As students presented their drawings with excitement, the consistent and widespread realism apparent in their drawings was fascinating. The majority of students drew from a range of the exact same things including dirt, worms, worm tunnels, worm colonies, fossils, bugs, snails, flowers, and water. A few students drew aquatic life such as fish and turtles in water, but only four students drew things outside of this range of items. One student, a boy named Zach, drew a “corr-hole” (Zach, personal communication, February 3), coloring a bright orange tunnel of molten lava flowing from a hole in the earth up to ground level. Another male student drew a vivid red tunnel disappearing vertically into dark brown dirt. This student also drew a spider-like creature in the red tunnel, scrawling the word “dead” with an arrow pointing to the creature. Lastly, a student by the name of Brendan drew three vignettes of different scenes underground, all including miners

37 engaged in various activities. One miner is hacking upwards at the earth from the bottom left corner, while another is hacking away in the middle of the dirt, stuck in a hole. The last miner is crouched by a pool of water, looking at fish swimming in an underground pool. I was surprised at the realistic representations within the drawings, and a lack of anything that appeared invented or fictional. I was also surprised that I couldn’t see anything that looked like it might have come from TV, movies, books, or culture outside of school.

Our subsequent reflection was enlightening in unexpected ways. I had expected students to illustrate highly imaginative scenes that drew from references such as their favorite games, books, television shows, movies, and activities with family. I was looking for social and cultural influences in their personal lives that might appear in their imaginations and therefore, their drawings. The widespread depiction of realistic creatures such as worms and fossils was unanticipated on my part, so as the students shared, I asked why they chose to depict these things. Their answers came as confident statements of fact, such as “because worms live underground” (Sloan, personal communication, February 3). When I asked how the students knew these facts, they stated “from science” and “from school.” Rather than create something new that could possibly live underground, students had drawn directly from what they had learned to be underground through school.

Context Their drawings showed inextricable ties to the context of their drawing activity: the context of school. As Duncum (2009) states, “The views students express are often as

38 much, if not more, a function of the institutional context in which they are uttered than what they truly believe” (p. 8). I remember feeling puzzled and a bit dismayed, as all of the students’ drawings not only mimicked the environment realistically, but also were similar to one another in color and content. Wondering if the activity was too difficult or if I had not explained clearly, I asked the group if it was difficult to draw things they couldn’t see. The general answer was “no, not really” even though they had not drawn anything that they had apparently not already seen at school. While I was still perplexed, I decided to move on to part two of the activity.

Students were then asked to think about how the unseen things underground affect the things above ground that we can see. We talked about some examples of what unseen things in our lives affect things we can see. After several seconds of thoughtful silence, one student popped up and said excitedly, “Air! Without air, we couldn’t breathe!” With this in mind, they returned to their seats and completed the aboveground portion of their drawings, thinking about how what they had drawn underground might affect visible things above ground.

The students again completed ‘think-pair-share’ after their drawing session and returned to the front of the room to talk with one another about their artwork. The content of the drawings reflected social and cultural instances of the experiences students have outside of school. For example, Luke drew deer and a coyote, because he goes hunting with his dad. Lily, who had drawn an underground city for fish, drew the buildings bursting through the ground into skyscrapers next to the trees. However, many of the aboveground drawings matched the predictability of the underground drawings: blue

39 skies, green leaves, brown trees, birds, and small animals. When questioned why most of them had drawn blue sky, green leaves, and green grass, one female student explained that the water underground makes the branches grow and the leaves green. While this information was inarguable, it also did not yield any data regarding the unique visuality of individual students; the students were drawing realistic, learned concepts.

As the students left for another class, I reflected upon the events and drawings with Mrs. Rodney and the student teacher, Ms. Penquite. When learning of my surprise at the realism of the drawings, Mrs. Rodney responded that she was not surprised at all, stating, “When students see another student that they think has the right answer, they copy. Also, we just studied worms and fossils in our science unit. Their drawings show the content statements and ‘I Can’ statements that we have to teach based on Ohio standards” (Megan Rodney, personal communication, Feb 3). Mrs. Rodney also commented that this was the time of day that students normally study science or history, so students were most likely consciously or unconsciously thinking about the subjects normally covered at that time of day. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, as Ivashkevich (2009) states, “…looking at the particular context in which an instance of drawing takes place is crucial for understanding the meaning and value of image making in a specific child’s life” (p. 52). The images students drawn reflect the context of where the drawings were made.

Furthermore, Mrs. Rodney exhibited the students’ science discovery notebooks containing the lessons about worms and fossils that students had referenced within their drawings. The artistic prompt had unintentionally aligned with concepts students had just

40 learned in class, explaining the source of the realistic drawings. Similarly, students were accustomed to learning about science during this particular portion of the school day. The students’ ways of thinking were conditioned not only by the pattern of the school day, but also subject matter dictated by state educational standards. While they didn’t exhibit signs of visuality that I had personally anticipated, they strongly showed the powerful effect of the institutional visuality within their illustrations. Figure 1 below displays examples of student artwork showing similarity and realism directly related to their studies of worms and fossils. Figure 2 shows the work of students who included either experiences outside the context of school, or items different from worms and fossils.

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Figure 1: Similar and realistic student artwork

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Figure 2: Student artwork exhibiting personal experiences inside or outside of school context

Getting It Right However, I was still curious as to the remarkable lack of creativity or originality shown in students’ drawings. While students had been encouraged multiple times to use their imaginations, they consistently represented things they were comfortable with rather than creating something new or different. Mrs. Rodney hypothesized that second grade is an age where students are no longer “little”, but rather are becoming “big” in the eyes of their families and teachers. She stated, “For the first time, they are capable and expected to make decisions and are learning how to learn, and play the game of school” (Megan Rodney, personal communication, February 3). She offered to take five minutes for wrapup discussion time to address these questions when students returned.

When class resumed, the group discussed the patterns of items depicted in their drawings such as worms, fossils, dirt, and water. Mrs. Rodney asked, “Mrs. Spires asked you to be imaginative- was this not enough?” One student responded that she didn’t know she was allowed to be creative, and several students nodded in agreement. Another

43 student stated that he was trying to do the right thing. Mrs. Rodney asked, “Is being creative different than using your imagination?” The students all responded with a resounding “yes!” and Eliza said, “I was using my more realistic imagination, but didn’t know I was supposed to be creative” (Eliza, personal communication, February 3).

Surprised, Mrs. Rodney inquired, “Is it hard to be creative? Why did you draw things you were comfortable with, instead of something like what Mrs. Spires drew, such as pink muskrats having a birthday party?” One male student replied to her question, stating, “Well, the muskrats having a birthday party are like little-kid creative. It’s easier to be creative when you’re younger.” Other students chimed in quickly, saying, “You have to study more when you get older, so you know more realistic things. It’s easier when you don’t know more realistic things. And little kids have more energy to be creative.”

In this manner, students exhibited the beliefs of the school institution. Not only did students feel that they needed extra permission to be creative, but they also were more motivated to be correct than to be different. As stated by McKay (2009), “North American culture, particularly U.S. culture, is plagued by the legacy of ‘getting it right,’ whatever it is- finality and stasis are perceived as stable. In this vein, uncertainty and change should be minimized at all costs” (p. 58).

Seeing You Seeing Me The similarities between artwork were addressed through asking students if it bothered them that other students could see their work. They responded “Yes, little kids don’t care about what others think; they don’t know they should care.” The students had also been heavily influenced by what other students were drawing, and the act of looking

44 at others’ drawings. As Berger (1972) states, “The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world” (p. 9). Not only did their awareness of other students contribute to the realism in their drawings, but also the ideas exhibited by others influenced their drawings as well. This was the first instance that I noticed the highly relational nature of classroom activities; students were constantly questioning and comparing the actions and words of others to their own.

Reflection The goal of the lesson was to investigate students’ understandings of what can and can’t be seen, as well as the relationships between things seen and unseen.

While the original learning outcomes and discussion questions changed as a result of students’ drawings, the layers of insights and connections among students and educators were astonishing. Students came to the conclusions that they were more motivated to be correct than they were to be creative, and that as they learn more, it becomes harder to be creative. Their drawings were direct reflections of conditioned learning habits, Ohio educational standards, and the gazes of their peers. The students were motivated to be correct, to be accepted, and to ask permission before being creative. The drawings revealed a highly contextual frame of mind; as Duncum states, “the views students express are often as much, if not more, a function of the institutional context in which they are uttered than what they truly believe” (Duncum, 2009, p. 8).

Similarly, I realized the significant impact students have on one another. The routes taken during our discussions were dictated by ideas bouncing from one student to

45 the next, and many of their drawings contained similar ideas. Students’ visualities are impacted strongly by the reciprocal nature of vision, and their learning is intersubjective.

While we did discuss the relationship of the seen to the unseen, what came about was a greater understanding of the influences of the educational institution upon what students try to see, and how students try to be seen, within the classroom. These ideas of intersubjective learning and the powerful context of school heavily influenced the planned activities of the second session.

Chapter 2: What Do We Expect to See? “Art education that explores transparency while acknowledging the limits of our seeing (knowing), and cultivates a willingness to be vulnerable and to respect vulnerability in others, creates intersubjective possibilities” (McKay, 2009, p. 72) Visual Constancies With the ideas in mind that students are highly influenced by the context of being in school, as well as by one another, the next activity was designed with the hope of drawing upon their personal experiences outside of school. Previously, students had analyzed the relationships between things seen and unseen in their lives, and where the knowledge of things unseen comes from. A logical next step was for students to think more deeply about how else their knowledge might influence what they see.

Elliot Eisner (2002) claims that experiences inform visuality by shaping visual constancies, in which what we have learned to expect to see becomes a sort of visual stereotype that replaces what we may actually be seeing (p. 68). According to Eisner

46 (2002), visual constancies can come in the form of generalizations, such as viewing a large group of branches, leaves, and bark as a tree. This generalization, while it helps to save time in perception, “tends to interfere with a more qualitative and analytical perception of the particular qualities of a particular tree” (p. 68). While visual constancies may “be useful in daily life” (Eisner, 2002, p. 68); they also hinder us from truly seeing the differentiating qualities of the world around us.

Within the previous activity, students had discovered that their experiences in school shaped what they had drawn and written, as well as how they looked at their work. They had made generalizations and assumptions about how I would look at their work, and the type of drawings they should create. Therefore, the students effectively shaped the next step in our exploration: an investigation into experience, expectations, and visual constancies.

Surpassing Expectations To begin, I asked students to write a short story about a time they saw something they didn’t expect to see. Within their stories, they were asked to include who they were with, where they were, why they were surprised to see this thing, and what they had expected to see. I gave them an example, and asked them to write for fifteen minutes.

As normal, we met as a class after writing to reflect upon our stories, with students returning to the front of the classroom to share and discuss their stories afterwards. Discussion questions were woven into the students’ dialogues to provoke deeper thinking and discussion. Going first, Sloan raised her hand and stated that one time, she had seen “a bear in a costume doing a handstand on the monkey bars!” (Sloan,

47 personal communication, February 21). She was at the circus with her family, and she didn’t expect to see this because normally she expects bears to be in the wilderness eating food, not doing acrobatics with people. When asked where she learned that bears live in the wilderness, Sloan said “School and TV” (Sloan, personal communication, February 21).

Next, Luke raised his hand and said that his unexpected moment was when he saw his fifty-year-old basketball coach do a 360 dunk at basketball practice. He said he was surprised because he didn’t think old people could do the same things as young people.

When asked why he thought this way, he said his grandparents always hurt their backs and move slowly. I summarized, stating that so far, the students’ stories showed that we learn to expect to see things from our own experiences as well as things we learn at school and on TV. The third student to share was Brendan. He stated that his unexpected moment was on vacation at the beach. One morning he was looking out at the ocean, and he saw his noodle riding in on a wave. He was surprised because he lost it in the ocean the day before, and didn’t think it would ever come back. When asked why he didn’t think it would come back, he referenced a time when his father lost his sunglasses in the ocean, and never found them again.

Another surprising story was that of James. James drew and wrote about a piece of classroom culture implemented by his teacher, Mrs. Rodney. He wrote about Mrs. Rodney’s use of a “clip-up” system, during which students get to move a clip with their name up and down a sliding scale based on their behavior for the day. James’s expected

48 sight was his name on “good day” while most of the class was on “outstanding.” His unexpected sighting was when all of the students, including him, reached “outstanding.”

His drawing accurately reflects each step of the clip-up system, from “parent contact” at the bottom, all the way to “outstanding” at the very top. James chose to reflect upon a time when his own behavior in the classroom surprised him, as well as a time when his teacher noticed his behavior. James’s story exhibits a visual constancy of himself created in tandem with the institution and his teacher; he was the only student that reflected upon his own behavior. Figure 3 below displays the aforementioned artwork of Luke, Sloan, Brendan, and Zach.

After sharing their stories, students were asked to consider several of the points they had raised with their experiences. One such point was the fact that both Sloan and Luke were surprised to see individuals exhibit unexpected capabilities. The class then discussed other examples of students who encountered similar stories of seeing people exhibit surprising skills. Stories from the students included little brothers and elderly people doing athletic things, animals with special capabilities, and finding things they thought they had lost.

The content of students’ drawings as well as our subsequent reflection showed a pattern of surprise when people or animals exceeded their expectations. Students exhibited visual constancies in connection with capabilities of different types of peoplethe very young, the very old, their peers, and themselves.

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Figure 3: Artwork of Luke, Zach, Sloan, and Brendan (from top right to bottom left) Prior Knowledge I then questioned students about where they learned to expect to see such things.

Students responses included their parents, families, and non-fiction books; science, the encyclopedia, school, and the Internet. After students shared their stories, they were asked if they could see any connections or patterns. Avik stated, “They are all about the prior knowledge. In each of them, everybody was thinking about the past…everybody thought in the future that wouldn’t happen because it didn’t happen in the past.” After

50 Avik’s statement, the students were asked if they thought that this prior knowledge that helped them form an opinion was a good thing or a bad thing. The students shakily responded “a little bit of both.” Referring to Brendan’s example, the students were asked to think about if it was important to know that the ocean does tend to take things away; the response was “yes,” because this knowledge keeps us safe. When asked why this prior knowledge might not be a good thing, students thought about Luke and Sloan’s examples, and said, “…Because then we think people can’t do things…that maybe they actually can.”

In conclusion, students were asked to name one important take-away from the activity that they could remember. After a few seconds of discussion the students, Mrs. Rodney, and Mrs. Spires determined together the following take-away: “Maybe we can’t always make an opinion based on what we know from before or based on what the outside of someone looks like…we should slow down, wait and see, and find out.”

Reflection Students successfully navigated through challenging terrain as they investigated their own visual constancies and expectations. While it was difficult for many to describe in words their opinions, their drawings and short stories show a comprehensive understanding of the differences between what they expected to see and what they actually did see.

Furthermore, the discussion and sharing contributed to the relational aspect of student learning and participation; again, their stories shared similar patterns that might have

51 evolved during discussion. “Authorizing student perspectives is crucial because it positions students to construct and negotiate their own learning in connection to social others” (Perez-miles, 2012, p. 121). For example, many of the students’ stories include experiences of animals in places they didn’t expect, or siblings having skills the students were not aware of. Other themes within stories include the presence of family and an event or a trip; many students reported unexpected sightings while on vacations or outings with their families.

Additionally, most students chose to write on their drawings, labeling people, places, and objects in order to make their stories more clear. They were not instructed to write on their drawings, but also not directed away from it. Some students included conversation bubbles and punctuations to clearly show surprise and emotion in their drawings.

In conclusion, because students showed a strong understanding of how prior knowledge could influence what they expect to see, the next lesson was developed to further investigate the meaning of prior knowledge. As students gained great understanding through a combination of visual representation, text, and dialogue, all three were incorporated into the development of the next activity. Because the students arrived at the term “prior knowledge” of their own accord, this concept was given priority in the next research session. Similarly, as we began a vulnerable conversation about how prior knowledge might form incorrect assumptions, it became important to talk more in depth about the nature of prior knowledge. As stated by McKay (2009), “We know what you see is never all of what you get, so we must approach the world with a more humble,

52 more vulnerable attitude. Art education can be very useful in developing this kind of mutual vulnerability” (p. 67).

Chapter 3: Mapping our Prior Knowledge Because the second exercise yielded fascinating connections between students’ knowledge, expectations, and seeing, we decided to analyze what prior knowledge is, and how it forms our expectations. As always, we reviewed together what we had talked about in the previous lesson. I asked students if they could tell me what we had talked about, and they remembered they had written stories and drawn pictures about a time they saw something they didn’t expect to see. They also recalled that we had decided together that our prior knowledge and experiences shape our expectations.

With that said, I asked students to return to their seats and write or illustrate three places where this prior knowledge might come from, in preparation for a visual activity.

After seven minutes, students brought their written thoughts back to the front of the class, and shared with their partners. In order to make a visual of our ideas, we worked together to create a large concept map on the whiteboard of their prior knowledge. As stated by Figueiredo, Lopes, Firmino, and de Sousa: A conceptual map can assist the discussion about the concepts being taught since it is a concrete representation, a visualization of the network of related ideas. As an aid that represents the structure of students’ ideas with emphasis on the relations between concepts, the maps can also help them relate their previous ideas with the ones they are processing.

53 -Figueiredo, Lopes, Firmino, de Sousa, 2004, p. 1 I was a bit nervous during this activity, because I wanted to make sure that each voice was heard. With twenty-four students in front of me, I realized the pressure and chaos that can come from large class sizes. We spent twenty minutes creating a large, colorful concept map of all of the students’ ideas of prior knowledge.

Their examples included culture, books, the Internet, school, people, significant citizens, artists, museums, the zoo, sports, places, and transportation. They also included a section specifically for “your mind,” which included the sub-sections of your “brain,” your “imagination,” “personal experiences,” “memories,” and “life.” We wrote and discussed what type of knowledge we get from each section, and students added to and enhanced one another’s thoughts. Together, the students created a colorful, branching, expansive map of their prior knowledge.

After we ran out of room and I could sense students were getting restless, we sat back and gazed at our map together. Overwhelmed, I wondered out loud to students about the connections between all of this prior knowledge and our stories about expectations. I asked them to close their eyes, and brainstorm how they might explain prior knowledge to their best friend or someone in their family. After thirty seconds of quiet reflection, they explained, “Prior knowledge makes us expect to see certain things.”

Students also stated, “It helps us to explain something to someone who might not have the same experience.” Another conclusion by students was “everyone has different prior knowledge, so they all see things differently, and that’s okay.”

54 Finally, students were asked to return to their seats to write down one important conclusion they gained from the activity. As we had run out of time, the students left their writing on their desks for me to look at while they left for a different class. I took a photograph of each student’s takeaway; they represent invaluable artifacts of what students learned from one another through writing, visual, and dialogic practices. Each piece of writing is unique, yet similar in content, proving that while each student applied the concepts slightly differently, the major takeaways were concurrent. Two examples are those of Eliza and Luke: “What I learned: I know now that everyone sees things different (sic) because everyone has different prior knowledge. Also, prior knowledge effects (sic) the way people expect to see things.” Luke wrote, “I thought that old people cannot do the things we can.”

Reflection In conclusion, this activity focused in depth on the concept of prior knowledge.

Students wrote individually, but then came together to discuss their ideas and map them visually. This visual representation coupled with lively, engaged discussion gave each student a chance to use his or her individual voice and see their ideas interwoven with those of their peers. The mapping activity allowed students to see new possibilities as well as the incredible amount of knowledge and experience they have as individuals and a group. Creating the visual together displayed how “Art can engender discrepancies between what we think we know and what could be” (Kalin & Barney, 2014, p. 26).

Additionally, through interacting and discussing the complexities together, students were

55 able to realize “multiple and contradictory subject positions shape students’ perspectives and agency” (Perez-Miles, 2012, p. 114).

Through investigating sources of prior knowledge and how it shapes students’ expectations, the class was able to explore the concept of visuality on a personal and cultural level. Students were able to recognize how one another’s different experiences shape their expectations and visual constancies. Furthermore, students were able to recognize how their individual and collective knowledge converged, entwined, and bloomed into new ideas and new ways of looking at prior knowledge. Through looking at the experiences that inform expectations in a new way, students challenged and reinterpreted visuality at cultural, institutional, social, and personal levels.

Figure 4: Prior Knowledge Concept Map

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Chapter 5: Conclusions Within the three one-hour sessions, students in Megan Rodney’s second grade classroom investigated, challenged, and reinterpreted visuality. While the research did not take place in an art education classroom, the students utilized traditional art education methods including art making, writing, sharing, and dialogic reflection. These techniques combined to create dynamic spaces of what Bakhtin (1981) refers to as “mutual interillumination,” in which students’ opinions “threw light upon” the differing opinions of others (p. 12). In this space, students compared, contrasted, and created new knowledge individually and intersubjectively. Each session merged activities into their normal educational routine, allowing for the context of the institution, classroom, and group play into the experience. In this manner, the visualities of the institution and classroom influenced and appeared within students’ work.

Furthermore, the methodology of the research relied upon the actions, ideas, and conclusions of the students. The issues illuminated within their artwork, writing, and

57 dialogue dictated the flow of the research as a whole as well as the plan of each subsequent lesson. In this manner, students participated in research and cultural negotiation. Students examined things seen and unseen, visual expectations, and the sources of influential prior knowledge. Each second grader acted as teacher and learner as they shared, compared, and converged their unique experiences into new ways of seeing and knowing.

Additionally, the work of students explored and illuminated many of the aspects of visuality as previously defined by art education literature. Within the first activity, students’ artwork displayed the subjects of science and history studied per mandated state standards. This artwork and corresponding dialogue showed the ways in which students’ motivations and opinions of their artwork are dictated by the context and ideology of the institution. If students had completed this activity in the art room, or at home, the outcomes may have been completely different. Students watched each other for divergent drawings and correct answers; as they admitted to “not knowing they could be creative” and “wanting to be correct,” they affirmed the indoctrinated values of the school in which they were working. Similarly, as they expressed that “it is easier to be creative when you’re little,” they displayed the cultural ideologies of childhood as defined by Paul Duncum (2006) and James Haywood Rolling (2009). As these students are in second grade, the statement that they are too old to be easily creative yields powerful connections, not only to the omnipresent ideology of childhood naivety, but also to Western values of correctness and “getting it right” (citation). The first activity harvested

58 meaningful insights into the visualities of the students within the context of their public school classroom.

Within the second activity, students delved into their visual expectations to find the ways that society, culture, and personal experience shape visual constancies. Their drawings, short stories, and spoken reflections illuminated expectations of the capabilities of people and animals as dictated by the aforementioned influences. Students revealed individual expectations, but also influenced one another’s responses through discussion.

Ideas floated from one mind to the next, shaping how each student thought about what they expected to see, what they did not expect to see, and why it mattered. They came to the conclusion that their prior knowledge influenced what they had expected to see, and this was something they wanted to explore further. As a powerful indicator of visuality, together we determined the next subject of study would be this mysterious “prior knowledge,” and where it came from. As students realized they each had different experiences that shaped their expectations of people, they touched upon how visuality affects their lives in deep ways: in the acts of looking at one another and themselves.

As we mapped our sources of prior knowledge together, we peered into the forces behind our visuality. The amount of information the students produced was breathtaking.

They drew how their visuality was shaped culturally, socially, and experientially, as well as through intersubjective and individual contexts. The atmosphere of the class within the collective mapping activity was charged with excitement as students shouted their examples one after another; the landslide of information was almost too much to keep up with. As students reflected on the outcome of this activity in relationship to the previous

59 two, they connected specific instances of prior knowledge to their stories about visual expectations. When students completed the activity by writing what they had learned, they responded personally to Richard Foster’s (1988) definition of visuality as “how we see, how we are able and made to see, and how we understand this seeing and the unseen therein” (p. xix). As Eliza stated, “I know now that everyone sees things different (sic) because everyone has different prior knowledge. Also, prior knowledge effects (sic) the way people expect to see things” (Eliza, personal communication, March 16).

While students were able to reflect upon visuality, the context of the institution and being in a group highly influenced their work and therefore the results of the research. This sway of context should not be mistaken as a roadblock; it is indicative of the commanding influence of context upon visuality. As students’ thoughts, opinions, efforts, and communication reflected the motivation to be similar and correct, they displayed visuality as culturally, socially, and institutionally constructed. However, they also exhibited agency in reflecting upon and reinterpreting their own visuality through storytelling, art making, and reflection. In this manner, I learned from students how to better facilitate discussions of a complex issue through the eyes, ears, and experiences of young students. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from the students as they showed me what worked and what didn’t; they also exposed my own visual constancies as their intelligence and insights far surpassed my expectations.

60 Chapter 6: DAAPWorks Project Collage Throughout the research process, I worried about the transferal of knowledge. As I transcribed our encounters, I was struck by the sheer impossibility of recounting everything exactly as it happened. I was concerned that my own voice would add a layer of opacity atop the fierce energy and dedication of the students. Because the students propelled the research, created the artwork, and wrote the story of this project, it is vital that their work be the voice of the final product. I wanted to show the collaborative and iterative nature of our time together, as the students worked together and with me to investigate what shapes their ways of seeing. Therefore, I endeavored to create collages of the artwork students created during each of our lessons together, to show not only how the students were able to make visuality visible, but also how they were able to talk about their experiences with visuality as a group and learn from one another. Each collage contains pieces of multiple students’ artworks, demonstrating the ways in which their writing, drawing, and dialogue weaved together to expose the intersubjective and contextual nature of visuality. Just as students responded to each other and shed light on one another’s ideas, contrasting elements within the collages cause certain words and images to stand out.

Likewise, as students discovered the difficulty in escaping the context of school while engaging in the activities, the ethos of their classroom and the institution is reflected in their work and as a result, in the aesthetics of the collages. Each collage represents a different stage in our journey together, acting as a narrative of our

61 experiences. This narrative is interspersed with images of students’ eyes peering at their work and one another, to represent the reciprocal nature of the students’ vision throughout the process. As students spoke about the pressure of one another’s gazes during art making and sharing, they revealed that not only did their work contain the ideas of others, but was created with the pressure of the eyes of their peers and teachers in mind.

Narrative: What Do We Expect To See? The images of student eyes are also included in the book “What Do We Expect to See?” This book was created as a final reflection piece for the students and myself, as we both concluded and began each session with dialogic review and reflection of our experiences. The book is yet another effort to show the narrative of our time together, how the students propelled the process of the research, and the astounding realizations they produced. Images of their words, artwork, and relationships illustrate each step of the process, in an effort to illuminate the nature of our collaboration. The narrative embodies “the story of individuals unfolding in a chronology of their experiences, set within their personal, social, and historical context, and including the important themes in those lived experiences” (Creswell, p. 75). Because the narrative is to act as a final reflection for the students, the book is written in a voice with the students in mind as the main audience. While the book is intended to give a sense of closure for our time together, it is in no way a summary of what can be accomplished with young students when talking about visuality. It is, however, a depiction of what the beginning of a conversation about visuality can look like, and the immeasurable and unpredictable

62 capabilities of students. We barely scratched the surface of the topic in our time together.

The students showed not only how incredibly talented they are in revealing, discussing, and relating to visuality, but also how vast the possibilities truly are. With growing understanding of ways of seeing and knowing, hopefully we will be able to look back on the book with new understandings generated by experience and time.

Furthermore, this narrative will act as a final reflective piece for myself as the researcher, as well as an idea source for other art educators who want to explore visuality with students. The book will be published as an e-book online and linked to my website, in order to be accessible to a wider audience.

Zine: Exercises in Visuality In order to engage a wider audience who may view the DAAPWorks exhibit, I created a zine that contains exercises in visuality. These exercises replicate the activities the students took part in during the research process, and ask participants to investigate their visuality individually and collectively.

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Figure 5: DAAPWorks Exhibit

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Figure 6: Narrative: What Do We Expect To See?

Figure 7: Zine: Exercises in Visuality

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Questions for Further Research The students who participated in this study produced astounding insights into the nature of their individual and intersubjective visualities. They revealed their unending capability to reflect upon and explore the ways in which their experiences in the world shape their ways of seeing. Moreover, their efforts illuminated my own visuality, as their discoveries, willingness, and intuitions exceeded my expectations. As each subsequent activity wrought unforeseen findings and new questions, the subject of visuality grew more vast and complex. The students’ investigations showed that visuality affected their work in school, how they look at one another, and how they see themselves. They also articulated that the context of school largely impacted the content of their work, their motivations, and their interactions with one another and myself. It appeared that the act of making visuality visible could lead to new insights and new questions in many different directions.

While the aforementioned results are merely a sample of the insights generated by the students, they indicate the development of more questions than answers. For this

66 reason, I feel that this research only scratched the surface of possibility, and proved the necessity of investigating the powerful influence society and culture maintains upon our ways of seeing. Furthermore, as students progressed through the research, the development of questions was iterative and unending; it seemed that the farther we looked, the more questions we found. For this reason, the further research questions listed below, just like this study, act only as catalysts to a larger investigation.

Firstly, because the context of the specific school and classroom proved to be highly important in understanding visuality, facilitating these exercises with an older group of students in a different context would yield interesting results. Older students may be able to recognize deeper and highly personal manifestations of visuality, as well as hypothesize and practice new ways of making visuality visible. Similarly, the specific execution of the lessons would be different, as students of an older age have more advanced interests and capabilities than those in the second grade.

Likewise, students continually advocated the importance of context in changing and forming their ways of seeing. Therefore, varying the context of the study would constitute yet another iteration of research into visuality. As the activities described above were completed in a general education classroom, changing the environment to a designated art education room, a museum, or outside the institution of school, would change the nature of students’ work and dialogue. I cannot begin to imagine how studying visuality in different contexts would change participants’ insights into ways of seeing.

67 Furthermore, the nature of the study completed was temporary and irregular in nature, as I was not a “normal� figure in their educational context. A study worth further investigation would be to note the impact of these exercises if completed consistently over time, with the same facilitator and students. Continual practice of these exercises could possibly change the ways students look at their worlds, one another, and themselves. An interrelated question would be whether students would create their answers or behavior based on what they thought the practitioner wanted; over time, familiarity could breed a sense of complacency or boredom.

Additionally, the students revealed that their visuality changes every day, based upon what they learn and experience. Because of the evolving nature of visuality, yet another research practice could be to measure or gauge these changes over the course of a school year. For example, students could participate in the activities at the beginning and end of the year, in order to visually gauge how their ways of seeing had changed, if at all.

Looking at visuality unfolds vast and varying possibilities. The more one looks, the more there is to know, the more questions arise, and the more the view changes. As we grow, experience, and learn, the exploration of visuality expands further.

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