Teaching Civic Participation with Digital Media in Art Education: Critical Approaches for Classrooms and Communities

This anthology shares educational practices to engage young people in critical digital media consumption and production. Comprehensive frameworks and teaching guidance enable educators to empower students to use digital technologies to respond to the social, political, economic, and other critical issues in their real-life and online communities.

Section I of the book explores philosophical and conceptual approaches to teaching civic participation via digital media and technologies in various educational settings, Section II focuses on the participatory civic approaches in K-16 art education classrooms, and Section III outlines these approaches for arts-based community settings (after school programs, camps, online sites). Throughout, authors reference different technologies - video, digital collage, glitch, game design, mobile applications, virtual reality, and social media - and offer in-depth discussions of pedagogical processes and exemplary curriculum projects. Building on National (NAEA) and State Media Arts Standards, the educational practices outlined facilitate students' media literacy skills and digital citizenship awareness in the art classroom and provide a solid foundation for teaching civic-minded media making.

Ideal for art and media educators within preservice and higher education spaces, this book equips readers to prepare their students to be thoughtful and critical producers of their own media that can effectively advocate for social change.

Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis is an Assistant Professor of Art Education, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on decolonizing, anti-racist, and transnational feminist approach to art/media educational research. Particularly, it examines the potential value and importance of nontraditional/informal/community-based art educational praxis in the lives of Asian immigrant/Indigenous-refugee minoritized girls. Her scholarly articles and chapters appeared in many peer-reviewed journals and books in the field of art education, education, women and gender studies, and media studies. She is a recipient of Mary J. Rouse Early Research Award (2017), Grace Hampton Invited Lecture (2019), J. Eugene Grigsby, Jr. Award (2020), and the Manual Barkan Award (2021) by the National Art Education Association for her article An Anti-Colonial Land-Based Approach to Urban Place: Mobile Cartographic Stories by Refugee Youth. She was a guest editor of the special issue of the Journal of Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, "From Outer Space: Emerging Girl Subjectivities and Reterritorializing Girlhood" (2017) and coedited two books, Girls, Cultural Productions, and Resistance (2012, Peter Lang) and Pedagogical Globalization: Traditions, Contemporary Art, and Popular Culture of Korea (2017, InSEA). Michelle is currently working on a book manuscript based on her community research titled Decolonizing Art, Place, and Environment: Reconsidering Asian Refugee Resettlement Education.

Olga Ivashkevich is an associate professor of art education, Women's and Gender Studies affiliate, and Director of the Women's Well-Being Initiative at the University of South Carolina. She received her PhD in art education from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2008. Her research interests include girlhood studies, youth criminalization, intersectionality, state and institutional violence, and youth digital media making as creative resistance. She is a recipient of the Mary J. Rouse Early Research Award (2015) by the National Art Education Association. Olga coedited an interdisciplinary anthology Girls, Cultural Productions, and Resistance with Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis published by Peter Lang (2012). Her articles appeared in many peer-reviewed journals such as Studies in Art Education, Visual Arts Research, Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, International Journal of Education & the Arts, Visual Culture and Gender, Art Education, and Journal of Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. Olga is actively engaged in the community-based research and conducts art and digital media workshops for adjudicated girls in Columbia, South Carolina.