My publications have been on the cutting edge of digital technologies and learning.
This has caused my research to become highly influential in digital technology discussions and research as indicated by ResearchGate and Google Scholar.
Book Chapters
Art Media and Technology
in The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education ABSTRACT: This chapter summarizes some of the media commonly included in art curricula for the teaching and creation of art. The entry has three separate sections: two-dimensional media, three-dimensional media, and newer media electronic and digital (Beal and Miller 2001; Wands 2007; Wigg and Hasselschwert 2001). While the media discussed in the two-dimensional and three-dimensional sections are frequently considered traditional media in art curricula, all of these media and materials are still used by artists and designers. The section on newer media discusses some recent developments in artistic materials and tools that have expanded the resources available for artistic creation. The aim of this summary is not to provide a guide to their implementation in the classroom. Instead, this chapter aims to contribute an overview of the major media concepts and skills included in curricula so that educators and school administrators have a greater awareness and understanding of the media available for artistic production in order to promote art-related learning. |
Developing a Critical Perspective of Creative Agency in Digital Environments
in Visual Production in the Cyberspace: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview ABSTRACT: Digital technologies have come to saturate many aspects of modern society. These digital tools can be used to complete daily tasks such as checking the weather, obtaining travel directions, and communicating with others. While digital tools offer the luxury of convenience for such tasks, how the design of these virtual programs influence the intentions and creativity of the user is still unclear. This should be a point of concern since participation in the current culture requires both the consumption of media and the ability to produce media in response. Thus, how individuals communicate their intentions through creatively constructing digital media matters greatly. It is in these human-computer interactions that the creative agency of the user must be translated in a way that can be processed by the code written by developers. By placing user intent within a digital environment itself begins to develop agency through the restrictions of the coding and suggestions from algorithms. It then becomes the job of the individual using digital tools to critically review the digital environments to assess if the environment is serving the user, or if the user is serving the environment. If the users of digital tools want to support their creative behaviors, then the ability to critically question digital environments for creative agency must take place to preserve the user’s creative agency. |
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Review of Post-Digital, Post-Internet Art and Education:
The Future Is All-Over ABSTRACT: Before I began drafting this media review on a Google Document, I closed various social media platforms on my computer and mobile phone. The social media algorithms were presenting me with news about Jason Allen, the recipient of the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s digital art competition’s first-place award (Kuta, 2022). This story reached viral status after it was revealed that he created the prizewinning artwork with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence (AI) program that turns text descriptions into images. The comments on these articles produced heated debates regarding artistic authorship, originality, and creativity, among other topics (Harwell, 2022). Further, new technologies like Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) are causing pedagogical issues for educators (NPR, 2023). This recent event is just one of many emerging instances that display the dynamic complexity and entangled becoming of online and offline materials. As art educators, how may events like this influence our approach to selecting and teaching digital art education content and our greater pedagogical understanding of art education? |
Zooming Support: Stories of How a Pandemic and SAMR Improved Preservice Art Education Instruction
ABSTRACT: The transition to hybrid and online instruction during the 2020 pandemic presented unprecedented challenges to the field of art education (Kraehe, 2020). While art educators have investigated the use of digital technologies for artmaking and instruction (Erickson, 2005; Leonard, 2018; Quinn, 2011), the nationwide hurdle to remote and hybrid teaching suddenly had art educators reaching out to their peers for help. This resulted in newly formed communities of inquiry and support, representing a wide range of technological skills and teaching experience. This article spotlights the Michigan Art Education Association (MAEA) Higher Education Division as an example of one such group. In March 2020, we, the members of MAEA, started holding triweekly Zoom meetings to discuss our new roles as online art educators. Over 10 months, we bonded and provided social–emotional support, becoming a collaborative inquiry professional development group (Gates, 2010). |
Emerging Artificial Intelligence, Art and Pedagogy: Exploring Discussions of Creative Algorithms and Machines for Art Education
ABSTRACT: The continued development and emergence of creative machines and computational creativity provokes certain questions that audit ontological and epistemological assumptions. Creative artificial intelligence challenges computer scientists, digital artists, and art educators to clarify or reconceptualize their notions of cognition and creativity. The article starts by addressing the increase in AI algorithms in both daily life and formal education settings to begin highlighting the shared investment across domains. The focus is then narrowed down to highlight creative machines and digital artmaking. By exploring the statements and artworks from computer scientists and digital artists, correlations to art education pedagogical approaches are then constructed. This will then lead into a recognition for a need to challenge and examine the ontological and epistemological assumptions present in art education. Finally, a new material theoretical framework for digital art education pedagogy is proposed to reorient discussions to ask new questions regarding increasingly creative machines and the experiences and education of students in the visual arts. |
The Arts and New Materialism: A Call to Stewardship through Mercy, Grace, and Hope
ABSTRACT: During highly polarized times, issues are quickly addressed in ways that emphasize divisions. To support the healing of our polarized culture through art, new materialist theory as presented by Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti will be entangled with art and artmaking according to Dennis Atkinson and Makoto Fujimura to argue for art as an act of environmental and cultural stewardship, creating new possibilities and differences in the virtual that are merciful, graceful, and hopeful. To form this argument, first a summary of new materialism and ethics through Agential Realism and Affirmative Ethics is addressed. Next, a cartography including scientific and theological perspectives is presented for a diffractive reading regarding the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope to develop a new materialist understanding through a philosophy of immanence to counter the circular perpetuation of violence. These concepts are then individually addressed through the proposed new materialist framework to further break from material-discursive dualistic thought. This approach is then explored through various artworks to investigate the co-constructing material-discursive nature of art to create new relations and possibilities in the world. Finally, an in-depth study of the artworks Becoming Us by Megan Constance Altieri and Teeter-Totter Wall by Ronald Rael are addressed to detail how a new materialist approach to art that focuses on the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope can position art as an act of stewardship. |
Entanglement Art Education: Factoring ARTificial Intelligence and Nonhumans Into Future Art Curricula
ABSTRACT: Despite the massive advances in artificial intelligence (AI) alongside the saturation of digital technologies in society, the domain of art education has experienced little change to account for the fact that humans are not the only content creators. Recent movements in art education—including but not limited to visual culture, choice-based art, and social justice–oriented curricula generally assume an anthropocentric perspective. This means that the content being experienced is assumed to have been created by other humans and does not provide a clear way to engage with nonhuman content. However, this stance is losing validity as our daily lives increasingly include computer-generated content (Figure 1), which is curated by algorithms. |
Homage or Biting Lines: Critically Discussing Authorship, Creativity, and Copyright in the 21st Century through Hip-Hop
ABSTRACT: The inherent traits of digital media have challenged traditional understandings of artistic authorship and creativity. This division in understanding can clearly be observed in the popular culture context of hip-hop music. Hip-hop initially began with analog technologies such as vinyl record players, then transitioned to predominately digital mediums. This changeover in artistic mediums has been well documented by opposing viewpoints from hip-hop artists, consumers, record companies, and lawyers. By focusing on hip-hop for critical discussion on artistic authorship and creativity, art students can engage in discussion reflecting on their own artistic and online practices, and how these behaviors are legally supported or suppressed by copyright law. |
Edited Journals
75th Anniversary of the Illinois Arts Education Association
EDITOR'S NOTE: This year’s MOSAIC Journal celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Illinois Arts Education Association! This year’s theme has blessed me with the opportunity to interact with many people and historical documents spanning the rich history of the IAEA. From working with this year’s guest authors to selecting the cover image for the MOSAIC, it was all a special treat. I hope you, dear reader, both enjoy and become inspired by the bundle of content in this issue. The MOSAIC journal is only possible thanks to contributions of so many amazing people sharing their IAEA related activities and achievements within the field of art and design education. For that, I am very grateful. I would also like to give a special thanks to the following individuals who have been tirelessly working through the IAEA archives over the past year: Becky Blaine, Anne Becker, Laura Milas, Joan Mills, Judith Doebler, Nick Hostert, Jerry Stefl, Anna Marie Coveny, Christopher Grodoski, and Kathi Hillyer. Finally, I would like to thank Grahame Wilkin whose artwork celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the IAEA graces the cover of the 2023 MOSAIC. |
Connecting
EDITOR'S NOTE: My name is Nicholas Leonard and I am excited to introduce myself as the new editor for the IAEA MOSAIC Magazine! I want to start by thanking both Kerry Parrish and Jennifer Wargin for their assistance and guidance as I transitioned into this new role and for all that they have done for the MOSAIC. The theme of this MOSAIC is “Connecting” which continues the trend initiated by Kerry and Jennifer to address the four areas of the Illinois Visual Arts Learning Standards: Creating, Presenting, Responding, and Connecting. During these past months, COVID protocols have encouraged various forms of safe distancing which presented different challenges for fostering relationships and forming a community with our students during the pandemic. Despite these hurdles, I was inspired and encouraged to see the work being done by IAEA members who were exploring new ways to engage students and having them artistically explore ideas across societal, cultural, and historical contexts to deepen their understandings and build strong classroom communities. The stories and experiences shared by our five contributing writers address a wide range of community-building related topics including creating a virtual visiting artist series, addressing mindfulness in the classroom, using design to engage the larger school community, incorporating social justice topics to explore anti-ableism, anti-discriminatory, and anti-racist pedagogies, and moving beyond a homonormative inclusion of LGBTQIA+ content. My hope is that these ideas and stories inspire you, as they did me, to build strong and inclusive educational communities. |
Please Reach Out If You'd Like To Connect |