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The School of Art Education Occcasional Seminar Paper #11

Article released: Tuesday, 19 September, 2006

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The eleventh Occasional Seminar in Art and Design Education, New Media Practice and the Frames within Visual Arts and Photography re-examines the context of the Frames in Secondary Visual Arts, and Photography syllabuses.

The Frames are designed to help art teachers accommodate their curriculum to the hyper-unpredictability of contemporary art, and enable students to enrich their critical understanding of past and contemporary works. Recent changes in contemporary practice, however, pose new challenges to critical explanation of the visual arts in art education.

The Eleventh Occasional Seminar, held in 2005, asks whether the original four Frames can accommodate these challenges, or does contemporary art foreshadow a need for an extension or even revision of the Frames?

The School of Art Education welcomed the return of Professor Norman Freeman to the Eleventh Occasional Seminar. Professor Freeman’s keynote address presented the grounds on which children’s critical reasoning about art, including that which underpins application of the Frames, varies developmentally from K to 12.

Visual arts and photography teacher Susanne Jones, from Leumeah High School, presented recent findings of her doctoral investigation into student photographic reasoning. Her study explores the constraints imposed on pictorial representation by the medium of photography and has particular relevance to screen based art, interactivity, multi-modality and relational aesthetics, as it applies to art making in schools.
Professor Neil Brown contrasted issues raised by the previous speakers against concepts of new media practice and relational aesthetics in contemporary art. In particular Neil examined the Frames in the light of their original purpose and assesses their capacity to reflect the challenges posed by advances in contemporary art.

Papers by each of the presenters are included in the publication including:

Professor Norman Freeman
Norman Freeman is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol. Professor Freeman is a world authority on cognitive development in children, in particular the development in children’s pictorial reasoning. Norman has previously participated in the School of Art Education’s Occasional Seminar program.

Susanne Jones
Susanne is Creative Arts Coordinator at Leumeah High School. She graduated from COFA with Honours in 1998 and is currently completing a PhD investigating photography in the Visual Arts classroom. Susanne teaches Visual Arts and Photography and has worked as a teacher/lecturer at AGNSW & Campbelltown Art Center. She maintains an interest in Photography and Digital Media both as a teacher and in her own artistic practice.

Professor Neil Brown
Neil Brown has contributed to educational policy over many years and played a significant part in developing the Frames in current syllabuses, a concept that now plays a key role in visual arts curriculum.