Investigating approaches to teaching artwork interpretation in culturally and linguistically diverse senior school visual arts classrooms
The proposed research seeks to investigate the struggles of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) learners enrolled in Western Australian senior school Visual Arts courses when tasked with the analysis of unfamiliar artworks in the Responding component of the course.
These challenges remain entrenched for CALD learners, as evidenced in the lack of research on successful strategies used to support these learners in their interpretation of culturally situated visual phenomena, such as the Western-European and Indigenous Australian artworks typically privileged for examination. Accordingly, this research aims to address these challenges by revealing effective strategies used by experienced visual arts educators working in CALD schools to support student acquisition of visual literacies and interpretive skills.
To reveal the rich insights of these experienced educators, a mixed-methods Arts-Based Education Research (ABER) design will be used to access discursive and visual data that captures their struggles and successes in navigating this educational issue. It is envisaged that this non-traditional research output will provide evocative insights into educator experiences and reveal workable strategies that other visual arts educators can learn from to better support CALD learner success in visual arts responding tasks.
This research focuses on investigating approaches to teaching artwork interpretation in culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) senior school visual arts classrooms:
