Art works as a re-presentation of research

Abstract

A critique of meanings and interpretations of culture that have a connectedness with art and art teaching, teachers and students, and society within and beyond schools provided a critical framework for my doctoral research, completed in 2006. This research, which was motivated in part by my role as a Päkehä/New Zealand teacher educator, investigated secondary school art teachers' understandings of culture, diversity and difference within the framework of the arts curriculum, and expressed through their pedagogical practices. In this paper I explicate a number of the interpretations of culture encountered in the literature which raise issues of how art is represented and classified. These interpretations inspired me, post-thesis, to generate a series of art works during 2007. Based on the concept of the Talking Stick and presented in a Talking Stick Circle, the examples included in this paper represent works from my exhibition, 'Talking my way through culture'. The aim of this paper is to show how I used the talking sticks to demonstrate that art works can function as a multi-layered interpretive act, as a re-presentation of a literature review and as a 'voice' with which to challenge pedagogical practices in art education.